It's below freezing, and the maple, cherry, sycamore, and beech trees are stripped to their bones. Most animals are silent, sleeping away their territoriality and sexual insistence, or wintering in milder climes. The mourning dove sits on a knotty branch, its silhouette black, as the sun dissolves into the grass. What is the sound of mourning? Consider the dove, its plaintive call—Perchoo-oo-oo-o—sound slurring up and fading into a kind of musical ellipses. What elegant pining. What perfect music for the transition from evening into night, fear into lament. After death there should be a bird, and why not the mourning dove? We imagine the bird speaks to us—Ah-YOU-you-you-you. How human it is to transpose, to carry what is wordless into our own field of aural signs, our language.Four sisters sit on the floor outside their mother's bedroom where she lies dying, where she has asked for a little solitude. Maybe she needs to pull her thoughts together, or wants to sleep, or wishes for a break from the guilt of “putting them through this.” Outside her door, seated cross-legged on the wall-to-wall carpet, they carry on their chorus of sniffles and sneezes, stutters and coughs. The air conditioner churns away. The balled-up Kleenexes pile up. They are angry or lost or just plain devastated. This was supposed to be a cancer easily cured. A few snips of the scalpel. And here, six months from diagnosis, their mother is lying on her bed, pale and skeletal at 51.The sisters need solace, and the mother has always been the primary source of solace. But she can no longer deliver it.Outside, the humidity settles like a double wall around the house. Cicadas thrum and fall in layers under tree branches. A Good Humor truck jingles by and here comes the neighbor, strolling across the street to deliver what he most surely thought was a considerate, caring query. So great to see the sun today, right? How's your mother doing?Why answer the doorbell? Why, the very next day, open the door to the delivery boy who holds out our dry cleaning hooked on his index finger, then launches into an enthusiastic sales pitch—a “subscription” to his service—minutes after our mother takes her last rusty breath?I try to imitate the dove cooing from its perch, but my lips quiver like a leaf edge, then cramp.The mourning dove (Zinaida macroura) is the state bird of Wisconsin, birthplace of my mother and many of her relatives. Her brother and wife lost their son to a terrible accident. First came the inquiries: Was the driver on drugs? Who sold him the drugs? Were they being chased? Was the car itself at fault—slippage in the brakes, a faulty seatbelt? Later they lapsed into silence, keeping up the appearance of dignified calm—silence over the breakfast table, slow motion reaching for the cream and the coffee and the blackberry scones. Newspaper pages turned one after the other, without being seen, then—that full stare into the beyond. Finished with their doubts and arguments, they buried their sorrow, and were careful not to listen to certain music, especially the songs their teenager loved. We sisters were not taken by surprise as they were. We had six months to say goodbye. Not enough, never enough.There are countless ways to mourn, as many as there are individuals. There are those who cannot touch their feelings. “And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs,” wrote Robert Frost. Others say they need time to complete their grieving, or simply want to put it on a shelf for later. If you don't sing, or cry, or talk about death, it may not exist. On the other end of the spectrum, the Irish have their keening as the deceased is removed from the house—your mother will miss you, your daughter will miss you, your sister will miss you, your niece will miss you. Puebloans in the desert believe the cry of a mourning dove will draw them to water, to the springs and pools where the birds come to drink, especially at twilight. They call them rain doves and the dove feathers are tied to prayer sticks so that the people can use them as invocations to water itself. Toward the end of her life, my mother refused to eat or drink, even water. She wrote a note to each of us to make sure we knew she loved us: I have a terrible thirst for you girls. We sisters took turns laying our bodies over her body kissing her cool forehead and cheeks and hands.Sobbing swells up your face and reddens your eyes and makes your nose run profusely. Sobbing follows the rate of respiration, indeed amplifies it—an ancient phone ringing from a time before its invention. But tears themselves make no music. They pool inside the lower eyelid, trickle soundlessly down the face. If we feel like crying, it may be possible for adults to distract ourselves, stop those tears before they start. But once begun, arresting their flow is far more difficult. For the most part, children do not have either option. As we are well aware, they cry more than grown-ups. Sometimes the family is so broken, they can't even attend the funeral.Cross-culturally, humans make sounds in response to the loss of a loved one. Though the rites vary from place to place, we seem eager to fill the void with something that distracts, erasing the silence that so persistently reminds us of the voice we no longer hear. Even animals mourn. Most famous are the elephants that congregate about the body in something like a wake, sniffing and caressing. They even return later, repeatedly, to visit the skeletons, lifting their trunks to their mouths to taste what they are smelling. And birds exhibit