Dead Embryonic Birds and Recyclable Milk Bottles
Yesterday, while doing some yard work, I found a dead embryonic bird on our back lawn. Rather than simply disposing of the hatchling’s lifeless carcass, I decided to call Carter over and use it as a proverbial “teachable moment”.
I explained to him that, even though we can see the bird’s body, the bird itself wasn’t there. The bird was with God. This kind of talk can be a little abstract in my experience — it’s a bit of a cop out since spiritual abstraction isn’t really something that 7 year olds are known for…so I used an analogy:
I said “Carter, after you drink a bottle of milk, do you get sad when you put the bottle in the recycling bin?” He laughed at me and told me that I was being silly. I explained to him that is not really all that silly and continued, “You aren’t your body. And the bird isn’t his body. Your body is just a container…like a bottle. When you drink from the bottle, you don’t really care about the bottle, right? You care about the milk. The bottle is just the thing that holds the milk. That allows us to drink it. It’s not important. A body is like a bottle. It just holds the real us so that we can experience the world. But it isn’t us.”
He understood immediately and then recommended that we bury that bird’s body at the base of our mulberry tree so that his body could be “recycled” to help the living tree grow bigger and stronger.
And then I hugged him and told him how proud I was of him. And we went on living…and not fearing the nature of our own mortality.
