Every year they come to my yard and help make my heavy grief lighter.

My daughter, Ana, wanted to get a hummingbird tattoo before she died, but tattoos are illegal for children under 16 in New York State. She was 15 years old and it didn’t look likely that she’d make it to her birthday. I could have driven her to New Jersey for the tattoo, except she was extremely anemic and I was afraid she would get an infection.

I waited, hoping her tumors would magically stop growing, hoping her profound anemia would somehow resolve, hoping that some miracle of modern medicine would save her. I wanted this for her and I wanted so much more too.

Eventually, hope and time ran out.

She died on March 22nd, 2017, six weeks before her 16th birthday. We had a replica of the hummingbird tattoo painted on her urn.

Barely a week later, everything started to bloom. I watched our yard come back to life, resentful and heartsick that Ana wasn’t there to watch it too.

As the days warmed and the landscape grew lush, I sank into my grief. I bought myself a necklace with a hummingbird charm. I looked for signs of Ana, hoping I’d see a hummingbird in my yard. I’d seen them in the past, so I knew they came as far north as New York.

When I speculated about this on Facebook, someone posted, “Bee balm! Plant Bee balm and they’ll come.”

“They love butterfly bush and trumpet vine,” someone else chimed in. “That’ll attract them.”

I ignored the advice, too soul-sick to think about planting flowers that would surely die under my watch. I wondered if the rose of Sharon bushes — also called althea, also called Hibiscus — that dotted my yard would be enough to attract hummingbirds. Hibiscus flowers contain nectar, but don’t start blooming until July.

That year, a friend brought me a hummingbird feeder and a container of cherry red nectar. Our friendship has faded away to nothing, but her gift was the start of something that endures five years later. It was a door opened, a beckoning to the birds.

I hung the feeder in my backyard where it baked in the sun. I changed the nectar frequently, feeling foolish every time I dumped the untouched liquid down the drain. It seemed hopeless, a complete waste.

I’d recently connected on Facebook with a woman who’d lost her 17-year-old daughter about two months after I lost Ana. Through our exchanges, I discovered she was a hummingbird expert. Though burdened with her own relentless grief, she inspired me to be more proactive.

“Plant bee balm,” she insisted after reading one of my dismal posts. “Plant purple salvia.” She told me to throw the store-bought nectar away and make my own out of sugar and water.

The recipe is four parts water, one part granulated sugar. Four cups to one cup — it’s that simple. Heat the water on the stove until it boils, then dump the sugar in and stir it until the liquid is clear. It’ll keep in the fridge for up to two weeks.

“Tie red ribbon to the trees near the feeder,” she instructed, so I spent one morning making the tree limbs look like Christmas presents. I tied ribbon along the entire length of the pole where the feeder hung. My husband and I visited a local garden center and picked up bee balm and salvia, plants with bright purple and red flowers.

Each day I sat outside and watched the feeder glint in the sun. Each day that passed without a hummingbird left me feeling even more bereft.

Around mid-July, when the rose of Sharon had finally begun to bloom, my husband and I were outside with our dog. As we leaned against the car blearily drinking coffee, a hummingbird buzzed above us. It zipped across the yard flying purposely around every single scrap of ribbon until, at last, it found the feeder. It landed. It drank.

We gaped.

They came every day after that. The first was a tiny male with a ruby throat. Sometimes I saw a female at the feeder and assumed it was his mate. The two birds took turns eating as I watched from a lawn chair about ten feet away.

Within weeks, two juvenile birds appeared. The male wouldn’t let them feed, chasing them away with a flurry of wings and chatter, so I bought a second feeder and hung it on a pole across the yard.

One day I noticed a new bird sitting on the feeder. Small and round, its head was crowned with red feathers and its black wings were dappled with white spots. It was unsuccessfully trying to get to the nectar. I took a picture and sent it to my mother, an avid birder.

“Downy woodpecker,” she said. “Get a suet feeder. They love them.”

I got a suet feeder and a package of suet cakes and hung the feeder in a tree. My mother was right — the downy woodpeckers love suet.

Since then, I’ve added more feeders and filled them with all types of seed. There’s black oil sunflower seed for everyone, nyjer seed for finches, safflower seed for titmice and cardinals, and suet for the many different woodpeckers who visit my yard

Five years ago, a door opened thanks to a humminbird feeder, gifted to me during the the worst time in my life. Now I’m in a different place with my grief. I watch the birds, sometimes for hours, and I know their names. I’ve always been determined to know them all.

Along with Ruby-throated Hummingbirds and Downy Woodpeckers, I regularly see Northern Cardinals, Tufted Titmice, Black-capped Chickadees, White-breasted Nuthatches, Blue Jays, Mourning Doves and (to my undending delight) a Baltimore Oriole who loves to sip from the bright pink flowers in my blossoming nectarine tree.

There is a dead pine tree, sheered in half, at the top of a small hill across from my house. Raptors like to perch there. A tree like this is called a snag. From my office window, I regularly see Red-tailed Hawks, Bald Eagles, and Black Vultures perched on the snag. Once, I saw a Merlin, way up high, just a tiny smudge of a bird.

I don’t sit outside and watch the birds as much as I did the first two years. At some point, I had to get back to the business of living my life, working, focusing on trying to move forward. But I can see them from my office as I spend my days writing. I pause often to watch them and think of Ana. Sometimes I ask her for a sign, hoping her spirit can hear me. “Show me the hummingbirds today, Ana” I say. “Will you make them come?”

There is something about birds that transcends the mortal world. They are just animals. I know that. I see them at the feeders eating, fighting and preening. But I also see them soaring above me, angling through the yard with otherworldly grace.

During that first terrible spring when Ana died, I hated the sun for rising without her. I hated the buds on the trees. I wept as the world turned green, flowers burst open, and strawberries ripened in our little garden. But then the birds came and made my heavy grief lighter.

The birds have no understanding of time or sorrow. They struggle fiercely to survive. There’s something astonishing about their determination, something incredibly humbling.

The birds taught me how to fight for my survival at a time when I wanted to literally lay down and die. They helped me make space for my grief. They gave me a reason to slow down and look up. And now, at the start of yet another spring, I’m grateful to watch the finches and blackbirds and cardinals as I wait for the hummingbirds to return.

A version of this story originally appeared in Modern Loss.