the semblance of grief. Their brains, after all, are wired with nerve connections and hormones similar to ours. Mourning doves will watch over their deceased, stroke them with their bills, and later return to the place where they died. But this behavior must go on for a long time to prove it's some kind of grief. It might be mere confusion, and unless we could simultaneously observe the bird's hippocampus light up on a scan, we can't be sure. After all, birds don't imagine the future or suffer from a tragedy in the past. They don't plan or regret, cannot understand a life span, or anticipate their own death. They sing to attract a mate or signal danger, the most basic of communication. Humans have language and music to soothe a dying mother. I remember the Schumann that drifted from her room. The Traümerei were her favorite. Schumann singing from centuries ago—the feathery touch of the pianist, the repeated passages that flitted and rippled through the hall. My mother loved Schumann, though I'm not sure what it said to her in her dying. To me it said, you'll be safe, someday the sorrow will dissolve into the future. And when it's over and your mother is gone, Schumann—and the dove—will bring her back.Mourning doves will consume a huge variety of seed types, more so than any other North American bird. They particularly like sunflower, safflower, white millet, and chopped corn, but these are often quickly scarfed up by squirrels, and other birds higher in the pecking order. The cheap bags of seed almost always contain loads of red millet. It's filler, and only when the squirrels and the more aggressive birds finish their meal do the doves arrive on the scene with their flexible appetites. There's more variety if they eat in the wild with its wheat, corn, canary grass, and pokeberry seeds. But it's dangerous because predators are comfortable there too.I remember my mother splitting a roasted chicken into seven parts, reserving just the back and maybe one wing for herself. She claimed they were her favorites. I'm sure this was a lie, or something she just convinced herself of over the years. Where hunger was concerned, her family came first. After she died, all sorts of food arrived at our doorstep—baked hams, green bean casseroles with Durkee onions, biscuits, fruit breads, and baskets of fried chicken—all with a simple “Sorry for your loss,” or just plain “Sorry.” If there had been Edible Arrangements back then, they too would have piled up on our dining room table or been stuffed into the basement fridge.My mother lunched the way her mother had lunched—discretely, standing in the kitchen, holding a small white saucer with sliced sweet pickles, cheese, and a Baby Ruth bar for dessert. While I grieved, I threw my health to the wind, eating only sketchy foods like canned enchiladas or roast beef hash, fried chicken livers with eggs, brie cheese, and Lay's potato chips. I wrote a message in the fog on my window: Help me. Backward, so it could be seen from the street.In the independent film A Ghost Story, Rooney Mara plays a woman called “M” who has lost her husband to a car accident that occurred on the street, right outside their home. A friend shows up with a cherry pie. She leaves, and soon after, “M” grabs the pie and a fork and slinks down to the kitchen floor. She proceeds to eat, slowly at first, then accelerating her pace, forkful after forkful, stuffing her mouth, wolfing it down, barely pausing to swallow until she has consumed the entire pie. It is one of the most riveting, effective depictions of grief I've ever seen.Grief makes the world seem foreign, flat, and strange. Grieving, we watch from a distance as people fuss and fume about trivial things. The heel of one woman's shoe breaks off on a New York sidewalk and she swears like a sailor. A man leans on his horn, raging as another car cuts him off. What is the point of this caterwauling over dropped keys, parking places, a butter knife fallen to the floor? What are these things compared to the enormity of a death? As for all those well-intentioned attempts at sympathy, they don't really make a dent: You know, my uncle died too, when I was just seventeen. The subtext is so obvious: My grief was at least as intense as yours. You'll get over it.Not helpful, we think, and retreat deeper inside, free of their noise. We feel only what we feel, our ears plugged, and vision clouded. Indeed, it's typical for mourners to think only of themselves, a condition some call the “zoom lens effect.” Easier to scarf up a pie, or focus on those small slices of pickle, crackers, and cheese—arranging a meal so the best smidgen comes last, then pressing our index finger into each crumb and drawing it to our mouth. Ah-ME-me-me-me. Not Ah-YOU-you-you-you. Anything else feels naked and dangerous.Mourning doves are tolerant of human settlements and thus have quite an extraordinary range, stretching from parts of Canada, throughout the States, and across both Mexico and the Caribbean. Some estimate their numbers to be close to 120 million. Unfortunately, they're a favorite of hunters, who kill close to twenty of those millions annually. Then, consider the fact that they are ground feeders, prey not just for sportsmen, but cats and hawks and other predators. Finally, for some odd reason a dove will freeze motionless till its song is complete, even in the chase. For many reasons, this sotto voce singer is an easy target.Once I was a teenage killer of mourning doves. As part of a seventh-grade curriculum in the natural sciences, I took turns