WHEN Merlinda Bobis’ father was dying in the Philippines, he was comforted by two birds who would visit and sing outside his window. 

Months later, the same orioles came to sing at his grave to comfort her mother, she says. 

From then on, birds seemed to offer solace to Merlinda through an intense period of grief, global upheaval and health challenges. 

“I felt them showing up for me,” says the award-winning Filipina-Australian author, who received an ArtsACT grant in 2018, plus support from De La Salle University in Manila, to research and develop her latest book of short stories, “The Kindness of Birds”. 

“I had two rosellas fly up to my balcony. A white dove visited me while I was healing from breast cancer. It was as if the birds were telling me, you have your sorrows but we are here, we are giving you comfort. It’s alright.”

The book, which Merlinda describes as fiction informed by her experiences, is a collection of 14 stories that reflect how kindness can inspire resilience during loss and grief. 

While writing the stories, Merlinda lost both her parents, her aunt and brother-in-law, and she says that her deep grief couldn’t help but permeate what she wrote. 

As well, the book was written through bushfires, hail and covid, and Merlinda’s own cancer diagnosis. 

“In this book, the wrench is from somewhere very deep. I feel privileged and humbled to be sharing these stories. I’m just a conduit. I believe this is the universe working with me,” she says. 

“For me it started with the gift of the orioles. I began looking at birds and researching, and found so many stories. If you keep yourself open, the thoughts and stories fly in.”

She says writing “The Kindness of Birds” became a lifeline throughout her treatment. 

“This book was my reason to get up and keep going,” she says.

“If I was writing, I was fine – the book kept me alive because my headspace was in the stories of others and in my own as the protagonist. 

“I felt the stories were being gifted and I had a job to do.”

A connection to birds and the natural world features in all the linked stories, as does the Filipino concept of kapwa, “a shared identity with another, a kinship, that psychic and physical “space” we share with others”, Merlinda says. 

“And it should be extended to nature, too. 

“It’s not just a hand we offer another person but also to the birds, the land, the water. We have to think of them as co-survivors and co-spirits,” she says.

“Even one small species has an impact on everything. And so, one of the messages in the book is, if we don’t take care of others it will impact us.”

Merlinda says “The Kindness of Birds”, her 12th book, is her way of giving back – in part for the kindness she experienced being looked after in hospital, which she writes about in the story “Angels”, and the gift of being able to take care of her parents in their last moments. 

“With covid, so many people now cannot even say goodbye, and there is so much grief. We are all kindred in mortality,” she says.

“I really hope it will be a kinder world after this.

“There are a lot of calamities in this book but through writing it, I found the resilience of people and nature.

“We grow resilient if there is a kind hand that holds our own amid the devastation.”

“The Kindness of Birds”, available at Dymocks Civic and can be ordered from any bookstores, online and directly from Spinifex Press.