The Occasion | Dany Owens

I have a vivid mental image of the first time, or at least one of the first times that I saw a dead animal on the side of the road. I don't recall dwelling on the actual corpse very long, and upon intense thought, the type of animal that it was still eludes me. We had to be on a roadtrip of some kind, in the old minivan, because I don't remember the location. I can, however, remember the drying blood, the tufts of fur still moving in the wind, and my disgusted fascination with it. Small details like that now seem like they're the majority of the memory. The macabre sight made it difficult to take in the whole picture. I remember being amazed that it was really, truly, irrevocably dead.

All the rest of that fateful day, and in the days that followed, my mind kept coming back to that pitiful sight. The strangest thing to me was that I wasn't sad, or emotionally scarred as one might expect. I didn't have horrible nightmares or develop gruesome interests as a result. The only problem was that I felt guilty for not being sad or terrified at the idea of death in general. In my still childish mind, the concept was that death equaled sadness and tears. People cried in the movies when someone died. It was an awful, yucky thing that should be avoided at all costs, wasn't it? So why wasn't I grieving for this deceased animal? It's what anyone normally would have done, after all, even if it was momentary or slight.

It wasn't really that I was surprised by the sight of a dead animal, although it would have made sense for me, as a youngish pre-teen of maybe eleven, to be. My experience with death was very limited and was always very sanitary and vague. I wasn't yet jaded by graphic violence or the sheer volume of death around me. It was more the realization that one day, this very phenomenon would happen to me. I too would stop breathing, possibly bleed, and expire. To this day, that amazing revelation has never hit me with the force it did then. Seeing my old relatives and parents' friends in coffins, hearing of far off deaths in countries I only had heard about...nothing made a difference, until that moment. That little dead body changed my views about the end of my life, for the rest of my life.

It seems hyperbole to say that the broken body of anonymous roadkill would have brought so much of a mental shift in my attitudes and perceptions, but I can think of nothing else I can point a finger at. I've realized, hopefully to my benefit, that life is temporary, and does end. However, this shift in paradigms isn't the awful menace that most imagine it to be. We only fear the unknown. And though I realize that an experience with a dead creature on the side of a freeway isn't an experience with the great beyond, it afforded me some knowledge and peace regarding this stage of life.

Only recently have I realized that while unusual, my lack of fear, sadness or anxiety over death wasn't and isn't weird. Since this moment in my life, I've often had the feeling that death is often a comfort, if not a blessing. Lives aren't perfect, but it seems, to me at least, that death should be. Once the trauma's over, it's peaceful. While, yes, I'll admit that not all deaths and their respective circumstances fall under this umbrella of thought, logically, in my mind at least, death isn't called "the big sleep" for nothing. Subconsciously my brain was reassuring me of a concept that my mind wouldn't realize for a few more years.