There is nothing funny about burying a pet, but I found myself laughing out loud as I dug a grave for Iggy.
We had Iggy for about 12 years, and that is a fairly long time for a green iguana. He had slowed down in his last years and I found him lifeless in his cage early one morning just as the sun came up.
Iggy had never been a “cuddly” pet, but we had developed a respect and understanding. I was to feed him lots of cilantro, and he was to swat at me with his tail. It worked.
Iggy had grown to a respectable size over the years, and I ‘guesstimated’ him to be about six feet long.
That’s where the “funny” part of burying poor, dead Iggy started.
I am not an overly sentimental pet owner, but I hate like hell to see them die, and it’s sadder than anything to have to bury them. I adopt a façade of stoic as I go about the job of digging a grave, and I do a little ceremony in my head as I place my beloved pet to eternal rest. Or something like that.
I pushed the tip of the shovel into the sandy dirt under the oaks and pines at the back part of the four acres I lived on in Bastrop, just off Farm to Market Road 1441. I had picked a place that I had determined would not likely be disturbed for a good long while after interment.
“That looks like it’ll do,” I said to myself, having dug what I thought to be a long enough and deep enough hole. I had wrapped Iggy in an old cotton sheet, because, not being overly sentimental, I don’t like to look at their poor, deceased bodies once I’ve committed to digging the grave.
I placed Iggy’s long, graceful body into the hole. His long tail ran flat for the most part, but as it reached the far end of the length I had dug, it began to curve up. The grave was just not long enough to accommodate Iggy’s lying flat on the bottom.
Dang.
I lifted his body in the sheet out of the hole and placed him to one side as I picked up the shovel to resume digging.
I thought I had it this time.
Well… I didn’t. But not by much.
I had to remove poor old dead Iggy’s body one more time, and continue elongating the Grave that now strongly resembled a Trench.
This is when I started laughing. The whole process had taken on a sort of macabre aspect that I certainly hadn’t expected. Any dignity that I had wanted to bring to the process had disappeared. All that was left was me, standing in the woods, using a dead iguana as a measuring stick for the trench I was digging.
It took one more “digging and fitting”, but Iggy was finally laid to rest, with his tail lying flat in the bottom of the trench, no tip sticking up.
Only a year before, I had dug a sufficient sized grave, on the first try, in that same oak and pine grove for my big black cat, Tootsie, who had died of old age and kidney failure. He and Iggy were now side by side in my little pet cemetery in the Bastrop woods. I placed limestone rocks over each of them, one big cat-sized one for Tootsie, and a long, long row of smaller rocks for Iggy.
When the fires raged through Bastrop weeks ago, among other things, I thought of Iggy and Tootsie. Silly as it may sound, I didn’t want anything to happen to them. They were my friends. I loved them very much. I hoped the fires had not scorched over their rocks, or burned the trees that shaded them. For whatever serendipitous reason, the fires didn’t go there.
It seems selfish to be glad that they were untouched. So many people lost everything. My little desires seem so foolish. But I am glad the fire didn’t go there. I wish it hadn’t gone a lot of other places, too.
~Leslie~
