We lost a rat yesterday, our old man Calle. He was just a week shy of thirty months old, quite elderly for a rat, and he seems to have died in his sleep. Friday night we actually gave them all special treats for Leather's "birthday;" it is easy to say, you know, when I'm old and feeble, if I can go to a party with my family then die quietly in my sleep the next day, that wouldn't be a bad way to go.
But I can't say that; I'm too messed up and maudlin. The usual post-death senseless ramblings are in the extended entry so that nobody has to see them if they don't want to.
If you are in a frame of mind to look for signs of death, there are plenty along a country road. Dried brown leaves, fallen trees, the bloodied carcass of a deer that didn’t make it to the other side. The gray and crooked headstones in the church yard. The fading spray paint and strip of caution tape left over from the accident investigation, and the white and upright cross of the roadside memorial.
As you might expect, considering my dysfunctional disposition on death, I’m mildly obsessed with roadside memorials, even the ones I pass every day. There are two on the way to work, on the same road. The newer of the two is from last summer, when a young man, speeding, lost control of his car, crossed the grass median and hit a van. I believe the driver was the only fatality, though there were serious injuries among the passengers in the van. The morning after, a Sunday, I passed by on my way to the bank. First I saw the spray paint. Then I saw a small cluster of people with candles on the grass next to the shoulder. Coming home from the bank, the people were gone but there was a wooden cross and flowers. Over the next few weeks the simple white cross was replaced with a larger stained wood cross that seems to be inscribed…it has the look of a careful basement shop project, and I’ve not stopped to read what it says. The flowers are changed seasonally, and in December there was a nativity scene. Someone puts a lot of effort in to keeping the memorial. Every day I pass it and notice, sometimes just for a moment, sometimes it occupies my mind all the way to the office. I have a million questions…who keeps it up? Does it help their grieving process, or is it holding back the healing? Do they live here and see it several times a day, or do they have to make a special trip? How do the people who love in the neighborhood feel? Do the accident victims still pass the site?
Further up the road, if you know where to look and look carefully, you’ll see what is left of flowers and stuffed animals and signs attached to a tree trunk with duct tape. A few years ago some high school boys were drag racing on this road one afternoon, and the tributes were left by friends of one of the drivers who died. I imagine the mourners there as teenagers who are now nearly through college, people who have moved on and wouldn’t think to clear away the weeds and vines that have almost obscured the site.
Back on the country road, I’m not looking for signs of life. The sky is a hazy shade of winter, to borrow a line from one of my favorite songs. But here and there I do see clusters of spring bulbs pushing up, not pale and tentative whisps of growth, but dark green, substantial leaves. In my present frame of mind they look like fingers clawing out from a grave, and I wonder if that’s not an apt analogy…last year’s daffodils have died, decayed, returned to the dirt and dust of the earth.
It isn’t apt if I think of death as nothing, the cessation of life, of change, of movement. The bulbs weren’t dead, through the winter they soaked up the minerals from the decayed foliage, and probably the decayed deer as well. The decay itself still moved, the breakdown of chemicals, the return of the elements. In this sense, reincarnation suddenly seems obvious to me, at least the reincarnation of carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen. I’m less secure in the idea that there is a soul to recycle, that somehow the fundamental individual is more than chemicals and won’t break down and scatter. And that’s what pains me, that I won’t ever meet again the childhood friend who died at 17 or my grandparents or my dog, and that all it would take for there to be no me tomorrow is for me to inadvertently pull out in front of the path of a drag racing teenager on the way to the bank this morning.
The perennials are a comfort up to a point. The daffodils return every year; they aren’t the same flowers I saw last spring but they came from the same source, they continue. I suppose it is the height of arrogance to think that I matter so much in the universe that I should continue beyond my allotted time, but I want my friend and my grandparents and my dog to be here…there…somewhere. Is that somewhere only in the minds of the living?
Ahhh, seasons change with the sceneryPosted by Nic at March 13, 2005 09:55 AM
Weaving time in a tapestry
Won’t you stop and remember me
At any convenient time