When Innocence Falls

Today, I witnessed something I cannot unsee.

I was driving when the car ahead of me struck a baby deer.

One moment it was there—fragile, soft, stepping into life, onto the road—and the next, it was gone. Its small body went under the vehicle, and pieces of it flew back against my car. I had no choice but to drive through its death, to feel its ending collide with my tires, and with my heart.

It was brutal. Sudden. Unforgiving.

The kind of moment that sears itself into your memory in an instant.

My whole body began to shake. I couldn’t catch my breath. The image was too much, too raw. I tried to steady myself but I couldn’t keep driving. My hands trembled against the wheel, my breath shallow and uneven, tears pressing at the edges of my eyes. I asked my passenger to take over, and I sat there in the passenger seat trying to collect myself, to ground,

to even begin to process what had just happened.

What I saw wasn’t just an accident. It was more than the loss of one tender creature.

 It was an initiation—an invitation to witness the fragility of life in its most vulnerable form, innocence torn apart right in front of me.

The image will follow me for sometime. And as I sit with it, I realize it isn’t only about the deer.

The fawn has become a mirror of something larger: the wildfires burning across my country, but also my home province.

The deer became the forests scorched to ash.The deer became the animals with no way out, caught in fire’s path.The deer became the young trees, green and tender, consumed before they could take root.The deer became innocence, destroyed without warning, brutality swallowing gentleness.

It is unbearable, this kind of grief. It strips you down, forces you to confront the truth that beauty and violence live side by side, that tenderness is not always protected.

It makes you feel how sacred and how fragile life really is.

And yet, I know that grief itself is sacred.

To witness is to carry the spirit. To remember is to honour. To grieve is to love.

The deer’s body will return to the earth. In time, fire will give way to regrowth. The cycles of life and death will continue, as they always have.

But to jump too quickly to renewal would be dishonest.

It would deny the weight of what was lost.

So I sit with the heaviness. I let my body remember the shaking, the breath I struggled to find, the moment my hands had to release the wheel. I let myself mourn not only for that one fawn, but for the forests, the land, the waters that have not yet come, for all beings caught in destruction’s path.

And from that place, I offer a prayer:

May the rains return to soothe the fires.

May the scorched land be held in compassion.

May the spirits of all beings lost—whether by flame or by asphalt—be remembered not for the brutality of their ending,but for the beauty they carried while they were here.

May we not harden against grief, but allow it to shape us into tenderness.

Today I saw innocence fall.

And today I choose not to look away, but to hold it as a holy reminder:

Life is fragile.

Life is sacred.

Life asks us to remember.

A photograph of Flower, reflecting in the forest. Photographer: Monika Dawn