This will be a definite departure from our usual fare… but it’s my blog, and I’ll do what I want 🤣

I have been thinking about death a lot lately. It seems to be all around me. That probably sounds morbid, but it has actually been quite the contrary. I have not ever been afraid of death. I am not especially eager for it, though there have been times in my past that I was. Perhaps my tendency for depression is part of why I have so little fear of death? Honestly, I don’t think that it is.

My earliest memory of someone I know dying was the old woman who lived across the street from us, here in this house – I think of her from time to time, living here again. I was very young – four or five, at most. I remember visiting her house – she was sort of the quintessential Old Lady – kind, with a well-appointed Victorian parlor and dish of hard candies. When she died, the adults attended her funeral. I distinctly remember being angry at not being allowed to attend and say goodbye to my friend. I don’t remember being confused about where she went, or anything like that – perhaps I was, but honestly I think children have a better capacity to understand these things that we give them credit for. Better than adults sometimes.

For me, life has always been the scary thing, with its pain and suffering and separation. Life is hard. Life hurts – I have fibromyalgia; for me, life quite literally hurts. And the depression of course is no fun. The hardest is relationships. They are life’s greatest joy and greatest heartache. We need each other – we love each other and support each other. And we hurt each other too. Sometimes intentionally, usually not. Life is joy and grief, all at once, all the time. Death is relief from all of that, and also quite inevitable, so why fear it 🤔?

So, as I mentioned, death has been something of a recurrent theme in my life recently. My Aunt’s partner’s parents both died this year, peacefully and t=in their 90’s. It has been the main focus of at least two recent Sunday services, and was at least touched on in others. I’ve just finished Journey of Souls and its two companion books, a fascinating exploration of the afterlife and possible life between lives. Death, the afterlife, and spirit are recurrent themes in many of the podcasts that I favor. It is a subject that interests me. We have a weirdness about death in our current culture that I find to be unhealthy. Sad, even.

So all of this has been percolating, but what specifically inspired me to write this blog was a recent Facebook post about my dad. I was crafting the post in my mind and trying to decide which euphemism for ‘death’ to use, which caused me to think, for the thousandth time, how strange it is that we don’t even want to say the word. This most inevitable of all things, and we can’t even say the word, let alone talk about it in open and meaningful ways.

I wonder if part of the reason we do not want to talk about death is that we are dissatisfied with this life. I have long felt that we are living in the wrong cage, or the worst timeline, or whatever metaphor resonates for you. So many of us are spinning our wheels, working jobs that deplete us, engaging in loveless relationships – with our spouses, our friends, our coworkers, even semi-strangers, always answering “how are you?” with the obligatory “fine” when inside you are feeling pain, sadness, anger, joy, lust, hunger… anything and everything but “fine”

The title of this post is from the Mary Oliver poem “The Summer Day” – perhaps you know it; it’s a UU favorite 😊

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down
— who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver

The Summer Day
Copyright 1992 by Mary Oliver

This poem, too, is about death – “Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?” I love this line… I have been reflecting on “at last, and too soon”… it’s so right… death is sometimes one, sometimes the other, and often both. Mostly, of course, this poem is about life.

I frequently reflect on my life through the lens of the last two lines

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”

Moving here, was, in some ways an answer to this question for me… I’ll talk more about that in my next post 💗☀️