Tiny Funerals

How the highway commute reminds us of our connection to all beings everywhere

Photo by Peter Law on Unsplash

There is a stretch of highway I travel often enough.

Like most highways, it is designed for movement; for getting somewhere else. Yet I find myself repeatedly drawn into moments that ask me to stop, at least inwardly.

As I drive, I notice the beauty first: the forests that line the pavement.
The flashes of green between breaks in the trees.
The occasional glimpse of wildlife along the roadside.
A large moose peering out of the tree line.
A hawk circling high above.
Their presence is so fleeting it feels like it was imagined.

These moments remind me that there is a world beyond the asphalt, a living world carrying on its own, quiet rhythms alongside our modern lives.

But there are other sights too.

I pass a groundhog pressed flat against the concrete barrier. It is trembling, trapped in that narrow space between the highspeed traffic and the concrete wall. It is entirely unaware that if it just turned right or left and ran a little way, it would tumble back into the cool safety of the brush.

A few kilometres later, a porcupine lies at the roadside, its quills no longer standing firm.
A small bear, a smooth mound of dark fur, that did not quite make it across the asphalt to the other side.
A large bird whose left wing lifts up and falls with the backdraft of every passing vehicle, as if it were trying to fly, though it will never fly again.

Small bodies curled into stillness where movement once existed.
Every time I pass one of these beings, I feel something happen inside me.
A pause. A quiet ache. A tiny funeral held entirely within my own heart.

I do not know why this matters so much to me.

The highway continues to hum. The cars continue. My own journey presses onward. Yet for a fleeting moment I find myself thinking: You were alive. You breathed the morning air. You belonged here.

The feeling is similar to the tightening in my chest when an ambulance cuts through traffic, its siren wailing. I don’t know who is inside. I don’t know where it is going. Yet I find myself offering a silent prayer.

May there be peace.
May there be grace.
May whoever is suffering be held.

These moments have made me wonder what exactly I am grieving.

Is it the loss of a particular being? Is it the fragility of all life? Or is it something deeper: a recognition that everything alive is connected by the simple fact that it exists at all?

Lately, my attention has been drawn to another kind of loss.

Along some roads, the forests themselves are disappearing. Large, brightly coloured excavators tear at the earth, clearing acres of land to make way for new developments and new routes forward. I watch trees that may have stood for decades fall to the ground in a matter of minutes. I think about the animals whose homes disappear with them. I think about the deer, the foxes, the birds, the bears, suddenly displaced, all adjusting to a landscape they did not choose.

And yet, I also appreciate the new road.

The road allows me to travel farther, faster. To visit people I know. It unfolds the map of this beautiful province for me. It enables me to see more of this world. The very pavement that saddens me also serves me.

This is the paradox I keep encountering.
The road is both loss and possibility.
The fallen tree is both destruction and design.
The highway is both connection and separation.
The world we live in exists because it is not tied to be only one thing.

Perhaps this is what I am really noticing — not just death, or development, or wildlife, but the complexity of being alive, being modern.
Every gain seems to arrive carrying some form of loss.
Every act of creation asks something of what came before it.
Every movement forward leaves something behind, something crushed in the rearview mirror.

There is no villain in this realization. Only an invitation to pay attention; to look past the windshield and notice. To remember and to resist becoming so numb, so hurried, and so focused on the destination that I stop witnessing the toll of my arrival.

The older I get, the more I wonder whether compassion is simply the willingness to acknowledge what most of us accelerate pass.

To recognize the life that was there recently.
To honour the cost without denying the benefit.
To allow sorrow and gratitude to occupy the same space.

That life holds both beauty and sorrow.
That progress can bring comfort while still asking a steep price.
That loss is a part of living.
And that every life matters.

Every creature that breathes.
Every tree that reaches toward the sky.
Every being moving through this brief and beautiful existence.

The tiny funerals I carry are not really about death alone. They are quiet acts of remembrance. They are moments in which I look at the shoulder of the road and say to the world:

I saw you.
You were here.
You mattered.

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