A luminous collection of essays and poems about family, faith, and the art of saying goodbye from award-winning essayist, poet, and teacher Brenda Miller.
In Love You, Bye, award-winning author Brenda Miller maps the territory of caregiving, loss, and unexpected grace. The title—drawn from the simple phrase she and her mother said to each other for years—captures the bittersweet essence of a book that finds profound meaning in the most ordinary expressions of love.
At the center of this collection lies the story of Miller's journey as the "wayward daughter" who becomes the devoted caregiver to her aging parents, chronicling her father's gradual decline and her mother's final months with remarkable vulnerability. From the rituals of Passover to the silence of hospice rooms, from the mysterious appearances of tree frogs to the sacred work of singing at deathbeds, Miller weaves together the ordinary and the transcendent, often finding that the sacred is embedded in the mundane.
Miller's voice moves seamlessly between prose and poetry, between humor and heartbreak, between the personal and the universal. She transforms the simple act of saying goodbye into an art form and the everyday language of love into something approaching prayer. Love You, Bye is essential reading for anyone navigating the complexities of aging parents, the mysteries of faith, or the simple courage required to keep loving in a world that can break our hearts.
A Flock of Hummingbirds Is a Glittering
Two weeks before she dies, my mother watches hummingbirds from her perch on the recliner, her world narrowed to the glass pane of her patio door. Look, her finger points, and there’s the male ruby-throated hummingbird drinking deep, flash of red visible at just the right angle of light.
My mother spends almost all her time in that chair now, legs up to relieve the constant pain from a wound that will not heal. I’ve put the hummingbird feeder in her line of sight, as well as a small, handheld feeder I’ve promised her we’ll try out when the weather gets warmer. We think this guy is the same bird visiting his perch, but we can’t really know. Sometimes two at a time jostle for position, but never what one could call a flock, never a crowd.
Inside her apartment, hummingbirds surround my mother: a carved wooden hummingbird alighting on a branch; a hummingbird decorative plate; a glass hummingbird hanging from an invisible string, hummingbird earrings in her earlobes, a paint-by-number of South American hummingbirds I did myself and hung in her kitchen. The hospice chaplain asked my mother what she loves about hummingbirds. Their persistence, she replied without hesitation, her mind suddenly clear, their ability to make a home out of nothing.
Just wanting to see a hummingbird is not enough. You have to prepare. Plant the right plants that will unfurl their lures. Buy the right feeder, make the food according to directions. My mother did it right, boiling sugar in water, keeping tabs on the level of nectar in each bowl. You have to be present; you can’t always be checking your phone, doing the crossword, thinking about what you did wrong yesterday and the day before that. They’re elusive, hummingbirds. It’s what they’re known for. That and the way they can metabolize sucrose to keep themselves from freezing. The way they can migrate hundreds of miles without stopping. The way their bright colors are not inherent to their feathers but depend on refractions of light. They’re survivors, with sturdy, impossibly small, hearts. . . .
A few weeks after my mother dies, my brothers, their families, and I visit the cemetery. It’s a cold April day, the first time I’ve seen the grave since my mother’s funeral. My brothers couldn’t attend the ceremony, so it was just me and many of my friends, plus staff from the dining room at The Willows, a group of teenage girls huddled together and crying. The rabbi spoke of how she cared for others more than for herself. I stepped forward to shovel the first clump of dirt; it landed with a loud hollow thump on the pine casket.
Now we stand at her grave, my brothers and I gazing down at the common headstone she shares with my father, who died five years ago. My own future gravesite lies just alongside theirs, beneath an ornamental flowering cherry that shows no sign yet of blooming. I hear murmuring from my sisters-in-law and my nieces behind us, but I don’t turn around.
Only later, as we’re driving away, does my sister-in-law say, Did you see the hummingbird?
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