Omens

I was told from a young age, like a warning, like a curse. That owls accompanied death.

One for the funeral home, and two for children. My father used to say, anyway. So then, it shouldn’t have come as such a surprise, looking into those, glassy, marble eyes above the mausoleum. Wide, moon round face curiously scoping out my every move, we stared one another down. And for a brief moment, it’s almost as if we felt connected, somehow. And then the barn owl bent its great body to preen, and I watched, transfixed. Alone in a graveyard with just this animal, and my own thoughts that I decided to speak out loud.

“Do you ever think that it’s ever too soon?”

The animal stilled, and raised its pastel head to size me up. With the distance between us, and wisdom beyond its years in those dark eyes, we were once again left at a stalemate. Two lone souls resonating as I asked another question. Two.

“Is there a time, a sequence, when death comes too quick? When it’s considered injustice?”

I gestured with wide, open arms to the field of gray headstones. The countless names, the lives, the stories they told. If I had known any of them, what would they have told me? What could be said about them, now that they were dead? Who told the stories of the deceased when they could no longer speak for themselves, and how were their stories skewed?

Bourgeois. Bernard. Higgs. Montgomery. Lee. Purkey. The aisle went on, 13 of them from start to finish. For some people 13 was considered a lucky number. For many others, it was a bad omen. Just like this owl, watching, waiting to elicit another response from me. Another question? A rise perhaps? Without knowing, the owl and I waited in the disquiet. Patient as death itself.

The rows in this particular graveyard, though not very wide, went on and on. Stretching back so very far that I was sure the farther headstones were withered and crumbling. Names indecipherable as they weathered with time. Yet, these 13 headstones were brand new, the slate still shined like it was freshly cut.

The trees that decorated the outside, swathed in mists, provided me with very little comfort. Everything around me had a somber eeriness to it. Something, not very right, like the world had been turned forcefully upon its head. I was reminded, looking at the names before me, that death sometimes came expected. Sometimes unexpected. And sometimes, you were not given much of a choice.

Not when death comes untimely, from sickness, or of old age. It is when your death is taken into someone else’s hands, that it becomes murder.

“Where do we draw a line, Mr. Owl? Is there such a thing as just death today? With so many human beings only just struggling to live?”

The barn owl viewing me, as I viewed it, blinked back slowly and cocked its tawny head. And it did not answer. It never did. Somehow with a chill, I already knew the answer. The mausoleum in front of me, I knew I would find it empty. If I went and ventured inside, down, down, into the cold depths there would be nothing but an empty, waiting sepulcher. Yet every other one of these graves were full.

In a way, I had a feeling that this is how it usually came to be. There was always a waiting resting place, and always an empty spot for the next one. Because I’ve been living in a society that does not count its people as people. But another skull, for another coffin. And I have only just opened my eyes.