Burying the Dead

A Hope for Us All

I stood in my next-door neighbor’s driveway, cold sweat dripping down the inside of my tee-shirt sleeve. Dirt was smudged on my upper lip, the mineral smell clinging to the inside of my nostrils. My arm was shaking under the weight of the metal shovel with the broken yellow handle I carried.

The metal shovel that held a lifeless body I wasn’t sure what to do with.

He didn’t see me right away. He had earbuds in, re-siding the little guest house in the back of his property. I walked to the rhythm of a funeral dirge, trying not to bounce the bed of the shovel. Trying not to look.

My youngest is Snow White, we joke. She sings to the birds, and they come. She kept a wild mouse in her room in a shoebox for weeks- feeding it cheddar goldfish crackers, willing it to spin a dress like Cinderella. And she befriended an injured squirrel she affectionately called Steve.

Steve was missing a large chunk of his tail and ran with a limp. She noticed him immediately as soon as we moved in, bouncing gently between the tree roots in the yard. She saved all of her peanut sandwich crusts for Steve; lined them up on her window sill. He would perch there and watch both of my girls as they slept.

He must have been suffering long before we met him. When it was his time, I like to think he returned to the place he felt most loved. I came home from the grocery store and found him in our driveway. No tread marks. No blood. No sign of harm. Or of life.

And I just knew I had to bury him before she came home.

And I couldn’t bury him in our backyard.

I dug out the shovel wedged in the corner of the garage and picked him up as gently as I could. I walked him down my next-door neighbor’s driveway- whom I had never once had a conversation with in the three years we lived here with a dead squirrel in a shovel I needed desperately to bury in his backyard.

I startled him. Him, with the earbuds. Me, a strange woman with a dead squirrel in a shovel.

I explained the situation as quickly as I could. My daughter was attached to this squirrel. I have an overactive dog who likes to dig. If I bury Steve in my yard, the odds of his body’s traumatic reappearance are high. He had acres of woods behind his property line. Would he terribly mind if I gave Steve back to the earth behind the fence?

His kind eyes blinked in understanding. I had a daughter, too, he said. She loved animals.

He gently took the shovel from my shaking hands and walked to where I couldn’t see. He didn’t return for quite some time. He returned covered in earth and I knew he dug a grave deep enough to cover right in his own backyard.

The sting of tears shocked me at first. I was not particularly sad at Steve’s passing. But the gentleness with which a stranger took a lifeless body and helped bury the dead he didn’t know stayed with me long afterward.

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The world has lost its mind.

I am by nature a fearful sort, but I am deeply afraid for the future of my country. It seems people have forgotten how to human. They have forgotten we belong to each other.

But then I remember.

The time an older gentleman buried a squirrel with all the reverence of a military funeral.

At one time, we were a people unafraid to feed the hungry, house the lost, help bury each other’s dead.

I have to believe we will be again.