Two Dead Deer

I enjoy writing about death, thinking about death and observing how it affects people. I guess that makes me weird (morbid? #dark?). It's the most natural thing in the world. Yet people still have the worst time coming to terms with it.

I think this is where the terms "naturally" and "easily" diverge. 

In the past week, I've seen two dead deer during my commute to/from work, which may explain my thinking about how things die, and all beauty ends, and oh-my-GOD-I'd-be-terrified-if-I-was-the-reason-for-a-deer's-death mentality.

The first one was a mess. There was a traffic jam on our way home from the train station, rear red lights ablaze. They weren't as red as the animal blood (whooooah, deep) that I saw smeared all over the pavement, dragged a few feet by a sedan. I gasped, my dad shrugged, and we went to go buy almond cookies. 

The second one was this past Monday. Another traffic jam, except it was daytime. I thought the car in question, which had a crater in its metal side, had hit a telephone pole or a tree. No. A buck, which are always so much larger than I imagine, was bent and collapsed in the left lane. No blood this time, but it had a spectacularly broken jaw. All I saw were the antlers. I'm sure I made a blasé comment. 

To avoid being overly-poetic about dead woodland animals, which I can really go on about forever, I'll tell you that my family has been attending a lot of funerals lately. As someone who is so strangely fascinated by death, it must be strange to know that I find funerals a bit nauseating. I don't think I can wrap my head around the idea of "paying respects" to a dead person's family. I always have the impulse to just leave them alone. Why would they want to see half-strangers and too many relatives when they just want to look at the floor?

Last Monday (the last of three), we crowded into a local funeral home for a neighbour.

I read about funerals, the bereaved and cultural funerary practices a lot. Still, there's no way that understand the half-firm handshake grip of a widowed mother. Especially if she's already lost one of two sons. Do they have a term for mothers with dead children? They should.

I grew up in a house where nothing, except high school grades and awful boyfriends, was taken all that seriously. I suspect that, when my parents die, my sisters and I will put in a respectable amount of effort, but we'll remain jovial. That's how they were when their parents did that thing that parents do. I don't think they'd want us to collapse into ourselves.

We had a family friend succumb to (read: die of) cancer recently. I spent a lot of time talking with my mother about it, especially about the children she left. My mom did something resembling a shrug: "All Mommies die."

I don't think I reacted in a bad way. It was something that only your mother could say, really. I probably just agreed with her, especially since her own mother died three years ago.

So when she dies, as all parents do, I know she's left me with the most important thing - the unwavering ability to move on.

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