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| My reflection in the vase of flowers I had just set on my grandmother's grave, Geldermalsen, the Netherlands. |
I think the first death of my memory was my cat Katykins, who arrived dead in the trunk of our green VW beetle. My friend and I looked at his little stiff body and I wondered at how similar and still utterly different it was from the rabbits my family routinely slaughtered for food. He was soft and black on the outside, but not like food or rabbitskins, and also not at all like the weak, leukemia-ravaged friend who had left for the vet that morning. More like a stuffy, not that we called them that, at the time. And my mother was inexplicably upset, and I'm sorry now that I didn't understand why.
Then there were relatives like Uncle Joe. All I knew of his death was that I had to have a TB test. And my aunts who I was supposed to visit in France and South Dakota, but both died just before I was to leave. When people we rarely see disappear, it's like a traffic-light in the distance that turns yellow, then red, and then green again before we ever even arrive. And we're young and life just keeps keeping on.
When my dog was shot, more compassionately than the pigs, I ran away and hid. I never saw her buried, and today I remember my father's agony more than my own. I still look for her in the brown-eyebrowed faces of living dogs, and the softness of their ears and paws that gently pad my legs and say "save me from the thunder", and the eyes that recall the innocence of that time before all the most confusing deaths began.
Then there were the car-crashes. The friend crushed on his motorcycle under a semi. Cancers. Children left motherless and the one who drank himself away before the cancer could get him. And those whose lives turned out to be more painful than death, so they left us lost and bewildered and guilty and frantically watching for signs, like maybe next time we could save someone. Be the net or the soil or the held hand at the last moment, or preferably the whole life long, so that life might have been preferable, after all.
Those deaths left me knowing I was powerless.
In the days before my grandmother died, I said "Grandma I'm scared", and she looked at me through half-open eyes said "me too, honey, but it'll be all right" and I struggled to believe her, as I held her unbelievably soft hand and nursed my tiny son, and then walked away from her for the last time.
I was terrified of death all my life, until the day I watched my grandfather die, on a hospital gurney in a supply closet. He said, "well how 'bout that!" and the pinkness slowly slid off his face, and neck, and hands, and he was gone. In that stunned moment our whole family was graced by his positive outlook and gentleness. I miss him, but in his final act, he transcended fear by giving us a window to gratitude.
I've lost so many people since then. My Dutch grandmother was the first. She drowned so suddenly and so far away that it took me years to accept she was gone. I lost my father like a great explosion that impacted every aspect of my body, being, and life. I lost people violently and sometimes gently and even gratefully. I've taught myself to kill for food and for mercy; I've become accustomed to recognising that sudden but graceful draining of life my grandfather introduced me to in a chicken's head in my hand, in a deer who hit the fence, or in my dog on my lap. I know how quickly the flies come. I know the suddenly-odd vacant smell of dead animals and dead people and the pain and the relief and the sheer terror of things not being as we expected. And I've taught myself to imagine that feeling onto the people lost from afar.
The horrors of war and climate change and all the other capitalism-induced crises are not horrible because of death, but because that death is founded on greed. I am teaching myself to accept death as a part of life, but never as a symptom of greed.
Nearly nine years after my father died, I still long to phone him--like he's just a short distance across the water and I haven't been to visit in too long. But I've stopped reaching for the phone, and instead I caress the memory of his voice asking for news. I hear some aspect of his voice when my nephew speaks, and his cultivated patience in my daughter. Like in my garden the dead plants become feed for the compost, and resurrect from seeds and water and sunlight, next year, to bloom, and die. I now see the continuity of love and life that transcends the deaths of our bodies. I see my father's toes on my own feet; his funny little wry smile between my son's cheeks, and I see his own and his father's quiet gentleness in my partner's manner. Sometimes we choose people who carry forward the things we need to hang on to from those we've lost.
Death is not just a part of life, but an opportunity to savour it. It's an opportunity to question how we live in and of the world; how we create the world, and how we build futures for ourselves and our children. It's an opportunity to hold our loved ones dear, and to let them go. To hold the hearts of those who are grieving, and hold our own grief with respect and compassion.
Tonight, as so many cultures celebrate the thinning of the veil between the worlds of living and dead, I'll stand with my partner in the darkness and think of those people we've lost and loved and of how we might carry their goodness forward with grace.