What to Bring with Us
On the way back from Roscoe, I saw a dead mole by the side of the road. Beside her, several young ones - so little that they seemed hardly able to see - were huddled together, pressing their small bodies against one another. Their mother lay only a few inches away. Another passerby stopped, and for a moment we stood there looking at them. As we came closer, the young moles stirred and disappeared underground, leaving their mother where she was. It was difficult to watch, but there was nothing unnatural about it. The dead remained, and the living had to go on.
They must have felt something. Not grief as we understand it, but more like the absence of the creature that had cared for them, the familiar warmth slowly turning cold, the sudden uncertainty of where food would come from. And then there were larger animals approaching (like us) and the immediate need to hide. Survival did not wait for them to understand what had happened. We cannot know what they felt; even the desire to give their feelings a name may be a very human impulse. But their world must have felt different from the one they had known only moments before.
In that sense, we are not so different. We grieve for family who leave before us, but we still eat, go to work, laugh again, and continue with our lives. Loss does not excuse us from living. The difference is that we do not leave the dead entirely where they fell. We bury them. We keep photographs and repeat their stories. We remember names, places, and ordinary afternoons. We move on to the next chapter without tearing the previous one from the book. We leave the body behind, but carry the memory with us.
Watching those moles made me think of the dog my partner brought into my life. She has known him far longer than I have, but now I, too, am accumulating memories of him: the small routines, the annoyances, the affection that comes quietly from sharing a home. He will probably live a shorter life than either of us, and one day we will have to let him go. My partner does not like to think about that. It is too certain a sadness. We dislike uncertainty, yet some of the futures that trouble us most are the ones we know will come. Maybe what frightens us is not uncertainty itself, but the knowledge that some currents cannot be turned.
For much of history, people have tried anyway. Kings afraid of death asked to be buried with their gold, their plates, their trophies of conquest, and sometimes even their servants and slaves. But what difference can it make, at the end, what we put into the ground beside us? Possessions cannot preserve the life in which they mattered. The better preparation is not deciding what we will be buried with, but deciding what we will have gathered within us by the time we have to leave. What matters is not what enters the grave with us, but what has entered our memory before we reach it.
Someday, if I am there to say goodbye to our dog, I will not simply leave him where he falls. I will bury him, mourn him, and remember the time we shared with him. Then I will leave that place too. I will go home, and eventually into whatever chapters come next. But leaving is not the same as abandoning. We bury the dead not so that we can take them with us, but so that we can bear to leave them behind. What we truly carry cannot be buried. We all have to go on. We just do not go on empty-handed.
