Stardust
According to RD Laing: 'Life is a sexually transmitted disease, and the mortality rate is 100%.' Mankind has struggled to deal with this unavoidable inconvenience since our time on earth began.
My own initiation into this overall condition of life involved a mouse. Early one summer morning, my equally small friend and I found a poorly mouse under the swings in the park. Fortuitously, Brenda had recently had a birthday, upon which she had acquired a full nursing kit, which she raced home to collect, whilst I patted and muttered mousie solace. On her return, we kitted up and delivered intensive field hospitalisation for the rest of the morning, but to no avail. Just how much our assiduous ministrations contributed to its demise is hard to appraise, but by lunchtime it was a cool and stiffening mouse. At this point, we had to abandon the mission to go our separate ways for lunch.
I recall that my mum had produced egg and chips – my favourite – but I pushed it around, unable to finish. I was too keen to return to the small unfinished furry project that we had left covered in leaves. Before leaving, I nipped upstairs for my small children's bible in the hope that my mate Jesus might be persuaded to intervene, having recently seen a picture of him at Sunday School chatting with a squirrel. Brenda was already at the scene – a tousled heap of snotty despair, clutching the tear-stained rigid rodent whom we had earlier named Mary. I proceeded to wave the bible around a lot, as we dropped to our knees to pray vigorously for a Lazarene miracle.
Once it was clear that there was to be no redemption, we moved hastily on to the distracting affairs of the funeral, which was to happily consume the rest of the afternoon. I popped home for a large matchbox and an old black scarf, while Brenda collected copious floral tributes from the park shrubberies. With Mary finally tucked up in pink petals in the box, we proceeded to march solemnly through the park to my house, which was conveniently close to the gates. Having recently heard someone's funeral on the wireless, we'd picked up on the basic riff of the funeral march, and managed to drag out our deugh-deugh-da-deugh dirge for a good 200 yards, proudly wearing our black armbands.
My mother was relatively unphased as the solemn cortege passed through the hall and kitchen (where she was busy making jam) and into the back garden. The ensuing silence alerted her maternal instinct for mischief – in this case the imminence of a flurry of inappropriate digging - and she generously proffered a sunlit patch under the rosebush by the garage. Some time later, the deed was done, all known hymns were hummed, and a mangled mound of bright flowers and a cross made of lolly sticks marked Mary's final resting place.
The next day it rained and we played doll surgery at Brenda's.
On the Third Day, Brenda had to go somewhere with her mum and I was left to play alone. I looked down from my bedroom window at Mary's grave and remembering snatches of stuff from Sunday school, I decided to attempt to negotiate further up the chain with the Holy Ghost. Having never seen a picture of him, I was unsure who exactly I’d be dealing with, but this was an emergency. Down by the garage door, I launched into a brief burst of ghostish mumbo jumbo before grabbing the trowel, scattering the limp flora, and unearthing the box. I slid it open, praying fervently as I stroked Mary's silky head. As I lifted her, she stirred, appearing to breathe. So intoxicated was I by this miracle that I ran towards the kitchen, calling urgently upon my mother to bear witness. But as she appeared at the door, I tripped up the garden step and Mary flew from my hand. As she hit the path, she burst open, and the cause of her apparent return to life was made brutally and indelibly clear to all my senses. I was alternately sick and hysterical, and it is one of the few times when I can vividly remember the deep musky comfort of my mother's embrace, before we went upstairs to start packing our holiday bags.
Although I had tearfully experienced the loss of a few pets that had suddenly and furtively Gone to Heaven - like Bambi’s mum and old Mrs Inch from next door - I had as yet never been confronted by any of the preamble involved in getting There. After Mary Mouse, I would find myself unable to place quite the same level of blind trust in that Jesus and his ghosty henchman.
Unavoidably, we will all experience a wide spectrum of bereavements prior to our own ultimate decommissioning. We struggle, and we learn to absorb and process losses and griefs, and we create our own fables to deal with the painful and perplexing business of goneness. But on reaching the ranks of the elders, inevitability looms, when we and our remaining peers begin to visibly disintegrate, and even our lifelong idols become mortal equals as they too crumble and fall, and we start to re-re-assess this mortality thing that does so inescapably include us. The stardust with which we are so uniquely fashioned begins to relentlessly disassemble, eagerly seeking its return to the original soup of cosmic chaos, and its next fortuitous adventure.
Just as Joni Mitchell once told us: 'We are stardust, billion year old carbon ..’ and it’s so reassuring to know that mice are included.