The Watch
The point is to keep company with someone who is dying without asking them to perform, and to carry what they leave.
Use this on the night someone else is making the last crossing. A someone here is not only a person. A dog on a blanket, a cat under the bed, a bird stunned against a window, a deer at the roadside, an animal you shot yourself — each of them is making the crossing.
Sit near, if your company is welcome. Keep a lamp. Make tea. Hold a hand if it is offered. Do not fill the silence.
Do not demand courage, meaning, reconciliation, or final words. Do not prepare anything to say. Sit near.
If they cross where you cannot follow, carry out whatever they put in your hands — a recipe, a warning, a debt, a way of doing a small thing. Wash the cup. Feed whoever remains. Tell the true story when it is yours to tell.
iWhen the dying is an animal. Sit near. Lower the light, quiet the room, keep the dogs and the children back. Do not stand over it; a body standing over an animal reads as a threat.
Say its name if it has one. Say what it did with its life if you know: worked, hunted, slept in the sun, raised four litters, followed you for eleven years.
Touch it only if touch settles it. A wild animal is not comforted by a hand and is usually made worse by one. Company at a distance is company.
Find out whether it can be helped, and get help if it can. A vet, a wildlife rehabilitator, a neighbor with a truck. Do not let the wish to be the one who stays keep an animal in pain that somebody else could end or mend.
Where it cannot be helped and the dying is long, ending it is part of the watch and not a failure of it. Do it quickly, competently, and close. If you do not know how, say so and get someone who does.
If you killed it on purpose, the watch is the same watch. Stay until it is dead. Do not look away for the part you caused. Then take it home, use what you took, and waste as little as you can manage.
If a car killed it and the car was yours, stop the car.
Afterward, move the body off the road if the road is safe. Bury it, or leave it where the crows can work, or take it to be burned. Wash your hands. Say the day out loud.
iiWhen your own turn comes, let someone carry it for you.