Things we miss.

 I just drove past the cemetery as I was trying to come up with things to write in this blog.The blog would relay the story behind a little dead fox on the side of the road. He lay curled in a ball for more than a week, who knows how long.

I drove past this beautiful animal many times. His hair was red, as we picture most foxes. His tail was curled around him before the road, I could see him like a snake eating its tail, wound tight as he was. I noticed him for a while and at first it was with surprise, you know, because we don't normally see foxes on the side of the road. But in time I realized the fox was laying in his dying position. I hadn't noticed his pain there before. His face was beneath his tail. Was he ashamed of death? Did he long for comfort dying alone? Like a little baby tucked under his mother's ribs. 

I thought of him looking for his own scent as from another. I thought of how I could have known, and will now know, that some creatures could have love wherever they are if we are aware of them and their needs. And I thought that for one, two, three times more, passing him there in the road. A lovely red fox.

Cemeteries are funny places. I visited the cemetery last week to see the graves of my family members. I don't think of how people died when I am there. It is the rare moment that we are concerned about things like that. How often, after someone dies, do we think on their death unless it was terrible? This is a powerful thing on a Sunday, a day when we seriously consider, for a couple moments, the death of God.

But I sometimes do think about that. And one thing I have been able to consider, what hasn't escaped me, is that once it's over it's over. Jesus commented, "It is finished", and that's true. It was finished. I think of that when I miss people who I loved that are gone. I think of how they finished this terrible thing we all dread so much. We dread dying. We don't ever think it will end, we don't ever think of what will end us, not really, we just dread it. Something we all must do. It is no small thing we say, and we say it so easily, "No one is getting out of here alive".