When one's dead, one's dead... This squirrel will become earth all in his time. And still later on, there'll grow new trees from him, with new squirrels skipping about in them. Do you think that's so very sad?
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
There is something very human in this apparent mirth and mockery of the squirrels. It seems to be a sort of ironical laughter, and implies self-conscious pride and exultation in the laughter.
Sad things happen. They do. But we don't need to live sad forever.
Today we bury his remains in the earth as a seed of immortality. Our hearts are full of sadness, yet at the same time of joyful hope and profound gratitude.
We don't live in the Garden. We live far from Eden. Every life is full of heartaches. Every life, frankly, is unspeakably sad.
Everything is dead while it lives.
Animals have a much better attitude to life and death than we do. They know when their time has come. We are the ones that suffer when they pass, but it's a healing kind of grief that enables us to deal with other griefs that are not so easy to grab hold of.
The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.
We seem wired to grieve with greenery. Allowing the dead to dissolve into the earth, to become part of the cycle of the seasons, has, for millennia, held the promise of cheating mortality.