Dead Animals

I saw this raccoon on my run sometime early last week. He was still there this morning, just as when I first saw him. I don’t know why the vultures haven’t gotten to him yet. Maybe because it’s been pretty cold; the scent of death might be trapped in the ice on his fur. Or maybe because of the towel. I took the picture this morning. I’m sorry to throw it onto your screen. It’s a little gruesome but it’s also a kind of sweet, right?

I can imagine what might have happened. I’m guessing that at dusk, someone was driving along, the raccoon ran out in the road, and the driver hit him. The driver must have stopped her car to assess the situation. The raccoon probably made it off the road. Maybe he pulled his little injured body over and collapsed. I can imagine the driver not being sure what to do. She probably took that extra towel out of the trunk of her car and covered the near-dead raccoon. The best she could do.

What does one do when confronted with a dying animal? We all know what we should do—put it out of its misery. But killing a creature is really hard. We don’t know what sort of force we would need to exert or where on that foreign body we should exert that force in order to take that suffering, to take that life. We aren’t sure if the injury is maybe minor, if the raccoon is just stunned or acting dead, if it won’t get the hell out of there in a minute and go tell its little raccoon friends about the ridiculousness. And we don’t want to make things worse. What if the creature is done with us. What if it just wants us to go away. We have no way of getting into the mind of that other being; we can hardly get into the minds of our favorite humans.

I’ve only been sick with fevers a couple of times in my adult life. Though sickness is supposed to be painful, I remember the experiences with some affection. Covered in blankets with the TV on, I am comfortable. I can hear Michael playing with the kids, taking care of me by taking care of them. The house is peaceful and I have the rare opportunity to exist on the outside, looking in.

When I broke my hip during a run several years ago, I wanted to just stay on that sidewalk. Someone brought a pillow out from the Marimekko shop on the street where i went down. She lifted my head gently and set the pillow underneath. It was such a kind gesture and a really beautiful pillow. I didn’t want the ambulance woman to move me. I didn’t want her to treat my suffering in that moment. What did the raccoon want? Maybe a nice soft green towel.

Becoming a farmer, I always thought that my reaction to death would become less severe, that it would be tempered by the cycles of life on rural display. But it hasn’t. It has just come into sharper focus. I’m not sure what the lessons are from this focus; but, I bet you want to hear about those dead animals. In this book that I’ve been working on, that’s not published yet, I have many, many stories of dead animals. Clearly, a theme of sorts for me. I want to share a few of them with you over the next weeks. Three. No, four. A deer, a chicken, a fox, and a human. Looking at death, we can really know life.

Looking at that raccoon, I feel the kindness, the ache, and perhaps the bewilderment of the human who placed that soft green towel on his dying body. As an extension of that attention, I see the value in that raccoon. It's weird, going through this life that we know will end in death, our own deaths, the deaths of those who we love. We're all doing our best to bear witness to the scary reality of mortality. Sometimes we can help comfort toward wellness. Sometimes we can't. But through it, the vulnerability that we exude and the softness of our efforts are quite beautiful.