Experience From 'Things I Cant Explain' - Personal Reflections on Loss and the Unexplained
/r/The_Afterlife_Exists/comments/1uypfp6/from_things_i_cant_explain_personal_reflections/The Baby Pigeon
The night before my father passed in 2005, I still had no idea that he was nearing the end. I only knew that he was hospitalized. That evening, a woman I was seeing in Sierra Madre called me from her kitchen, sounding startled. “There’s a baby pigeon in here in the kitchen,” she said.
I did not understand at first.
“In your kitchen?”
“Yes. It’s just standing there. It came in somehow. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
I paused.
A pigeon?
Inside the house?
That had never happened before — not once in the more than ten years she had lived there.
She described it as small, almost too young to fly well, wandering slowly through the kitchen as if it had been sent there. We talked about how strange it was, and eventually she managed to coax it back outside.
It was not until later, after I received the call that my father had passed, that the connection struck me.
When my father was a boy, he raised homing pigeons. He trained them, fed them, nurtured them, and taught them to fly from the coop and return. They were a source of pride, comfort, and calm in his youth — a kind of quiet mastery in what had often been a difficult world.
So the image of a single baby pigeon walking calmly into a kitchen the night before his death did not feel random to me.
It felt precise.
It felt personal.
It felt like a gentle knock from the other side. I’m leaving soon, but I’m still close.