As a child, I found the fear of death mystifying. Raised in a culty, right-wing Christian family, my parents trotted out the message of eternal salvation at least weekly, often verbalized as “being a Christian means obeying your father and mother and working hard so that you can go to heaven.” To my six-year-old ears, the fire and brimstone Sunday sermons seemed more silly than scary, and the obsession with living forever and avoiding hell felt like a lot of worry over the absolutely unavoidable reality of death. I could never drum up much angst about my eventual demise, but I did see that folks around me, including those I respected and cared for, thought that death was something to prepare for. With time, I discovered that my cosmology was far less common than those of a religious bent.
From my earliest memories as a child in the big open prairie of Eastern Montana, I lived largely outside, and with limited human interaction. Surrounded by the wind, a proliferation of bugs, and a stupendous array of animals and plants, I came into consciousness as a human minority in a teeming horde of life. All things living, growing, and propulsive populated my formative years, at numbers far in excess of human beings. I explored dusty paths and massive sage as the lone representative of my species, surrounded by a multitude of life forms, some that killed and ate each other, some that I ate, and some that would certainly eat me if given the chance. Death and life were all around, but what mattered was the being.
As I entered adolescence and adulthood, I constructed the semblance of an individuated self. Even as I achieved functionality in contemporary American society, I held onto the more-than-human environment as my ultimate frame of reference, as my real and true community. I could operate as an individual, but only performatively. In the grand sweep of history, in the eons of planetary evolution, my individual self simply did not seem to matter. Instead, my joy came from being a part of the whole, from awareness of my connections in the present, from feeling the sun, the wind, the bugs and bees and even the rattlesnakes that shared my favorite trails and shady ledges.
Living into this way of being, my eventual death didn't hold much weight, or even generate much emotion. My demise won’t cause the cacophony of life to cease. In fact, if I’m part of the decomposition process, my death will enhance the vibrancy of all that is around me. Rest assured, if I am aware of my death on the near horizon, I will feel sorrow over my physical separation from those I love, and mourn the chance to touch and hug, to revel in taste and pleasure and beauty with those I hold dear. But I don’t worry about disappearing into nothing, as I know that the matter of which I am comprised will remain a part of everything. I recognize that this is an unusual perspective in contemporary American culture, markedly different even than that of atheists or agnostics.
Given my apparent acceptance – and even celebration – of death, I noted (with some surprise) that of all the seasons, I valued the green and growing times of spring and summer more than the reflection and incubation of fall and winter. Even with a philosophical disposition to see death as part of life, I need a reminder of the folly of the always-growing illusion. My circle of life isn’t really a circle, but instead a lumpy ovoid with all things green at the fat, heavy end. I prefer the stunning color of the poppy over the seed husk and find the vibrant stalk of chard more attractive than its decomposing remnants. Farrowing is intensely fun…and fall butchering just needs to get done.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with a love of growth, but I am often guilty of a dismissal of vegetative and farmstead death, a refusal to enjoy it or savor its textures. The faulty assumption that growth is always good has seeped into my thinking, at least when it comes to life in the garden. In truth, unfettered growth isn’t health. In the human body it is a symptom of disease. And American culture’s desire for perpetual economic growth has created irreversible havoc and ruin, as the globe can’t grow in perpetuity.
So, I am leaning into dying in the everyday, and attempting to retrain my eyes and recalibrate my value system to see it as a beautiful and necessary process in its own right. In her contemplation of gardens, cultural critic Olivia Laing explained that she’d mistakenly “internalised the idea that a good garden is a deathless garden, in a state of continuous perfection… All this time I’d been resisting its lesson, chasing the high of perfection, feeling a failure when things browned or died back. It was as if my job was to maintain the visual illusion, as if the garden couldn’t possibly look good unless I’d succeeded in excising any evidence of death.”[i] I’ve let the ideal of continuous growth contaminate my growing ways, giving lip service to death’s important role while removing signs of its handiwork – cleaning up the stalks, chopping back the wilt, and deadheading the spent blossoms.
My embrace of death as part of the cycle should extend to all things, as we are all in the process of dying, just like poppies and houseflies and pigs. That dying is healthy, not harmful, despite my inclination to stave it off in the greenhouse, the farrowing hut, and the pasture. The world is a bountiful place – most of the time. Crops grow and animals mature, at least until there are pests and disease. I can seek to avoid or delay some forms of death, but engaging in what Laing describes as the “fantasy of perpetual abundance” is an easy step too far.[ii]
Death brings its own beauty, if only I can see it.
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[i] Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise, W.W. Norton, 2024, p. 278.
[ii] Ibid.
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