How To Accidentally Host A Funeral

There are moments when the universe feels like it’s testing your ability to take responsibility for your accidents. Not the big, philosophical kind, like who you fall in love with or whether you vote, but the small, immediate kind that happens when you’re alone. The ones like when your headlights are on, and you hear something small and alive go silent under your tires, only to feel a double thump, thump. You don’t plan that kind of test; you don’t even realize you’re taking it until you’ve already failed.  

I didn’t start crying until after I stopped the car. It was 10:30 p.m. on a quiet December night, the kind where the roads look clean enough to trust, and the air feels sharp enough to sting. My friend’s Christmas exchange ended an hour ago, and I was driving in the shadow, one minute away from home. I had a mug of leftover hot chocolate sweating in my cup holder, and Mariah Carey was still playing faintly through my Bluetooth. Then thud.  

I didn’t hit the brakes until three seconds after it happened, which somehow made it worse. My brain needed time to realize that I had, in fact, hit something living. I remember staring through the windshield, half expecting to see nothing, and yet I was right. All I could see were the dim circles of light beaming onto the pavement of the ragged road from my headlights.

I leapt out of my seat, swung the door open, and ran to the back of my car and saw the damage of what I had run over. With the door on the edge of its hinges and the car still running, in the middle of the damn road, there he was. A squirrel. Or, at least, what had been a squirrel.  

The next morning, there was fur on the grass, and my father’s voice cutting through the cold, thick air: “What the f**k.”  

It’s strange how that sentence can sound both confused and concerned. My dog, Bailey, wagging her tail obliviously, standing over what looked like the ruins of a battlefield. The stone I had engraved in scratched, crooked letters the night before, Here Lies Gavin, R.I.P., was tilted on its side, next to what was left of his grave. I could even still see the indentation from where my pocketknife had bitten into the rock.  

I cried again, but softer this time, because crying twice for the same squirrel I only ran over felt excessive, even by my standards. My dad looked from me, to Bailey, to the scattered remains of Gavin, to the hole I dug in the ground. He looked at me in the eyes and told me he wasn’t angry, just trying to locate the logic behind what I did. So, I told him everything in one big breath, from the party to the thud, the plastic bag and gloves, the digging, the crying. He listened, sighed, and then without another word walked to the shed to grab a shovel and a bucket. 

We buried Gavin again that morning, further from the house, past the electric fence. Bailey stared longingly through the back glass door, confused by the seriousness of it all. When we were done, my dad patted the dirt down firmly and said, “Okay. Maybe this time he can actually rest in peace.”  

That wasn’t the first time I’d tried to fix something I couldn’t undo. When I was nine, I broke one of my mom’s snow globes from her collection. She kept it on a narrow shelf above the fireplace in the kitchen, those tiny glass worlds with little plastic snowmen inside. I remember trying to scoop up the water with my hands, like I could try to collect what was lost.

My mom walked in on me, kneeling there, soaked, surrounded by broken glass and miniature glittered snowflakes. She didn’t yell; she just handed me a towel and said, “Well, at least you tried to fix it.” She explained to me that I deserved an A for effort and that there are things we can’t control, but we still continue to try and make them right.  

That line, “at least you tried,” echoed through my head the night I buried Gavin. I hadn’t thought about the snow globe in years, but maybe that’s where this impulse came from. Maybe every act of trying to fix what’s broken starts from the same place, just a child trying to scoop up the pieces of something fragile, pretending they can still fit together.  

When I knocked on the first door that night, my hands were shaking; it wasn’t even cold out, the shaking was just out of embarrassment. Try explaining to a stranger why you’re outside at 10:45 p.m. asking for plastic gloves. The first three houses stayed dark, no response; the fourth one had a porch light on, but the person behind the door said, “Sorry, I don’t have plastic gloves.” The fifth man opened the door, squinting through the dark. I lied to him and explained that I had spilled something in my car. He took it well and didn’t flinch. He just disappeared inside and came back with an entire box of disposable gloves.  

He didn’t ask questions, just said, “You can take them. You might need a few.”  

That sentence meant more to me than it should have; it was such a small, decent act that it felt almost heroic. I wanted to tell him that I’d never forget this, that he was now part of this surreal chain of events, but instead I just said thank you and left.  

When I think back on it now, the story plays out of order in my head. Sometimes I remember the burial before the accident, and sometimes I remember the dog before the gloves. The whole night is a loop, filled with lights, tears, dirt, laughter, guilt, and then lights once again. 

If this were a movie, there would be symbolism: the brake lights on my car as confession, the glove box as mercy, the digging as rebirth. But it wasn’t symbolic while it was happening; it was just a mess.  

Still, the mess taught me something I didn’t expect: I learned that grief, even the small kind, can turn you into both a poet and a clown at the same time. You start carving farewells into rocks for things too small to matter, and call it closure. And maybe that’s okay, or maybe you’re just finding ways to distract yourself, trying to close chapters you never truly finished.  

My dad and I joked later that Gavin was our family’s “first official pet funeral.” We even gave him an anniversary once, half as a joke, half as a habit. But every time I drive past a squirrel on the road, I think of him. But whenever I drive past any animal on the side of the road, I call them “sleeping animals” in my head, because it’s easier than admitting what it really is. If something darts in front of my car, I will slam on the brakes, no hesitation, no thought, because I’ve turned my guilt into instinct.  

Sometimes I imagine the timeline differently: I swerve just in time, Gavin makes it to the curb, and the night ends quietly. But then I think I wouldn’t be the same person if that had happened. I wouldn’t have learned how absurdly sincere I can be; I wouldn’t have watched my dad, shovel in his hand, turn frustration into gentleness. I wouldn’t have even known how strangely holy a midnight backyard can feel, especially when you’re burying an animal.  

It’s funny how stories rearrange themselves when you tell them enough times. The night I ran over a squirrel has become a kind of family myth now, something that lives somewhere between comedy and tragedy. In my mind, it’s always snowing, even though it wasn’t that night; the air is always colder, the stars sharper, the headlights whiter. Maybe that’s what memory does; it edits the scene until the emotional truth is clearer than the real one.  

So, if you asked me when this story begins, I couldn’t tell you. Maybe it starts with the snow globe, maybe with that thud, maybe with my dad’s concerned “what the f**k.” I’m trying once again to pick up the pieces and fix what I broke and hold it steady enough to mean something.  

So, rest in peace to Gavin, and here lies the things we can’t control but continue to try to make them right. Here lies the strange human habit of turning our accidents into stories, stories that refuse to stay in order, because life rarely does. 

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