My daughter’s pet mouse died. Shall I give that little creature a posthumous pseudonym? Yes: Aster, like the wild asters that persist, slightly shriveled but still vivid along the margins of tree wells and fences even in December. Aster was not impressed by humans, I don’t think, but she was lovely, with violet-petal ears, and she allowed us to gently stroke, with cautious fingertip, her tremulous flank. The sensation of her stance upon my hand was barely tactile, as though I were cupping not a living body but an audible vibration, a delicate sound. But, as I said, we barely seemed to register in her consciousness except as a place to poop or pee, occasionally. Neither Hanauta nor I paid her much mind, alas. Days would go by without our having looked in on her and each time we did she was invariably huddled inside her pink translucent igloo. Days did go by, we don’t know how many, between the time of her death and Hanauta’s discovery of her body. Several days, surely, at the end of which came H’s wail of regret, and her tears. I lifted Aster’s still, small body and gently shook away the clinging clods of bedding. She weighed nothing and seemed neither stiff nor pliant, though her body had taken on the pent, smooth angle of her cage’s corner where she had lain to die. Dark patches shown through her fur, blackened circles that alarmed me, and beneath its scales her naked tail (pink and seemingly four-sided like the stem of mints) bore regular stains of purple. Hanauta retreated to her reading chair but I invited her to make a ritual farewell for this lonely creature. I made an incense offering (to all Buddhas and Bodhisattvas throughout space and time) and we chanted Loka Samasta Sukhino Bhavantu (may all beings everywhere be happy and free.) Then I placed Aster in a re-sealable plastic sandwich bag and set her atop a box of ‘home style mini waffles’ in the freezer. She is awaiting burial, or I am awaiting her burial in a Brooklyn planter box (Hanauta’s dad has a roof garden.) That was that, ritual enough.
The morning after Aster’s funerary rites I found on my classroom rug a brown mouse lying dead. He was plump and sleek having grown fat on the scattered aftermath of our messy lunches. He had been on his way some where, his limbs arrested in a graceful trotting posture. I do think he was male, on his belly I saw no nipples (he looked so full I thought at first I’d found a pregnant female.) I didn’t pick him up, I don’t know why I felt such caution in the stillness of the morning classroom. I called my boss who pinched him up in a paper towel announcing, “It’s still warm” before depositing him without sentiment or ceremony in a trash can.
Other deaths have occurred in the classroom. Many snails have died while in my care but snails are mysterious and have methods of absence that fall short of actually dying. First, they can simply hole up in their shells and refuse to flow out no matter the enticements of tender lettuces and water droplets and the loud entreaties of impassioned three year olds. Second, snails are able to disappear in a small amount of soil for months on end. When I say disappear I mean these snails elude detection no matter how many times I rake my fingers through the snail tank soil. They re-appear, prompted by I know not what change in the environment, visible, viable, ready to live again. Third, snails also aestivate, seal themselves up under a thin cover of dried mucus – a real necessity when I am in charge of their habitat and routinely fail to give them adequate spritzing and/or fresh flora. But snails do truly die, of course. Sometimes I have found them still in the throes of decay, their lovely subtle foot reduced to foul, green muck. Sometimes nothing at all remains of the soft tissue. Invariably I sniff at these emptied shell and find they smell of nothing, soil, and sweetness. If a child asks about whether a snail has perished I say: “Well, no (or well, yes) but everything that begins will end sometime. Everything that starts will finish.” As for rituals of farewell, I just lob dead snails and empty shells into the garden or trash can without comment.
What more can one say to three year olds about death? Margaret Wise Brown wrote The Dead Bird which is a lovely but impossible book. Impossible because the children pick up, caress, and (in Remy Charlip’s sweet illustration if not in the text) kiss the (dead) bird. To which I say: feather-borne parasites, federal laws against possessing any dead birds or parts of birds, avian flu. But The Dead Bird sometimes appears on lists of resources for ‘talking to young children about death.’ A book I really do like on this topic is Judith Viorst’s The Tenth Good Thing About Barney. A dead snail doesn’t necessarily merit this degree of study and reflection, not unless a child seems concerned or interested. I am thinking about death, though, as I anticipate the entry into my class of a child whose father died a year ago. My students have not quite gotten around to the perennially favorite game of playing dead. The chief feature of death in these games is its impermanence, its reversibility. To play you must lie still and wait for someone to approach and wake you; this game is only played by children who are confident that one or more friends will come to rouse them. Children in our class will play dead, though, and we will certainly talk about daddies and we may find ourselves in a conversation that spirals gently around (like the snail’s shell) from these broad topics to the particular fact of one Daddy’s death. I don’t know, yet, what we will say, the children and I, but not “everything that begins will end.” When it comes to the people we love that is, I think, too large and cool a truth for threes to bear.
