Oh Deer

 

Not seen in this photo, but very present, off to the right 
is the blue tarp covering the deceased deer awaiting 
its reunification with nature. 

One beautiful evening last week, I finished the dinner dishes and decided it was too lovely to be indoors.  Grabbing a cardigan and my tea, I headed for the back garden.  An unusual warm front meant temperatures 10 degrees above normal.  In response, springtime vegetation celebrated by stretching, blooming and putting on a show I had waited all winter to see.  The scent of apple blossom danced in the air, I couldn’t inhale it like I wanted too, but it played around the fringes on the night breeze, adding to the general awesomeness of the moment.

Admiring the blue bells, I turned and caught another scent before I saw the upsetting scene.  A deer was lying dead on the ground, having been hit by a car; it made it as far as my yard before dying.  I groaned, struck by the juxtaposition between the night and the sight before me.  Grabbing a tarp I covered the body, anchored it with rocks and resumed my now subdued reverie.  I continued, appreciating the flowers and new leaves while simultaneously wishing death didn’t exist.  The presence of a dead animal under a blue tarp wasn’t helping my mood, so I walked to the front yard to admire the non-deadness of the scene.  “I will deal with this poor animal in the morning,” was my last thought on the matter before getting ready for bed. 

The next day my bed was displaying a gravitational pull it reserves for Monday mornings.  I contemplated going back to sleep when I remembered the tarp in the back yard; more specifically what was under the tarp.   I had no idea what I was supposed to do with a dead deer but hoped someone in conservation could tell me. 

I reached a person in Animal Conservation about 20 minutes later.

“Good morning, this is Jim.”

“Hi Jim, I’m wondering if you could help me.  I have a deer in my backyard that was struck and killed last night, could you let me know how I am supposed to dispose of it.  It is clearly too big for the garbage service.”

“Well Karen, I have good news and bad news.  The bad news is that if it dies on your property you are responsible for disposing of the body.”

“Oh darn it.  What is the good news?”

“Well, the good news is the deer on the island are much smaller than the ones on the mainland.  So you have less to lift.”

“Jim, regardless of that fact, I still have a bunch of deer to get rid of here. What should I be doing?”

“Well you have a few things you can do.  First option is the bury it.” 

I look at the boot cast on my foot. “Sound advice Jim, supposing that wasn’t the easiest option, what else have you got?”

“Okay then the next thing to do it to throw it in the back of your truck…”

I sighed heavily…

“ …and whaddo you drive?”

“A Firefly.”

“…throw it in a friend’s truck and drive it to the outskirts of town and reunite it with nature.”

“Jim, this deer is really and truly dead, it isn’t being reunited with nature or anything else at the moment.”

“Ha, ha, ha, yes I get that, what I mean is, you drag it a good ways off the road and it will return to nature.  And there is one more piece of good news.”

“Okay, shoot.”

“You don’t need to dismember it or cut it up at all.”

“Jim, I am beginning to think that your version of good news is very different than mine.”

He laughed for real this time, “you can just let nature do its thing!”

“Okay Jim, so far this is really appalling. I don't think you have a lot of friends.  And if someone sees me and thinks I’m a murderer?”

“I am going to give you a file number and if a good upstanding citizen tries to get you arrested you tell them Jim knows what you are doing.”

“Delightful.  So to summarize, I am to take the corpse of this deer, throw it on the top of my car, drive through the town to the outskirts, drag its body into the bush and if someone tries to arrest me I can give them your number.”

“Yes, mam.”

So you might understand Beloved Friend, why I felt that my Monday morning was off to a rocky start.  I shared my research with my better half, and he immediately got his man-i-tude going and rescued me.  He wrapped the deer in tarps and threw that critter in the back of the car and accompanied me on the next part of the adventure of reuniting the dead dear/deer with nature.

I would like to tell you that the whole thing went off without a hitch, but in a new and surprising marriage-first my husband and I ended up squabbling over where we were going to dump the body.  Friend, believe me when I tell you the discussion was like being caught in a very bad movie.  Perhaps you will understand why I was praying strange prayers as we pretended to look at our phones as two joggers ran past as we parked on a semi deserted road.  When they were out of sight, my man dragged the dead animal off the roadside, only to disappear neck deep into Oregon Grape.  I wasn’t sure if he was going to make it out again.  I was worried the joggers were not only healthy but were upstanding enough to find us suspicious.  What if they had enough oxygen coursing through their systems to make a phone call?  What if they were ultra-marathon folk who were capable of chasing my firefly home?

Suffice it to say I was in a pretty bad mood when I returned from my noble, yet illegal feeling act of environmental reunification.  Frankly, because the experience was very corporeal (and the slightest bit traumatizing) all I could think about was that death in movies was far easier to deal with.  Corpses are heavy, and murder on tv is way more stylish than lugging something dead into the middle of the bush.  Deciding my thinking was getting kind of dark, I focused on thanking Jesus that I wasn’t a murderer.  And because all that thinking of death had landed me on the subject of loss, I decided let myself consider some of the losses I was grieving on the quiet. 

Specifically, I was thinking about a relationship that was as dead as the deer I had left to decompose.  Stuck by a friend without warning, and the blow was fatal, it killed a relationship that had taken years to build.  My once-friend was like the driver who kept on going, leaving me to deal with the fall out.  As I sat in my car, windows open to lessen the stench of death, I was profoundly thankful that Jesus cared about me.  The losses of the past few years had been great, the strains of the pandemic so difficult, I cried.  I wished I had a friend to call, and when I realized there wasn’t anyone, I cried some more.   

Now, lest you be tempted to think I’m pathetic and don’t know how to have a good time, I have to tell you that were you in my “little-blue-faintly-smelling-like-death-mobile” in order to drop a rather large dead animal in the woods to decompose, at moment you would have seen me smile.  In fact, I might have suggested we go find and overpriced chocolate in one of our fancy chocolate shops to celebrate the crap morning we were having.  Because in the mess and muddle of it all, I knew that God really did care.  It was one of the first real victories I had during that grief soaked string of years; years that I wondered if God cared, why he seemed to have withdrawn and if He could grow a faith as frail as mine. 

He does.

He didn’t.

He did.

Sometimes, I am amazed how sticky the prosperity gospel can be.  Death and loss are part of the human condition and it takes a mature heart to accept these realities.  My love of miracles and easy answers, my desire to be saved from the battle leads me people to think my prayers are being ignored when the preferred answer does not come.  Yet sometimes, the victory is in coming through loss knowing his goodness.  This heart change cannot be faked; it is won in the battle to trust God when things are far from perfect. 

It is won by his grace.

So friend, if by chance you are trying to move on from a loss that has left you broken, from the death of something or someone you held dear, or trying to recover from the unexpected and unwanted: let me remind you that you are still on the road of faith.  You are not less because the miracle you wanted did not come.  You belong to God, you are not forgotten and that road will get you home.  The season you are in will turn in time and eventually we will find our way home.

Praying for you this week,

Be safe and drive carefully.

xoxKaren