A Crow Tapped My Grandmother's Window Every Day of Her Last Week

My grandmother spent her last week at home, in the front bedroom, with the family taking turns to sit with her. She was dying, gently, of being very old and very tired, and she had asked not to go into hospital, and we honoured that. It was a slow, quiet week of low voices and cups of tea gone cold and the district nurse coming and going.

The crow arrived on the first afternoon. A big one, glossy black, and it landed on the sill of her window and tapped the glass with its beak. Three or four taps, a pause, a few more. Then it sat and looked in through the net curtain, unhurried, and after a while it flew off. We thought nothing of it. Birds do odd things.

But it came back the next afternoon, and the next, always around the same time, the middle of the afternoon when the light was going flat and gold. Always the same window, her window, though there were four bedrooms it could have chosen. Always the tapping first, that deliberate knock of the beak on the glass, and then the sitting and the looking in. My aunt, who is not sentimental, started to find it unbearable. She drew the curtains. The crow tapped anyway, on the glass it could no longer see through, and she had to leave the room.

My grandmother, when she was awake enough to know, was not frightened by it at all. She said, quite clearly one afternoon, that's my ride, that is, and gave a little laugh, and went back to sleep. She had grown up in a mining village where these things were spoken of plainly. A crow or a raven at the window of a sick room was old news to her. She treated the bird like a relative who had come a long way and could jolly well wait until she was ready.

She died on the sixth afternoon, in that flat gold light. I was in the room. The crow was on the sill. As her breathing changed and then stopped, and the room went very still in the way a room does, the crow tapped the glass once, a single tap, quite soft, and lifted off the sill and flew away over the rooftops. I went to the window and watched it go until it was a speck and then nothing.

It never came back. Not the next day, not the day of the funeral, not ever. We watched for it, all of us, half wanting it and half dreading it, and it was simply done. Whatever its business had been, it was finished.

I have tried to be sensible about this. Crows are clever, cleverer than we like to admit, and they learn. A crow that gets any reward at a window, warmth, a reflection, the movement of people inside, might come back day after day. Maybe someone left crumbs on that sill years ago and it remembered. Maybe it saw its own reflection and was tapping at a rival. There are explanations and I have lined them all up and looked at them.

But not one of them explains the single soft tap at the exact moment she stopped breathing, or the way it left and never returned once she was gone. My grandmother was not troubled by any of it. She knew what it was. She called it her ride and she was proved right, and she went out of this world in the gold afternoon light with a black bird keeping watch at the glass, patient to the last, waiting to see her off.

I am not frightened of crows now. When one looks at me a beat too long I think of her laughing and saying that's my ride, and I find, to my own surprise, that it is a comfort. She was not alone at the end. Something had come for her, and it waited, and it was kind about it.