We are not alone in grief….

Now a fact not many of you will know but I am absolutely phobic about birds….chickens to be precise but it has now widened to all birds. This phobia stemming from a wonderful cockerel which pecked me beautifully on the knee when I was a youngster.

I digress…

But suffice to say that I never really feel as though I have a lot in common with birds. However, I was reading a wonderful article about magpies and how they suffer grief as well. Wow, you don’t really think of birds as being in pain do you?

“Dr Bekoff said he studied four magpies alongside a magpie corpse and recorded their behaviour.

“One approached the corpse, gently pecked at it…Another magpie did the same thing…Next, one of the magpies flew off, brought back some grass and laid it by the corpse. Another magpie did the same. Then all four stood vigil for a few seconds and one by one flew off.”

After publishing an account of the funeral he received emails from people who had seen the same ritual in magpies, ravens and crows.

“We can’t know what they were actually thinking or feeling, but reading their action there’s no reason not to believe these birds were saying a magpie farewell to their friend,” he wrote in the journal Emotion, Space and Society.”

What made me think was that I often sit here and think….no one really knows how I feel, no one can truly understand my pain…..and now am I thinking…is it me that doesn’t understand, doesn’t understand that grief is truly universal and that pain sees no boundary, not even genetic makeup?