Small Graves and Small Dashes

Is this the start of being us? It’s a question lodged in my throat and in my heart like a splintered chicken bone.

This week two finches lay dead outside two different glass doors in our house. Today, suddenly, urgently, I needed to dig their graves.

I wound a scarf around my neck, pulled on boots caked with mud, grabbed gloves and a spade from a bucket in the garage, and headed outside to bury their perfect, peaceful bodies of sunshine in our garden. The holes would be small.

I had dreamed about it, been haunted, even, by the overhead photos of rectangles dug into the earth in neat but slightly irregular rows, like a child would have drawn the windows on a school or a library.

photo of Shajareh Tayyiba Girls School in Minab, Iran via Getty images

These were graves for girls in a primary school in Iran. There were five rows of twenty, but they’ll have to add more. The school was bombed on a school day.

As if that is not horrifying enough, small children in small graves. There is a bomber, and it may well be us. Who are we? That we are not covered in ash and sorrow and repentance even during investigations adds to what we lack. Our clothes should be torn. Perhaps that is what drove me out to bury the birds even more urgently than at first. I didn’t want to be a gravedigger, but I was.

That is part of being us. And I had lived in Iran as a teenager. I knew that Saturday is a school day for all school children in Iran. Our school week at the American school ran right alongside Iranians from Saturday to Wednesday, with weekends on Thursday and Friday. Surely, all of us knew that.

And then something more came to me deeper and sharper. Not only would these graves be small and their dashes close together, which tells one story, but each schoolgirl would share the same death date, row after row after row after row, which tells it more truly.

It reminded me of something I wanted, but wasn’t sure I could have, something Port William’s gravedigger, Jayber Crow, wanted, too,

“As I buried the dead and walked among them, I wanted to make my heart as big as Heaven to include them all and love them and not be distracted. I couldn’t do it, of course, but I wanted to.”

Maybe we can. Maybe that is the start of being us.

header photo by Fons Heijinbroek from Unsplash