Still Keeping His Eye on His Girls

On love, loss and the red-tailed visitor who keeps showing up

Today is Chris’s birthday. He passed away in 2021, and today he would have turned 51, which is a number I keep turning over in my mind this morning the way you turn a smooth stone in your pocket, not trying to do anything with it, just feeling the weight of it, the realness of it.

Yesterday, the day before his birthday, I was walking the trail behind our house when I saw it. A beautiful red-tailed hawk moving through the woods — unhurried, deliberate, flying low enough through the trees that I stopped mid-stride and just watched until it disappeared into the branches. Then I found him and took his picture.

Hi, Chris. Tomorrow’s your birthday.

The hawk has been ours since a few days after he died, back in the early, raw days of 2021 when everything was still shock and disbelief and the girls and I were just trying to find our footing in a world that had suddenly become unrecognizable.

I was driving with them in the back seat, when we passed the studio apartment I had rented just the year before, after he and I separated. And in that exact moment, just as we were passing it, a hawk came flying directly across my windshield, wings fully spread, so close to the glass that I flinched, so close I could see the detail of its feathers. The whole thing lasted maybe two seconds.

I didn’t think. I didn’t reach for comfort or scramble for something reassuring to say. The words came before I even knew I was speaking.

That’s your dad.

Not as a wish. Not as a mother doing her best to soften an unbearable thing for her daughters. It came as knowing, the way certain things arrive in the body before the mind has had a chance to weigh in. And something in the girls received it the same way, quietly and completely, the way children receive truth when they hear it.

From that day on, the hawk has been ours.

We see them everywhere now — on the trail behind our house, circling above the soccer field, perched on a powerline as we pass on the highway. And without needing to decide or discuss it, one of us says:

There’s Dad.

The girls have told their friends about it. They’ve pointed to the sky on the playground and explained, with the particular matter-of-factness of children who have no patience for things being more complicated than they are, that when a hawk appears overhead, it’s their dad checking in.

I love that they carry this so naturally, without embarrassment, without needing it to make sense to anyone who doesn’t already feel it. And I love that it came from him, that in the middle of all the loss and the silence and the absence, he found a way to give them something they could point to, something that moves through the sky above their heads and says I’m still here.

In Native American tradition, the hawk is a messenger and a guardian, a creature of extraordinarily sharp vision who sees not only what is directly in front of it but what lies far ahead on the horizon. Hawk medicine carries the energy of awareness and protection, the sense that there are forces watching over us, caring for us, holding us in their sight even when we cannot feel them close. Hawk says: you are not alone. I am still keeping my eye on you. Look up.

I didn’t need a tradition to tell me any of that. I knew it already, in my bones, in the two seconds that hawk filled my windshield five years ago. But there is something quietly comforting about knowing that people across cultures and centuries have looked up at a hawk and felt exactly this, that something larger was present, that love is not extinguished by death, that it finds its way through, one form or another.

Chris was 47 when he died. Today he would have turned 51, and there is a particular grief in that arithmetic that anyone who has lost someone too young will recognize immediately, the grief not just of the life that ended, but of all the years that keep accumulating on our side of it while his number stays frozen. We keep getting older. He stays 47. And every birthday, I have to hold both of those things at once: the life that was, and the life that keeps going without him in it.

The hawk helps me hold both.

It is a symbol of hope for us, a symbol that life goes on in ways we don’t always have the eyes to see, a symbol that we are watched and cared for and loved even from the other side of whatever this life is. He is still keeping his eye on his girls. I believe that with everything I have.

Happy birthday, Chris.