“I pray to birds, because they fly closest to heaven.” Lydia said once.
Wilbur had smiled amiably, always one to entertain her. “Heaven’s a long ways away from here, what makes you think they can make it?” Never mind the fact that Wilbur didn’t even believe in a heaven, hadn’t since he was six and his young shoulders didn’t yet know how heavy the world could be when placed on them. But Lydia did, and Wilbur had a soft spot for the woman who was the closest thing to a mother he would ever get.
“I never said they make it to heaven, now did I?” A playful smile tugged at her lips, eyes glittering sidelong at Wilbur in the cool autumn sun. “I said they fly close to it, because not even they can make it that far. They’re only birds.” She rolled her eyes like it was the most obvious thing in the world and couldn’t believe that Wilbur didn’t know this, and nudged him teasingly with her elbow.
Wilbur laughed and nudged her back.
“Then why do you pray to them if they’re so bad at their jobs?”
“Well, who else am I going to pray to? The air? Now that’s just silly. God can’t hear me if I pray to air. Be reasonable.” Lydia snorted, leaning back in her rocking chair with closed eyes. A gentle wind buffeted past, it sighed in the orange-ing trees above and made the dappled shadows on Lydia’s face dance serenely, and Wilbur had marveled at how young she happened to look in that instance; wrinkles smoothing back into her face like early morning dew. For a moment, she appeared as she did nearly thirty years ago, when her joints had not yet been eaten by arthritic termites and her hair still held the tint of the sun’s golden rays. “Besides, birds are just angels who are too young for heaven and are still learning to fly. They’ll hold my prayers for me until they’re old enough to give them to God themselves.”
“Is that so?” Wilbur hummed quietly, turning an inquisitive eye to where a small woodpecker sat perched on a low hanging branch. He watched as it tilted its head one way, then the other, curiously peering inside a small crevice hidden in the tree’s bark. “What prayer do you give that one?” he asked, pointing out the woodpecker. Lydia followed the line of his finger easily to where the bird now pecked cautiously at the place it had been studying.
She turned a questioning eye to Wilbur, thin eyebrow arched skeptically at him, but Wilbur didn’t look away from the woodpecker and kept his face carefully neutral, so she sighed heavily and also turned her sights back to the bird. Wilbur swore he saw her give a tiny smile from the corner of his eyes, but didn’t want to acknowledge it.
“I pray that there’ll be sunlight in winter, and water in summer. That every butterfly will have two wings, that every stray penny will be found heads up, and that children will always scream in excitement when they hear the song of an ice-cream truck.” The way Lydia’s eyes seemed to gloss over a little, unfocussed, and with a wistful grin, told Wilbur that she was seeing things that were only visible to her eyes. “But mostly,” she said with something hinting to mischievousness playing at the edges of her voice as she turned to face him, leaning over the arm of her rocking chair like she had something she wanted to confide in him with. “I pray you’ll learn that burgundy just isn’t your color.”
Then it’s Wilbur’s turn to snort, though it’s months later when winter is just starting to creep in that he does.
He’s alone, and the chill seeping through his jacket isn’t from the cold—though some of it is, because it’s freezing and just this morning the weatherman said it was going to snow later that afternoon—but it’s also from the grief soddening his bones in Lydia’s absence.
It’s hardly been two weeks since Lydia slipped away peacefully in her sleep, but Wilbur misses her already—has missed her from the moment he knew she was gone. There wasn’t a lot of people who cared for Wilbur, who were willing to just sit and talk with him for hours about meaningless things in order to feel a little less alone in this all-too-big-world, and Lydia was one of those very few. But she’s gone now and Wilbur wants to be selfish enough to ask the God Lydia believed in to bring her back—but he doesn’t.
Instead he stares down at the grey slab of stone that bears her name and years of life like it’s some victory to be bragged about, and on some level, Wilbur supposes that it is. Lydia lived a long and happy life, one that was clearly illustrated in the wrinkled valleys and roads etched on her face; a roadmap of every smile she smiled and every tear she shed. He knows that she held no regrets, died ready to be swept into heaven on the back of some bird finally ready to gain a pair angel wings.
Wilbur fiddles with the stray thread of his scarf, the burgundy one Lydia had always tried to hide from him when he was a teenager because of how she claimed he looked horrible in the color, and closes his eyes briefly on a soft sigh.
When he opens them, he does so to the overcast sky, and wonders if Lydia had managed to reach her heaven even with all those clouds in the way. He hopes she did. Even though Wilbur could never find the ability to believe in God or a heaven of any kind, he wants it to be true for Lydia. Out of everyone else in the world, she deserved it most.
Casting one last glance down at the headstone, Wilbur finds a small thrush standing atop the newly dug earth at the foot of it, and smiles despite himself.
“I pray that you made it to heaven Lydia, and all your prayers had made it too.”
Jenny Zimmer is a senior studying English and History at Washburn University, where she works as a student assistant in the library’s archives and special collections. She currently lives in Topeka with her two cats, Arthur and Billy.