Squirrel Death
Church of the Future
I was reading in the backyard chair, sunshine on my shoulders and a little stream of melancholy strings playing. The green grass growing all around and around, and here comes a squirrel.
The slowest, most contemplative squirrel I’ve ever seen. He was lustrous red brown gray and he crouched at first, hesitant to move again. Soon down prostrate. A created creature, terminal like the rest of us. Under the fire pit on his belly, the squirrel regarded me with one steady and full black eye. I held the gaze. I spoke, “My love, are you in pain? What message do you have for me?”
And as the afternoon hours slipped by, the sun descending across the big knowing sky, I ran my eyes over pages of Thomas Wolfe describing and describing and returned the gaze at intervals communal, quiet and with the small tinkling of strings. “Dying, his eyes burn beautifully, and the old hunger shines more fiercely in them.”
A hospital cracked open like an egg and I felt the flattened air of death, the exhalations of worries and deeds that hadn’t mattered, or had they? I sat with the squirrel until dusk when my dinner discussing legs arose and scampered off to the store to return with meat for the charcoal pleasing aroma to the Lord who brought us together on a stretching Saturday unencumbered. The holy bookmark, the evening hymns, a citronella thurible.
The squirrel stayed there – the tail hair auburn blowing in a soft wind, sheltered under the black fire pit and the black eye upon me, upon Rodger, upon Sheridan, upon Erik as we peered under and blessed the baby emerging to an aging slant of light, returning to the creation and ether. Anointed angels circled the altar through sunset and - in the morning, the black eye was closed and the small soul had scattered with the auburn soft hair still waving in the earth winds of change.
After coffee, eggs, toast, I dug a hole in the overgrown weed patch with Grandpa Rank’s old shovel and gulped the rigor mortis load onto its firm rusted blade across the lawn in solemn procession. I laid my friend down there and Erik covered the corpse, undertaking and speaking, “There, buddy. You can rest there.”
Thank you for coming to us, to hold you gazing in departure. I unroll group prayers upon the unmarked patch I could not even find the next day. Good night, sweet prince. Good morning, deliverance.
I have sat with death before and somehow this always feels like the easy inevitable emotions we’re suited for. Every backyard is some kind of temple.