Dead Raccoon

[porphyry]

This morning I took Madeline down to the front yard so she could help me water the flowers we've planted this year (although "watering" to her seems to mean that she should fill up her watering can and pour all the water on a single flower, and I find myself admonishing her: "Water the flower, Madeline! Don't drown it.").

As we arrived at the bottom of the drive, I immediately noticed a terrible odor and knew there must be a dead animal nearby, and sure enough, within a few minutes I saw the body of a dead raccoon lying near a woodpile. It wasn't very old because it hadn't reached its full size yet. It didn't appear to have any obvious wounds, so I figured it had died from disease. It also was quickly becoming flyblown.

Later in the day, Malkhos walked the children back down there with instructions from me that he should take a shovel and toss it deeper into the woods. However, Malkhos decided to give it a proper burial which Andrew was anxious to do. The child even offered to help dig its little grave though later Malkhos informed me Andrew only dug about ten percent of it and he himself, despite his inclinations to the contrary, engaged in work of the noble proletariat, gravedigging.

Before its actual burial, Andrew kept calling out that it was alive and its eyes were moving. Then after the burial, he inquired whether it too would grow into a Spartan like the buried dragon's tooth. Malkhos informed him that more probably the raccoon would turn into worms which would be eaten by birds and those by foxes so that in time the raccoon would become a fox. Malkhos and Andrew each poured a libation for the spirit of the dead animal and Malkhos commended it to the care of Hades and Persephone. However, inasmuch as the soul had been joined to an animal body it was probably not destined to make the return to the One in this generation, so Malkhos did not speak to it the Orphic secrets nor the passwords given to the initiates of Eleussis. Perhaps next spring an Easter egg could be dedicated at the grave. Unfortunately, St. Francis was left out of all this religious ritual, much to my dismay. While Andrew and Malkhos were busy with all this, Madeline ran off to the garage to sit on the tractor to play instead.

So both children have seen death firsthand and don't seem unduly traumatized by it.

Comments

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

We went down to the racoon on the spur of the moment so I failed to bring the camera. A shame since I saw an insect I had never seen before, the colorfully named Necrophilia Americana, of which a half dozen were swarming over the body. It turns out they eat maggots and spend their time flying from corpse to corpse, carrying also their fellow travelers, maggot-eating mites. The beetles also lay their eggs inside living maggots, so their own maggot will eventually eat a live fly maggot from the inside out.

Here is a link to much more information and pictures of the creatures:

http://www.hiltonpond.org/ThisWeek040508.html


I should also add that while digging the grave I turned up a bone (not entirely clean so I did not keep it). It was similar to a chicken's leg bone but a bit longer. There were no others, so I have no idea how it could hve gotten there.

[jermynsavile.livejournal.com]

You seem to handle the whole parental experience with such good judgement and common sense. Your children will benefit so much from this.

My own first experience of death was the collapse of a shop-keeper near my grandparents' home. He lay surrounded by people with his legs sticking out from beyond the crowd. My grandfather rushed past me (we were going out to the shops together) to try to resuscitate him. It didn't work. I remember that my feelings of the enormity of it were tempered by pride for my grandfather as he seemed somehow to be the centre of attention, the only person amongst the adults who knew what to do. Strangely, I remember it as a happy experience.

It doesn't make other deaths easier to bear, largely because it is the loss that hurts not the death itself. But it demystified it as a process. It happened, people die. Not a bad fact to acknowledge.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

The concept of death is a difficult one to know how to present to children. I think the whole question of one's own mortality is one that is achieved around, say, my age (41). It's only through the loss of others that we come to understand death and grief--and, as you say, it's not the death itself that hurts so much as it is the suffering of those left to mourn.

My first go round reading Shakespeare is quite memorable to me for a number of reasons, one which is, of course, death is a recurrent theme in the body of his work. Once I was reading Antony and Cleopatra at some job I was working at and someone asked, "What's it about?" and trying to answer that question to a non-reader in general was difficult. I tried to summarize it this way: "I think it's about two things. First, it's impossible to love someone who is inherently self-destructive. All the love in the world, given with all the best intentions, can't fix a person who seems bent on destroying himself. Two, it's not so much about death as it is about grief. I say this because once Antony is dead, Shakespeare devotes a large portion of the remainder of the play to Cleopatra's grief. He doesn't hurry to her suicide. He lets us watch her suffer first, showing that true suffering from death comes not from the one who died, but to the one left behind." An initial reaction, certainly; and immature, but fundamentally correct. I don't think my children have yet learned that lesson... but like us all, they will.