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Except in this dream I have, I always miss him. I just get a couple of hairs and Teddy screams and down he goes. Weird, huh?
Here, Chris tells Gordie about a dream in which he relives the time Teddy climbed the dead branches at the top of a tree and fell. In reality, Chris caught Teddy by the hair and saved his life, but the persistent dream of an alternate, tragic ending emphasizes how Chris’s catch was sheer luck. Teddy could easily have died that day. As with other encounters with mortality in “The Body,” death and survival are unpredictable and random.
The kid was dead; stone dead. The kid was never going to go out bottling with his friends in the spring, gunnysack over his shoulder to pick up the returnables the retreating snow uncovered.
Gordie has these thoughts upon seeing Ray Brower’s body and fully internalizing that he was an ordinary kid not too different from himself or his friends. Notably, Gordie’s list of events that Ray will never experience doesn’t include great rites of passage or milestones, but instead focuses on very mundane, trivial parts of childhood. His focus on the unremarkable emphasizes how even these small things are worth mourning. Ray Brower’s death is sad not because he was a remarkable child or even because he had his whole life ahead, but because he never got to live at all.
