To a Dead Mouse

I Friend, whatever brought your life to end had no appetite for mouse flesh, nudged your small gray body on its side with a thorough sniff and left your corpse exposed on the asphalt path, then, for reasons of its own, wandered off for something better suited to its tastes, and more substantial to its hunger. Flies hover over you like tiny iridescent vultures and ants engage in a reconnaissance over the big gray hill that rose up during the night from the asphalt when yesterday it had been a flat surface. Your demise, friend, is only a beginning. Nature is very resourceful and expedient. In a day or two, magnots will rise within you and inflate your small frame to twice its size, scour you until you’re reduce to a dried out flat gray rug with tail, unless another’s hunger first makes you its meal. As mice go, your reputation did not exceed that brotherhood of dreaded outcasts humans can barely mention and not shudder – rats, snakes, bats, and spiders. II Decency compels me to inform you that you will be given no formal burial. That honor – or vanity, depending on your viewpoint – humans reserve solely for themselves; no eulogy, no flowers, not even a headstone to verify you lived and died – all of which even the vilest of our kind receive, as though a residue of worthiness remained in them. You will pardon our vanity and irrationality. Death does not change any life, only seals and ends it. It is the one event humans cannot explain satisfactorily. And yet death is as common as weather, no day is without the dark cloud of its knowledge or presence. It exceeds, possibly, all human fears, real or imaginery, and it plays cruel sport with the imagination, all of which, little mouse, you have been spared. III Few spectacles can match its elaborate rituals and ceremonies, not to mention its afterlife beliefs and scenarios, centuries old, stale, and reeking with the smell of desperation and hopelessness, or its lofty, eloquent but empty pronouncements and unreasoned speculations, all devised to camouflage, deny, and ultimately transform death’s otherwise simple and natural reality, which is nothing more than the absence of life. No, little friend, none of this will attend or insult your demise. Let it suffice that you are no more, as we also one day will be. Earth has decreed it so. IV Difficult as it is to say, neither I nor anyone can offer you hope beyond the sleep that now enfolds you like a hawk’s talons its prey. You have been ousted from the house of life, the doors are locked, the windows bordered-up. You are barred forever from reentering. No redemptive price has been paid for you, though you are not unworthy, and why not I am at a loss to explain. No creed, no act of faith was demanded of you. And yet, far more than humans, you were faithful to the laws imposed on you, though no reward or better life was held out to you. You lived the only life you knew and you lived it well, without questioning, without complaint, without bitterness. I tell you, friend, there is no greater achievement. V The dead exist only in the minds of the living. They, not the dead, need to be consoled. But who of your kind will console you? As parting words, I offer you only this assurance: All living things share the same earth, the same eventuality, all are destined to return to it. It is, I imagine, easier for you to accept this, for you had no pretentions beyond this life, this planet, and so your going down was only a small step from no imagined height. VI And now, you will pardon me if I lift you by your tail and put you to rest in a setting more suited to what you were once accustomed to, one I believe you would approve – beneath a quilt of brilliant fallen leaves. Nothing special or symbolic, just a natural covering. As for me, and the rest of my kind who walk this earth, it is the dark light of life they have become accustomed to, not the natural darkness you, little mouse, have entered. Rest, then, in that uneventful darkness. Rest, my little friend.