Amiable, Lovely Death

You don’t expect to see sky burials in the city – but they’re all around. Burials when the ground is too hard to bury a body, so the culture ceremoniously leaves the deceased out for vultures to pick away at it. It’s the natural order of things, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Except there is no ceremony in the city.

On Saturday Mark and I came home late, crossing through the alley on a cold night, making some noise as we usually do to scare away any rats. We’ve both had the experience of sneaking up on one, catching him by surprise – once, in the parking lot, I had three little ones race towards me in their game of tag before I screamed and they quickly veered off to the right. Another time, Mark had a big fat one nearly run square into him before it saw a person standing there and took off the other way. This night, coming down the alley, we came up on a big one, a foot from head to butt, lying on its side. It looked to have just died. His fur was clean and brownish grey, his belly white. He was well-fed and strong, and probably poisoned. We rounded it respectfully, though I wanted to take a closer look. It felt disrespectful somehow, to gawk. The next morning he was gone, presumably swept away by maintenance workers.

Yesterday morning while making coffee I looked out to watch the ducks in their precarious premating rituals: one brown female surrounded by five green-headed males, all of them vying for her attention, and as they bathed themselves in the icy water, a dead carp floated by, unnoticed.

This morning I was awoken by the loud screams of sea gulls – a group had gathered on the ice over the river and were pulling apart a dead fish. They have been out there for hours, pulling out sections of its gut, two or three standing guard while one takes its turn at the carcass.

We cannot bury our dead with so much concrete. We go out to the expressway-rimmed suburbs, we cremate and sprinkle the lake. For some reason I am glad to know that sky burials are still a viable option.