Today another singer was buried.

Ionut* (pronounced “yo-noots”) was my grandmother’s canary. He came to live with her thirteen years ago and only left her during this last year, when she moved to a hospital, then one care home and then another. We brought her over to see her little roommate, but there were not so many words between them.

I once asked my grandmother why she didn’t get Ionut a little female canary to keep him company. Most birds are social: a canary in a cage with a good friend might make the cage more bearable. My grandmother shook her head. She explained that once a male canary has a mate, he stops singing. By denying Ionut the companionship of his own kind, he would never stop singing.

Sometime this morning, a family friend came over for a cup of coffee and, as a fellow caregiver for my grandmother, asked to listen to little Ionut sing again. My mom and our friend went into the parlour. There lay Ionut, at the bottom of the cage.

Whenever I saw Ionut, I felt bad for this poor lonely little canary. I discovered that, if I chirp, Ionut answered in his much sweeter singing voice. Ionut and I made up a game. We chirped back and forth at each other, sometimes chirping singly or sneaking out a second chirp quickly after the first one. I guess I had my last chirping game with him last week, when I was a little impatient, stopped playing and went to the kitchen, leaving Ionut chirping once or twice more to get my attention.

After work, I got a message from my sister across the country. At the end of her message, she remarked that Ionut died this morning. I wished we could have a funeral. I wished that I could have one last, good, long look at him. He moved so quickly when he was alive, I never had a chance to really study him.

But my parents are not the funeral types, especially not for pets. When my little handsome dogs died, one by one in 2003, there were no funerals nor even any last viewings. My mother said I was crazy to even have funerals for my hamsters. “You’ll have to take them out of my rose garden one day,” she told me.

I phoned them on my way to work to ask if they had still not thrown Ionut away. I was prepared with a sort of plan that perhaps I could whisk Ionut out of the trash can, take him home and bury him near Lucian.

My parents, in particular my father, when I asked, were horrified that I should think of them as people who simply throw away the corpses of friends. They said I will see what happened when I got to their house.

They found him a little plastic coffin, maybe a plastic box. “Like a glass coffin for a princess,” said my mother.

My dad built a gravemarker.

Ionut was laid to rest along the garden path, under a tree.

My mother worried that she would pass by him every day and think of him. She worried this would remind of her of her sadness.

But isn’t it better to remember the dead? To not let them drift off and be forgotten, as if their presence while here was of no worth? There’s so little meaning to our lives, and we atheists don’t have the fantasy of heaven to pamper our moods. There is no god to give life meaning, as hard as some people try to convince themselves - deep down, they know, otherwise they wouldn’t be so afraid to die when their time comes. If we remember our beloved dead, toss them a scrap of memory every now and then, we honour them and make their lives worthwhile.

* I would spell his name correctly if Wordpress would let use accent markings. I was stupid for moving over from Blogger. Wordpress sucks.