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closeDeath came to the Kent household recently, and once again, I was amazed by one of my boys.
We actually had been on a death watch for several days while Scotty decided whether Squirt, his turtle, was dead or just hibernating.
Squirt had begun to do what things do after they pass, and we finally had to break the bad news to Scotty that the odor coming from Squirt was not due to a failure to brush his teeth.
His daddy mentioned something about the garbage can outside, but Scotty shot that down immediately.
So I told him it was fine to bury his turtle, Squirt, in the backyard, throwing caution to the wind that we were breaking some city ordinance.
I watched from the window as he painstakingly dug a hole, made a mound over the grave and then lashed two sticks together to make a cross.
He then came into the house and went back outside with his BB gun for the required 21 gun salute.
After that, he hummed “Taps” and again asked permission — this time to use his pocket knife to carve Squirt’s name in a piece of wood to mark his final resting place.
I was proud of myself for just a few minutes as I thought about the kind and compassionate child I raised.
Until Scotty came back in for the shovel he had put back in the garage.
“Absolutely not,” I heard myself saying after questioning Scotty. “Just because you have your knife out, you cannot dig him up and perform an autopsy.”
Perhaps Scotty has watched way too much “NCIS.” Maybe we shouldn’t have let him watch all that Discovery Channel stuff. But either way, I told Scotty I was sure nobody needs to know what color a turtle’s insides are.
He then stated matter-of-factly that I shouldn’t complain about his science grade if I wasn’t going to ever let him dissect anything.
“Squirt was your little pet,” I said to Scotty. “How could you stand to cut him up?”
It was then that I was amazed again by my child — not by his antics but by his simplistic understanding and acceptance.
Scotty went into an animated lecture about how that did not matter at all because Squirt was no longer there. It was his body that was in the ground, but God had taken his soul to heaven.
I was taken back to years ago, when Scotty once told me I was wrong about Jesus living in his heart.
“I never feel him in my heart,” Scotty told me out of the blue one day, “but lots of times I feel him moving around in my stomach.
“It makes me feel good,” he continued, “because I really feel him in there.”
No, we didn’t dig up Squirt. And although the memorial that was so carefully built was destroyed that same afternoon by two boys running a lawn mower, somewhere in my backyard is buried a testament to my child’s utter acceptance of God.
Oh to have the faith of a child.
Contact Alline Kent at allinekent@cox.net or 396-2467.
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