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| Image credit: Photo by two stout monks on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons |
My daughter, Janie, found the body. Our pet* had been missing for a while, so at first she shouted to me excitedly. She found him! But when I ran to her, it was clear that he was already gone. She looked from his still body up at me and asked, tentatively, "Is he very hurt, Mama?" There was a pause, where I knew that this was the moment I was supposed to do that magical mama thing. I was supposed to kiss the boo boo, mend the tear, put the pieces back together, paste the petals back in place. I was supposed to fix it. I was supposed to make it better. But I had to admit, with tears in my eyes, that he was more than hurt, he was dead. And I couldn't fix that.
Janie's grief was overwhelming and instantaneous. She sobbed until she couldn't breathe and cried until her red eyes were swollen nearly shut. I had to carry her in to the living room and place her on the sofa where she clung to me and wept. Her brother Austen hovered nearby. "I'm sad," he said, in a simple statement of facts, "but I'm not crying." After a while, Janie wanted to sit with the body, so I wrapped it in a towel and we sat together, crying, as we watched its stillness.
I told the children we would need to bury it; the life was gone and the body had to return to the earth now. While Austen accepted and even seconded this idea, Janie was, at first, vehemently against putting the body in the ground. But as she watched it, not moving, she asked what would happen to the body. I told her it would slowly decay and transform, like the dead bird we saw wasting away earlier this spring, shrinking and dissolving to just feathers and bones. If we put it into the earth, it would transform into rich soil and nourish plants. She liked the idea of new life in a plant, so she and I prepared a plant and something to contain the body. She drew pictures of herself, crying, to lay in the grave and a note with hearts and our pet's name to say goodbye. Austen said he would like to do something too. So, he took a Sharpie marker and on the towel I had wrapped the body in he wrote, in block letters, the label: "DEAD ANIMAL." Mark dug the grave and we each threw a handful of dirt on the body before placing the new plant on top.
Over the intervening weeks, each child has continued to process the loss. Janie focused first on death: pointing out dead grass, dead leaves, dead bugs wherever she went and telling me they were dead like her pet. However, I've noticed a gradual shift to thoughts of rebirth. At first, she expressed hopes and wishes for the body and spirit of her lost animal, but more recently she has spent a lot of time tending the plant that sits over the grave, drawing pictures of it, talking about it. Two weeks after the burial, she talks very little about the pet itself, although the loss is still clearly on her mind.
Austen, on the other hand, talks about the lost pet each day. He continues to express, always very matter-of-factly, that he feels sadness and misses the lost animal, even though he continues to appear (to the world at large) not to show it. He talks about how things might be if his pet were still alive: what it might be doing and feeling and thinking at any given moment. And he seems very concerned (in a way that many would find totally un-autistic of him) about how the animal parents and siblings of our pet might react to its loss. He wonders if its mother would be angry or sad to know that it was dead, and he hopes she doesn't find out, so that she won't know the pain. He wonders if its siblings would miss it and feel sad that it's gone.
As for me, I cried writing this post, so I know I'm still grieving the loss — and feeling my children's grief as well as my own.
* It feels awkward, but necessary, to me (at least right now) to talk about "our pet" without naming it or letting you all know whether it was a goldfish or a dog or a turtle or a pony or a hamster or a cat or a bird. (Although it's probably a safe bet that it's not a goldfish or a pony.) I still struggle with issues of anonymity, and my general guideline is not to share in detail here anything I've shared with people in my real life and likewise not to share in detail with those in my real life what I share here. I know I've blogged about cats and fish in the past, but a few new creatures have found their way into our house since then, and since the institution of my rule about keeping my blogging and real life more strictly separated. So the nature of our pet, and the manner of its death, have remained somewhat vague. At some point, the two halves of my life may come into greater alignment, but for now, this is what I feel comfortable with. Unfortunately, this can mean that I miss the opportunity to paint a fuller picture.
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