working on a bird-banding team consisting of three other teenagers supervised by a respected ornithologist, botanist, and middle school teacher. Our classroom was stocked with Roger Tory Peterson guides and Zim's Birds of North America, the walls hung with identification points, distribution charts, and more. We built birdhouses and feeders filled with suet we made ourselves from bacon grease and seed. We wrote bird life histories, traipsed lightly through the woods with binoculars and scopes, and competed fiercely for the longest life list.A thicket stood outside our building with a mostly protected grassy area in front—the perfect setting for capturing birds. We hung mist nets between the trees and set out five or six cages in the clearing. I specifically remember one such structure—with nine compartments, three across and three down, like a tic-tac-toe board—each with a swirl of multicolor seeds leading up and a trick platform a bird need only rest one foot on, causing the door to slide down. It was intended for the smallest ground feeders (sparrows, wrens, chickadees, titmice). Occasionally, larger birds showed up too.We followed a strict code of ethics. First: do no harm. The team leader checked traps and nets repeatedly, then shut or took them down in the evening and when predators were present. Seed was stored in a large, plastic-lined garbage can and we used a sawed-off Clorox bottle as a scooper. Once a white-throated, house, or song sparrow was trapped, we held it with utmost care, its head between middle and index finger, its body cupped in our palm, secured by a pinky and thumb. If we worked gently and quietly, and completed the process quickly, the bird would be minimally traumatized. There were specialized tools for affixing the band and ensuring no painful overlap. These were arranged in boxes by size: miniature, medium, and large, with a couple of extra larges in case we happened to net a pileated or crow. We recorded data in a binder, adding it to wall-sized charts and graphs, noting species, dates, and the numbers stamped on the bird bracelets.I was a nervous team leader—so determined to do no harm, I tried to scare the birds away by banging on the window or stomping on the walkway that surrounded our classroom. They scattered quickly. Better no banding at all than an unmanageable cluster of snared and terrified prisoners. Inevitably, the birds returned, and I was not watching when the dove, a female, waddled forward, head down into the tiniest compartment, its weight bringing the door down almost instantly. Nor was I present while it hurled itself against the mesh, tearing tissue and slicing open the skin just above the eye. Blood began to soak into its feathers, and, finally spotting this calamity, I ran for help. Our teacher was irritated at the interruption, then furious. He wrapped his hands around the bird, dabbed a bit of ointment on the wounds and then, abandoning protocol, released it to its foreshortened life. Indeed, the dove didn't make it far at all and stood panting at thicket's edge. The image of this iridescent creature with its mangled feathers and flesh was wrenching. It was the first black mark on my conscience and introduced my earliest experience of grief, one layered with guilt and the horror of killing something, especially this gentle bird. Not surprising that I remember it in such detail.The word “bereave” comes from the Old English bereafian, meaning “to be snatched violently away” or “robbed of,” and most tellingly, “to be torn apart.”A human opens fire in the woods, a door slams, or there's a cat circling. Birds immediately startle, flushing at the speed of alarm. And this is what it sounds like when doves fly: a fluttering whistle, especially on take-off. While other birds generate only the thud of wings, the dove creates an extra layer of music called “sonation,” from the Latin sonare, “to sound.” A sonata, for example, is music played, rather than sung. The dove's whinny is produced by air vibrating against the contoured tips of its flight feathers. It too has a purpose, a presaging of danger, like the white underside of a deer's tail or a sudden branch snapping in a forest.After our mother died, my sisters and I scattered into four different cities, four different states, where we mourned in four different ways. There was no gathering around the kitchen table, no sharing of music or poetry that might comfort, no laughter-inducing stories of that terrible vacation or heart-to-heart conversations while our mother cleaned up in the kitchen, no sifting through clothes and letters and purses. There was no discussion at all; we just went on with our lives. We were used to pouring out our troubles with her, and no one else.I taught English at a private high school in New York surrounded by hormonally charged adolescents and a handful of other teachers who hadn't yet faced the premature death of a loved one. I felt like the single citizen on an undiscovered planet, climbing the stairs to my sad little apartment, overpreparing my lessons for the next day, and later, rewarding myself with brainless stuff like Family Feud or National Enquirer while the trees went black against a lavender-smudged sky. I don't recall the landscape at all and certainly no birds, though a mourning dove with its ancient music would have been pleasant, another voice mirroring my sorrow and pain.Other music we might hear from the dove: snap of sunflower seeds split into half. A heartbeat if we're pressing an ear to its breast. The mourning dove's unique mating call is hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo, uttered by males on land and only during a very specific season, usually spring. The sound is like unamplified backup singing at a rock concert and, extending that analogy, their behavior is like fans in the audience nodding their heads to the beat. The lovers preen each other with gentle nibbles around the neck, then progress to grasping beaks and synchronizing their bobbing. And once “married,” they manifest fidelity well after the breeding. As long as they are alive. Hunters and predators take their toll, but don't feel sorry for them. Off they go in search of another mate, breeding like rabbits, sometimes six times a season. Studies show their extinction is among the “least cause for concern.”As I attempted sleep, was I the only one experiencing that interior screeching and sawing of anxiety, that orchestral clamor, what the Germans might call Klangfarbenmelodie. My breathing too was broken like a bicycle chain unhitched from its gears, or an engine with a loose screw catapulting here and there. Why is it the wee small hours of the morning are so blaring, lonely, and attenuated? Did my sisters experience this too? Or did we again diverge, scattering into four distinct states of mind. The one in denial slept like a baby, another turned to sleeping pills, the youngest to running ten miles a day till her body fell into bed like a stone.We have a larynx to sing, lips and a tongue to form vowels and consonants. Birds have something special—a syrinx, situated at the fork between trachea and bronchi—each branch with vibrating tissues, each tube controlled by individual muscles. The mourning dove makes little use of this ingenious anatomical construction. But other birds can transition flawlessly from one song to the next or in some cases sing both songs at the same time. The true master is the wood thrush. If you happen one summer morning to be east of the Mississippi, in a damp deciduous forest with a dense shrub layer (and you are in luck), the thrush will begin its ethereal fluting—to me, more lovely than anything you'd find in an orchestra, music from an ancient well of shadow and water.Though we have no syrinx, there are people who can sing as if they had one. There's the polyphonic overtone singing by Anna-Maria Hefele—part spirit, part bird, and the rest one well-practiced human. A normal singing voice contains multiple tones, which we hear as a single note. Unlike most of us, she's conscious of these multilayers and can separate them out, splitting the sound into two: the root tone and the overtone. The effect is quite beautiful, like the song of some undiscovered creature deep inside a cave. At a funeral or memorial service, it might represent the music of transition, of passing from one kind of being to another.A dove is nowhere near this talented. The male sits on a cooing perch sending forth the repetitive perchoo-oo-oo-o, perchoo-oo-oo-o. The music is discernable, distinct, but still throws people off. I thought it was the hooting of an owl. I'm sure it was an owl. And even when we've got the species right, we continue to imagine the dove is grieving, because we have once grieved, and this song is the universe reflecting our sadness. Its message is actually territorial—a significant stance, my branch, my nest, get back, stay off, stay out.We humans are so anxious to make our mark on the world. We make a bird ours because we've seen it, named it, recorded it, and translated its song into human language. We put out seed and suet and the dove flies in for our pleasure. We are confident that we are helping it grow, and multiply. We band and track and accumulate data for years, so our ancestors will know what we know and do what we do. Then we shoot it for sport, adding another notch to our kill list and perhaps a meal, if we are up for it. We make up stories about the dove. Musicians, with their knack for recognizing patterns (shape, balance, repetition, and variation), have stolen the dove's utterances. Ottorino Respighi borrowed the perchoo for “La Columba,” a section of his larger composition “The Birds.” And there's Prince, who in perhaps his most famous song translates the dove's call into a brilliant lament of his own.Who can blame them? This is what we do, as humans. We commandeer the colors, noises, structures, and smells of the natural world to suit our thoughts and creations and history. We take it one step further and lose our objectivity altogether, assigning human emotion to nonhuman behavior. When someone we love dies, devastation kicks in. And if other human connections are not available, these biases are somehow comforting even if they are unscientific or inaccurate. We do this because it allows us to remember, to belong, to feel less estranged from the natural world, though in fact we are not estranged, not actually distinct and separate, but inextricably part of, and tied to, the living world around us.It's early spring: the onion grass is up in sloppy, scattered tufts and the red maple buds have just begun to poke the air like sharpened pencils. Condensation on my window forms a kind of ghost sickle. While the rest of the house sleeps, quiet and dark, the dove alights on an evergreen outside my bedroom, singing Ah-YOU-you-you-you. I'm grateful it's the first melody I hear, ever so tentative, preamble to Klangfarben—that crackling dawn bird chorus. I can relax. I allow myself to think that the bird in its sympathetic circular way sings for me, and I am listening to the music of my mother's voice.