Maybe there is Peace in that

There is a deer buried in my garden.

He was young, with velvet twigs of antlers, and smaller than his mother who he walked near a week ago. I had named him. A week ago I named him. And I wrote a piece that I hadn’t published yet on him — on his group of four. Now, I’m not sure if I will ever publish it. That was the piece I had wanted to publish. This is the one that is reality. And it is unfair for me to call him by a name that was never really his.

On Saturday, with an excavator, I dug a large hole perpendicular to budding sunflowers and okra and gregarious beans, then I went inside while my boyfriend went across our land and scooped the deer’s body, placed him in the hole, and covered it with dirt and twigs and roots.

I want to tell you that this deer did not suffer.

I want to tell you his life was well-lived, and that he was old and tired. That he had seen many things in his years, escaped hunters and coyotes alike. That it was simply his time. Old age. Like they say: dying of old age.

But these things are not true.

And they are not things that I could change even if I wanted to, not with my knowledge or means.

That deer did not jump the fence when he should have, and so by Saturday morning, he was buried in my garden.

By evening, a proper plot had been placed above him. Six perennials, all purple-flowered save one bright yellow. I could not find Jacob’s Ladder, but the perennials will bring pollinators to visit him. And maybe there is some peace in that.

Let me be clear that I am not the first person to witness a dead deer. Not the first to see another animal take another animal’s life. Some people take trophy pictures dressed in odd greens and tans and hold up heads of dead deer. And while I’ve eaten venison I have never understood that triumphant response: that a death of another should be the delight of someone else.

I think about the dinosaurs. In Chicago, in the hot month of July in 2019, we went to the Field Museum. Four hours was not enough, but we were under-caffeinated and warm and our feet and backs were tired. Those dinosaurs, even with their large teeth and wings and strong legs, tails that could whip one another back or forth, necks that put a giraffe’s neck to shame, they could not survive.

The fossils of dinosaurs have long fascinated me, which gives me pause. While I don’t delight in the death of these animals, I delight in the discovery of their fossils: a relic to their lives, a tiny physical insight into what the world was like millennia ago.

These petrified bones hold in them a world of imagination and science, and they trigger memories of other small-bodied things I have buried. Moles. Gophers. Hamsters. Birds. Cats. And maybe one day these small-bodied animals will fossilize in the dry soil and be a discovery for a scientist many years from now.

But I had never buried a deer. Never something so large. I could tell you the scene, replay it for you from the memories of my eyes — the eyes that saw something so regal become so ravaged, so weak. However, if I did, neither one of us would be better for it.

This morning a bumblebee came and landed on a Stoke’s Aster in the dirt above the deer. The plant is a vibrant purple flower and parallels the feeling I have towards bumblebees: fuzzy and friendly-looking. For a moment, the bee rested a moment. Not yet, but one day, one moment in time not too far from now, a plant root will grow deep into the soil and find the body of an animal I could not save, the one that did not become a fossil. And the plant will be stronger.

Maybe there’s some peace in that.