A vulture descends, drawn by the smell of ending. Flesh surrenders its last warmth to the waiting earth, where all things eventually return. The scent rises through the afternoon heat: meat still weeping, its pores drinking in the last of dirt and air. This is the moment between was and will be. The vulture knows this language of decay, this understanding written in cooling blood and softening tissue. It moves with practiced care, each step measured, each gesture precise. It gathers slowly, this dark-winged undertaker, patient in its craft. It exists because death exists, its body transforming what must be transformed. I am still learning to accept this story. This story that is already written in my bones.

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Six summers ago, a vulture finds my family home. From our porch, we watch one claim the horizon where our yard kisses the forest edge. Its shape hangs heavy against the leaves, filling the spaces between branches like ink drops spreading through water. Over the years, they multiply in the canopy until the trees wear them like strange decorations. So high they perch that you can almost forget they are there, until night draws you out to look at the stars and you see them—dark forms holding the space between earth and sky.

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A vulture pokes at its last portions of flesh. The deer's eye holds emptiness in its glaze, a dark pool where insects gather like black tears. The vulture grows still as the corpse it tends, reading in the meat's strange mottling. A sign of disease. It consumes this poison with a methodical purpose, drawing the disease into itself until it becomes a vessel of death. Soon this ground will grow green again—leaf and moss will write their own stories over this place, and the earth will continue to breathe.

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By fall the vultures settle at the edge of our home. My father's diagnosis comes on Halloween - stage four lung cancer. The vultures can smell what we cannot. Or choose not to. The coughs that won't heal, the lines carved deeper into his flesh, the yellowing teeth, the way his body has been telling us all along in its own quiet language of decay. Such ugly birds, I think.

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I watch my mother in the mornings and evenings, her hands moving through familiar rituals - coffee grounds, pill bottles, the careful fold of clean sheets. Each gesture a meditation on waiting, on loving what is already beginning to leave. There's no touching now. No needed flesh on flesh, sharp as a morning plunge, salt striking cold rocks. The space between them in their shared bed grows wider each night, marked by the careful geography of bodies that remember other ways of being alive. Love changes shape in these spaces. Becomes something raw and sad and honest. A different kind of death— the slow dissipation of what was, while still breathing, still moving through the motions of life.

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A vulture is not an aggressive bird. It does not fight for dominance or chase others away, but waits its turn to feed. It does not seek the light in living eyes; only tends to those where light has already faded. A vulture is a patient bird. Patient like my mother, who puts aside her own being and happiness, driving to appointments, paying the ungodly insurance bills. Making peace with being a notch below content. Holding her grief like a stone beneath her tongue. Learning to live in the suspension between was and will be, between wife and caretaker and widow.

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Months flow into years, and somehow my father keeps breathing, every inhale rough as sand. The vultures stay, their forms woven through the trees, constant as seasons. Through summer heat and winter ice, they remain, testing the strength of branches with their weight.

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A vulture does not sing or screech to the sky. It speaks only in small sounds - grunts and hisses when threatened, then silence. So much of its life is silence. A burrow holding its breath against winter cold. Like my mother in the early hours, when grief sits heaviest in her chest.

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Time bends strangely now. We make space for each other when we can in this suspension— holidays, birthdays, long weekends— carved out moments that feel both precious and painful, like pressing on a bruise to remember it's there. My mother's resentment rises to the surface in these gatherings, a current we all feel but cannot name. It emerges in the sharp edge of her laugh, in her quick misreading of glances, in words that cut open old wounds and bleed. Sometimes her pain finds me instead, ricocheting off the walls of her trapped existence to lodge in my chest, leaving marks on my flesh. My words never fill these spaces right. Distance doesn't cure it, presence doesn't fix it. Feeling the sadness every time I can't see my parents. Feeling the sadness, every time I do. There is so much ugliness in the in-between.

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Yet in this same space, love persists. It lives in the small surrenders—staying in the room when silence grows too heavy, saying yes to another round of cards when the hour grows late, walking one more time through the woods where the vultures keep their patient watch. Choosing to be together in this brutal existence we've been given. Grief in living, love in dying.

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My mom tells me a woman from the bird conservancy comes to visit our home. She says our home is officially named a vulture sanctuary. My mom smiles at that. A sanctuary for the vultures, she laughs, and something in her voice catches like light on water. She takes this job seriously. Listing down the requirements to keep it such. Beginning to notice the birds more. Shushing anyone who rolls an eye at them. This is their home too, she says.

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I've come to accept this strange gift we've been given - this sanctuary where death and life press against each other like pages in a well-worn book. The vultures gather in our trees, dark witnesses to our family's slow unraveling. I find myself drawn to their meaning, their ability to hold what we fear to touch, to know what we pretend not to see. In their presence, I recognize a strange mercy— they carry our endings with a grace that says something about living. That it isn't always beautiful. Sometimes we have to drink the poison and store it in our bones, so that there might be a new version of this life. That a sanctuary, I think, is not a place where death cannot enter, but a place where we finally stop turning away. Where we can admit how scared we are, how intimately human.

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I often tell people that my childhood home is a vulture sanctuary. Those ugly birds? How scary. It is scary, I think. Death. But then I have the opportunity to see a vulture take flight, just beyond the treetops. Where my mother's hand finds my father's beneath the dinner table. In their dark feathers, sunlight becomes something else entirely— not pleasant, exactly, but real as bone, as blood, as breath. Something that reminds us we are all just borrowed light. Feel its warmth against skin. Feel its sting.

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Life is death is life. Let us not turn away from the necessary vultures who tend to this earth.