Carl’s Deer
It was the day after her beloved brother’s unexpected death, and Susan didn’t know what to do. Carl had always said he wanted to be buried in the township cemetery that abutted his farmland property, so he could “keep an eye on things.” But no one had been buried there for twenty years, and the township had flatly refused her request. What was she going to do?
Carl and Susan had grown up as children of a divorced mother in the Detroit area, at a time when such families were looked down upon. “We moved around a lot, and spent time in childrens’ homes when she couldn’t care for us,” Susan recalls.
The two children were very close; in fact, Susan probably provided most of her younger brother’s security. Carl had attended eleven schools before he finally graduated and entered the Air Force. “He attained the rank of Sergeant there, came home, went to college on the GI bill, and worked for thirty years at Chryslers,’” Susan says. A normal life in many ways….and yet Carl never married, and often battled depression. “I used to wish he had a wife and a bunch of kids,” Susan says. “I think he would have been happier.”
Instead, Carl grew increasingly isolated. Long ago he had purchased a cornfield, and as the years passed, he worked on the land in his spare time. He planted trees, had three ponds dug and most important, made a habitat for wildlife all over the property. “As land came up for sale, he bought more, and eventually he owned sixty acres, most next to the cemetery,” Susan says. “He had lived in an old mobile home until recently, but finally built a new house to retire in.”
An occasional friend would visit to fish or stroll the premises, always made welcome, and it seemed an acceptable life. But Susan still worried. More outgoing, and busy at her nursing career, she wondered if her beloved brother was, in his own way, at peace. The happiest she ever saw him was when he fed the wildlife each day, especially the doe and her twin fawns who came to eat on his driveway. Carl would sit on his porch and watch them, in hushed communication. But was it enough?
Now, she would never know. And she would not be able to honor his last—and only—request. In the midst of her shock and grief, she prayed once more for an answer.
That afternoon, her phone rang. The township officials had inexplicably changed their minds. Carl could be buried in their cemetery.
“Of course all the funeral plans were changed,” Susan said. Quickly, she and the others visited the cemetery to choose a proper gravesite. Someone found a black granite boulder just over the fence on Carl’s property. It would be the perfect monument.
Apparently it is. For the day after the funeral, Carl’s grave was covered with deer tracks, as if his friends were coming to pay their last respects, as if—-in that small gesture—they were assuring Susan that her brother had indeed found comfort in their presence.
“This week I am meeting with the person who will be selling the property, and I’m hoping that whoever buys it will take care of the land as Carl would have wanted,” Susan says. “And then I’ll go to the cemetery, and see if the deer have been visiting with him again.” Or perhaps they are angels in disguise.
(c) 2003 Joan Wester Anderson www.joanwanderson.com
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My internet pprovided recently switcheed me from yahoo to Internet Provider. In a list of favorites was your website first on the list! I hadn’t read the site in a long time. But I started reading some of the stories. Listed for November 28,2008 you had reposted the story I had sent in regarding the death of my Brother Carlton who died in 2003. What a suprise!Coincidence? Who knows, but I will say that the deer still visit his grave often. There are always tracks by it, and the people who bought the house ofter see the deer in the driveway still.
Susan