When Birdsong Fades: Honoring Fuzz and the Healing Power of Melody

There Patricia and I were, guiding twenty souls through the labyrinth of healing work, my fingers clicking through PowerPoint slides about why we get stuck, when my phone vibrated against my hip. Then again. And again. My eyes met the screen: "Fuzz is gone." Three simple words that somehow weighed a thousand pounds. Time fractured. I kept speaking, but part of me had already flown home, searching for a tiny yellow body that would never again greet me with song.

My mind raced while my mouth continued forming words about trauma and healing. A cruel irony. Where did I go wrong? The question echoed like a hammer against my ribs. Did I leave her cage unlatched? The mental replay began - my nightly ritual of tucking in our sanctuary of souls: four rescue chickens (Vinnie, our bantam rooster, always the last to settle), four pigeons saved from various urban perils, two cats who'd known abandonment before love, two dogs with histories written in their wary eyes, and our four canaries. Fuzz had been perched on her favorite sleeping spot, her tiny head tucked beneath a wing, yellow feathers puffed against the evening chill. Nothing out of the ordinary. Except something must have been.

These sweet canaries entered our lives just weeks before my mom slipped away after her long, gutting descent into dementia's void. I grew up with canaries - their liquid gold melodies pouring through our Minnesota home each morning. Their song was my first experience with what I now call #frontloadjoy - that deliberate practice of beginning each day bathed in something that makes your cells remember what they're here for. Their trills are the soundtrack of my earliest memories, bright yellow notes against winter's endless gray.

We had stepped outside our comfort zone as dedicated rescue-only animal guardians and actually purchased a canary from a pet store. We found one locally, but when we arrived, we discovered she was a female. "She's in back," they told us. "The customers were bothering her too much so we put her in the storage area." That was it. Sold. We rescued her from all those horrible bothersome cage tappers, even though I was a bit disappointed we wouldn't have a singer.

So we found a male. Jacqui drove an hour to get him. He was definitely a male - singing almost the moment he emerged from his travel box. Within five days, we had five new eggs.

Now, as responsible vegans, we don't intentionally bring new life into this world - there are plenty of rescues in need. But I really wanted something new and wonderful in my life, something directly connecting me to my mom. She was an opera singer, you see. To raise and support me and my three brothers after my dad left us for another woman, she had the foresight to get her master's in education. We moved from Minnesota to Michigan, where she taught High School Choir for a couple of decades and was my choir and madrigal conductor throughout my high school years.

Mom gifted me with song in a way that went beyond inheritance - she planted it in me, watered it daily, showed me how to use it as both shield and embrace. Her voice could fill an auditorium without amplification, but it was in our kitchen, singing while stirring spaghetti sauce, that she taught me its true power.

My practice of #frontloadjoy bloomed fully when I finally understood that singing at the top of my lungs each morning wasn't just about melodious self-expression - or potentially annoying sleepy neighbors. It was medicine. Science wrapped in joy. Each sustained note activating my vagus nerve, each harmony calming my churning system, each familiar lyric grounding me when the world felt too sharp, too loud, too much. Those morning songs rewire me, tuning my frequency lower, balancing the internal orchestra of my nervous system. My protector parts loosen their vigilant grip, my indulger parts quiet their demanding voices, my rebel parts sit back and giggle at the unexpected permission to simply... be. To make sound without purpose beyond the making.

The first canary baby was born the day after Mom passed - October 24, 2023. We documented their growth with countless videos as they grew and eventually flew out of the nest. Our firstborn was a boy, so now we had two singers in the house.

So this is an ode to Fuzz - not just a canary, but a tiny, feathered teacher who showed me how much life can fit inside such a small frame. It's an acknowledgment of all the heart strings that vibrate when we lose any life force, regardless of its size or species or supposed significance in the grand scheme of things.

What strikes me most, sitting with this raw, tender grief, is what isn't happening: I'm not standing in front of an open refrigerator, searching for something to numb this ache. A decade ago, I would have been halfway through a pint of ice cream before the tears dried, methodically filling the Fuzz-shaped hole with sugar and fat and momentary distraction.

Let's be honest: Eating is our go-to response when life hurts. We turn to food to soothe, nurture, numb, support, and dissociate from SWCC (Stuff We Can't Control). It's the coping mechanism we've been conditioned to use since childhood. Sad? Have a cookie. Celebrating? Cake time. Bored? Snack away. Anxious? Comfort food to the rescue.

But what if we paused long enough to reach for something else? What might serve us better in these moments of loss and pain? I invite you to make your own list of alternatives:

• Perhaps it's stepping outside to feel the sun on your face
• Maybe it's calling a friend who truly listens
• It could be allowing yourself five minutes of ugly-crying without judgment
• Or sitting quietly with a hand on your heart, breathing deeply
• Writing furiously in a journal without censoring yourself
• Moving your body in ways that release the tension grief creates
• Making something with your hands - art, music, garden soil between your fingers

Something like this - a small or significant loss - is inevitably going to happen in all our lives. It happens all the time. The question isn't if, but when, and what we'll do when it does. The fact that I can feel this fully, without needing to escape it through food, might be the quietest victory of my life. Growth happens in these broken-open moments. Healing reveals itself not in the absence of pain, but in our capacity to hold it without running.

We held a small burial ceremony for Fuzz. It was sweet to see all the visitors Vinnie and our 3 hens come over to the quiet corner in the garden. And now, Peaches and G sing at the top of their lungs, perhaps in memory of their fallen friend.

If this story awakens the memory of your own losses - whether feathered, furred, scaled, or human - I invite you to pause. Place a hand over your heart. Close your eyes. Let yourself remember fully. These connections aren't small things, aren't silly things, aren't "just a pet" or "just a memory." They're threads in the tapestry of who we are. They've shaped us. Scarred us. Healed us. Taught us.

And sometimes, like the canary's song that wraps me in my mother's presence even now, these connections transcend the physical, becoming the melody that carries us through our darkest days, reminding us that love doesn't end when heartbeats do. That grief is just love with nowhere physical to go. That singing through tears is perhaps the most human thing we ever do.