A Robin Came Inside the House the Day My Father Died

My father did not believe in signs. He was a plumber for forty years and his religion was that things had causes you could find if you got down on the floor and looked. So I want to be clear that what I am about to tell you would have annoyed him enormously.

He had been ill for a while. Heart. We knew it was coming but not when, the way you never really know when. That last week he was mostly in his armchair by the back window, dozing, waking to complain about the tea being cold, dozing again. My mother and I took turns sitting with him.

The morning he died I came downstairs first, about seven. It was February and freezing and the house was silent. And there, on the back of his empty armchair, was a robin. A real robin, red breast, bright black eye, sitting perfectly still and looking straight at me.

I stood in the doorway and I could not work out how it had got in. The back window had been painted shut since before Christmas. The door was locked. There was no draught, no open flue, nothing. The bird did not panic when it saw me. It did not flap around the room the way a trapped bird does, throwing itself at the glass. It just sat on his chair and watched me, and then it hopped once, and looked at the stairs, and looked back at me.

I went and woke my mother. When we came down together the robin was still there. It let us get quite close. Then it flew, once around the room, easy and unhurried, and out through the kitchen where I found, only afterwards, that the small top window was open a crack. It had not been open the night before. I would swear to that. My mother swears to it too.

We went up to my father. He had gone in his sleep, sometime in the last hour or two, peacefully, the doctor said, his heart simply stopping. The robin had been sitting downstairs while he was dying above us, and it left the moment we found him.

My grandmother, who was Cornish, always said a robin in the house means a death, or news of one. I had heard her say it a hundred times and rolled my eyes a hundred times. My father would have rolled his eyes too. He would have told me the window was open a crack all along and I had simply not noticed, and that a cold bird will come indoors for warmth, and that a bird sitting still is a bird that is frightened, not a bird delivering a message. And he might be right. He usually was.

But I keep coming back to how it looked at me. Birds do not look at you like that. They look through you, past you, at the exits. This one looked at me and then at the stairs, twice, deliberately, as if it wanted me to go up. And when I did what it seemed to want, it left.

I do not tell many people this story because I can see them deciding what kind of person I am. But my mother was there, and she is the least fanciful woman alive, and to this day if a robin lands near her in the garden she goes very quiet and says, hello, love, as though she is talking to someone she knows.

We put a robin on my father's headstone in the end. My mother's idea. He would have hated it, and I think that is partly why she did it. A little joke between her and the bird that sat with him while he left.