Cardinal

Contributing Writer

Gabriella Pinto

I’m not a religious person. For context, the only times I’ve recently been in a church were for family members’ baptisms or funerals.

I’ve never felt drawn to religion, except for the concept of heaven. That idea always calmed me down as a kid because I have always had a serious fear of death borne of saying goodbye to my elderly aunts.

My grandfather had calmed my fears by telling me he’d had near-death experiences that allowed him to reunite with his deceased family members. That worked, for a while.

Now that I’m older, I don’t know if I believe that heaven exists because my logical side shuts down the thought of it. I can’t cope with the idea that it will all be over one day.

That’s why I still try to have hope.

While I’m not religious, my hope allows me to feel the presence of my deceased loved ones when, oddly enough, I see a cardinal.

This is not a new idea. Whether it’s a person saying “Hi mom” when one flies by or the song “Cardinal” by Kacey Musgraves, there are so many instances where cardinals are seen as a symbol for loved ones who have passed away.

We have a figure of a cardinal that sits on the top shelf of the china cabinet in my family’s dining room. When my grandfather died and I started seeing a cardinal perched on the railing of our deck out back, I made the connection.

My grandfather died at the bottom of the steps of that deck in 2018. I was 13 when it happened. He was leaving to go to the Veterans Affairs hospital with my grandmother, but he didn’t make it. He fell into my grandmother's arms and said, “I’m sorry.”

Those were his last words.

He was there when I woke up that morning, but was gone by the time my mom picked me up from school. How was I supposed to believe that I’d never see him again?

I couldn’t. That’s why I have the cardinals.

Those birds probably aren’t him, but at least they remind me of him. While I have hundreds of pictures and videos of my grandfather in my phone, those are from the past. The cardinals provide me with something the pictures and videos can’t, a new interaction with my grandfather.

I had similar encounters with cardinals when my great aunt passed away in 2023. Her doctor told her that given her age, she didn’t need to have mammograms anymore, which allowed cancer to ravage her body.

For her final days, my great aunt had at-home hospice care. That year, on the first of April, my mother and I went to visit her early. I held my mother as she sobbed in my arms. My once-lively great aunt who spoiled me rotten and ended every phone call with “take it easy” was now unresponsive in a hospital bed.

She wasn’t hooked up to anything and didn’t respond to what we said to her, so she might have been gone already. When we got home, we sat on the couch in silence.

At one point, my mother got up to talk to my grandmother, my great aunt’s sister, in another room. This was when I began to hear a repetitive chirping noise coming from outside. I searched every window in the house to find the sound. Then I turned and looked at the back deck.

And there sat a cardinal, perched on the railing, chirping at me. I called for my mom without breaking eye contact with the bird, and once she saw it too, the cardinal finally flew away.

Five minutes later, we got the call that my great aunt had died.

Both my grandfather and great aunt died in the spring, when the cardinals would come out. Logic tells me to think one way about these birds, but hope and faith urge me to look deeper. This may be the only thing I choose to believe in.

Whether it’s my loved ones’ actual spirits, “messengers” from heaven, or just a plain old bird, I’m reminded of people who changed my life whenever I see a cardinal. I hope that it’s somehow all connected, and for now, that’s enough for me.

Gabriella Pinto will be joining Horseshoe Magazine as the Managing Editor for the Fall 2025