The episode named Blackbird Strikes the Window and Is Buried begins with a blunt interruption: on Hermann’s fortieth birthday, as he smokes what he has declared to be his last cigarette, a blackbird crashes into the living-room window. The impact breaks the breakfast’s expectant quiet and sets in motion a household funeral. In the narrator’s memory, the bird’s death becomes more than an accident: it is a child’s close encounter with irreversible loss, shaped by sibling play, family authority, and the solemn care of ritual.

The impact at breakfast

The family is gathered around a birthday breakfast while Hermann smokes his final Roth-Händle. A shadow passes over the narrator’s plate; then comes the crash. Hermann spits the cigarette onto the tablecloth, the narrator’s mother makes a strangled sound, the Family dog leaps up and knocks its head beneath the table, and the brothers and narrator recoil in their chairs. The cigarette ember lands glowing on the cloth as the others hurry to the window.

Birds have hit the windows before, but never in the middle of breakfast, and never with such force against a silence charged by the birthday and Hermann’s announcement. The window strike abruptly displaces the family’s attention from his self-imposed resolve to quit smoking. Hermann, who has been sitting heavily and laboriously rising from his chair, surprises the narrator by touching the glowing ash with a saliva-wet finger and then drawing it into his mouth. The tiny orange-yellow point of ember is echoed by the blackbird’s yellow-orange beak in the morning light. The narrator’s attention moves between these two images before settling on the motionless bird.

The narrator’s eldest brother opens the sliding door, the narrator’s mother holds back the Family dog, and the narrator’s second-oldest brother examines the bird. Its eyes are closed and one wing lies outstretched. Hermann cautions against touching it and suggests that its neck is broken; the brother, who hopes to become a doctor like Hermann, answers with medical speculation. Their exchange gives the scene a playful, almost clinical register, but it cannot settle what has happened. The narrator’s mother fetches a shoebox lined with a kitchen towel, and the blackbird is placed inside.

From waiting to a funeral

Later, the narrator and the second-oldest brother kneel beside the box in the cool front hall. Nothing has changed. The narrator hesitates to come so close, as if the bird might be only temporarily unconscious and its stillness ought not to be violated. The brother turns it with a colored pencil; its feet are stiff and extended. He tests its pulse and concludes that it is dead. The narrator still asks to wait, recalling that birds can look dead without being so, but the brother insists that they must prepare a burial before the body begins to smell.

By midday, the funeral takes place in the family’s pet cemetery, where the narrator’s eldest brother has already buried zebra finches, ornamental fish, a gecko that escaped and was found mummified behind a cupboard, and other birds killed by the window. The cemetery gives the blackbird’s death a place within a repeated family practice. The brothers have established roles: the second-oldest brother delivers the eulogies, the narrator carries the dead animals on a handkerchief, and the eldest brother makes small wooden crosses. The narrator is struck by how little the animals weigh. Carrying the blackbird feels less like bearing a body than holding empty hands out in the air.

For this funeral, the second-oldest brother proposes cremation rather than burial. Despite the unusually hot day, he puts on a black turtleneck and explains that he cannot bear the thought of the bird rotting beneath damp earth. Its life, he says in effect, belonged to the air; its ashes should be scattered into the wind. The eldest brother approves and produces his lighter. Together they gather branches and dry grass, build a neat pyre with a hollow at its center, and place three firelighters inside. The narrator helps, but the structure looks to him like a comfortable nest. As the eldest brother makes a flame flare above the lighter, the narrator fears that they may not have waited long enough and imagines the bird waking in the fire and flying away alight.

The mother’s decision and the burial

The narrator’s mother comes into the garden carrying laundry. The brothers try to shield the pyre, but she sees the firelighters and asks whether they mean to set the bird alight. The second-oldest brother argues forcefully for cremation, presenting it as a legitimate custom and turning the question toward how their mother herself might want to be buried. Her initial shock softens into thoughtfulness, but she refuses to let the boys burn a bird in the garden on Hermann’s fortieth birthday. Burial, she decides, is acceptable; cremation is not.

The practical arrangement changes at once. The narrator removes the firelighters from the nest-like pyre, the eldest brother fetches a spade and chooses a place between the existing graves, and the mother resumes hanging laundry, glancing toward the boys as she works. One spadeful is enough to make the small grave. The second-oldest brother delivers a ceremonious eulogy, describing the bird’s short life, imagined hardships, songs, and companionship. The narrator recognizes that these claims may not describe a bird the family actually knew. The speech nevertheless gives the death a formal shape; its mock grandeur also carries a complaint against the decision that has prevented the brothers from scattering the ashes.

The narrator places the blackbird in the grave from the handkerchief and pushes earth over it with his hands. He tries to hold back tears, then bends close to the mound and carefully pats the soil, using the task to delay standing up. His eldest brother tells him to stop drumming on the earth, calling it a disturbance of the dead. The narrator wipes his tears on his shoulders without being noticed. The eldest brother sets a wooden cross into the mound, and the brothers sing a bird song until they can no longer remember how to continue. They return to the house with the subdued composure of people leaving a church.

Ritual, play, and the larger narrative

The funeral is at once earnest and improvised. The brothers borrow the forms of adult mourning—eulogy, grave, marker, song—while turning them into a space for invention and argument. Their proposed pyre becomes a nest; the second-oldest brother’s medical diagnosis becomes a theatrical funeral speech; and the narrator’s careful work at the grave reveals grief that the family’s joking language does not erase. His tears make plain what the ceremony’s performance only partly conceals: the bird’s death feels final to him, even while he has resisted that conclusion.

Elsewhere in the memoir, the narrator describes accompanying Hermann through the psychiatric hospital’s Christmas celebrations, where patients’ gift-opening and annual nativity plays could depart dramatically from their scripts. Those scenes do not repeat this funeral, but they place it beside a wider pattern in which formal rituals are reshaped by the people taking part. Here, too, the expected sequence is interrupted: the birthday breakfast gives way to a death, a proposed cremation gives way to burial, and an improvised song brings the brothers back indoors. Much later, at Hermann’s death, the narrator again attends closely to the body and to the question of where pain goes when life ends. The blackbird’s burial is smaller and child-scaled, but it establishes an early form of that attention: death is not an abstraction when a body has to be carried, placed in the earth, and left behind.