Years ago, the great medical essayist Lewis Thomas wrote a poignant treatise on dead birds. He noted that we rarely see dead birds, certainly not in the numbers one would expect. The summer skies fill with live birds, pigeons choke our cities like rats with wings, gulls hover like been around ships and beaches—yet their dead vanish. Aware of their impending demise, dying birds instinctively hide themselves away, perhaps to avoid contaminating the world of the living with their carrion. Schizophrenics do likewise. Like dead birds, their obscurity belies their swelled ranks. They seek heaven on
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