Illustration by Alex Siklos
First Person is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.
We buried him before a tree on a hill, spring heat blazing down. A rock bore his name, which I had scrawled in permanent marker. Alvin. Yes, like the singing chipmunk. We voted on what to call him and democracy doesn’t always breed originality.
Alvin wasn’t an ordinary rodent. His tastes were refined, perhaps more so than those of the children who had gathered that afternoon on the wooden porch prior to his burial. He listened to Metallica, read Nietzsche and fathered 12 children. Alvin was a family man. He was a good chipmunk, by any measure.
His favorite song – Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl – seemed almost too simple, too gentle for a creature who dove headfirst into the fury of thrash metal. But that was Alvin. He refused the confines of genre. He was a wild thing, not just in body but in spirit. His final wish was that Brown Eyed Girl be played at his funeral.
Of course, Alvin’s biography was assembled by us – campers and counsellors – on the porch that June afternoon, as we prepared to say goodbye.
Because that’s just something you do for a chipmunk who had been crushed by a tractor.
It was my fourth summer volunteering at a children’s bereavement camp. On the surface, it looks like any other camp: canoes gliding across the lake, soccer balls ricocheting off goal posts, kids smuggling candy after lights-out. But here, every child has lost someone – most often a parent or sibling. And stitched into the daily schedule is grief programming: memory circles, candlelight vigils, quiet spaces to speak of loved ones no longer physically here.
So when I saw “Chipmunk Funeral” on the program, I did a double take. It felt wrong. Why stage a funeral for a rodent in front of children who already knew death too well? At first glance, it seemed almost cruel in its parody.
But grief is rarely straightforward. Sometimes, a little absurdity is exactly what’s needed.
After we all gathered, Aly Bird, a grief counsellor, stood before us and said plainly: “Today, we’re going to conduct a funeral for a real chipmunk.” To accept death, Aly explained, we needed to tell the story of life. So the kids did. A camper said Alvin had a wife. Another added he loved racing. One said he had 12 children. I mentioned he read philosophy books, because I like a chipmunk who wrestled with the big questions. We spoke about funerals, about the ritual of saying goodbye. We spoke about what it means to remember someone we miss.
Afterward, the campers, in their baggy T-shirts and dirt-stained sneakers, leaned over the shoebox one by one. Some looked away immediately. Some hovered, caught between fascination and dread. There he was: Alvin, small and still, his tiny limbs arranged as neatly as they could be.
Looking into that shoebox was less a lesson in grief than in biology, in the blunt truth of organisms destined to expire. It fostered the kind of curiosity that comes not from innocence but from recognition: This is what it means to have once been alive. Perhaps moments like this, gazing into the impermanence of life, are a sort of rite of passage for children.
Disney would agree. We never see Bambi’s mother’s body after the gunshot, but I still remember Simba pawing at Mufasa’s corpse, begging him to wake up. I felt that same hollow recognition when I stood over my own father’s body, staring into the vacancy of his open eyes. These kids have said goodbyes to their own Mufasas, their own loved ones. But maybe there was something liberating, something empowering, about taking this other glance at death, this time through a lens of imagination.
That afternoon, after we configured Alvin’s story and observed his body, we formed a procession up the hill. The leaves rattled in the warm breeze, cicadas droned.
At the top of the hill, there was a hole, Alvin’s final resting place.
One camper strummed Brown Eyed Girl on guitar, swapping in chipmunk squeaks for a verse. Laughter cracked through the solemnity, as it always does.
Then Alvin was lowered into the earth.
And as I watched him swallowed by that hole, I thought of my father being lowered into his.
Kids volunteered fake anecdotes about Alvin.
“He loved to dance under the stars!”
“He made the best pancakes!”
“One time he saved a dog from a coyote!”
From the brush, another chipmunk darted out.
“His family,” one camper whispered.
Imagination has a way of cheating death. It fills the space absence leaves behind, giving shape to something that might otherwise dissolve into nothing. The loved ones we miss live on in our invented conversations, in the presence our minds create.
We walked down the hill quieter, lighter. As we did, I imagined Alvin thrashing his head to Metallica, pausing between tracks to thumb through some Nietzsche, and looking down at his 12 children.
Mitchell Consky lives in Toronto.
