Contemplating my relationship to death

While also craving my Grandmother's pot roast and carrots

The stillness didn’t bring me calm as I walked into the room where my Grandpa Frank rested.

Dressed in his light denim Wrangler jeans, collared shirt and the denim vest I bought him as a Christmas gift the previous year it just didn’t make sense to me he wasn’t in the garden tending to his vegetables.

Or maybe he was- but not in this life. He had passed on and I chose to have one more moment of physical togetherness with him in the funeral home.

I don’t remember what I said to him, but I remember a feeling of reckoning surface around what this moment also meant.My mom is now at the plate, and I am on deck in the game of life and Death.

The cliche of “time flies” never felt more true — I am no longer the little girl running through the grass to go pick raspberries, I am the mother watching her daughters do it.

I am the daughter escorting my mother to Doctor’s appointments. I am raiding her chip drawer to help keep her weight in check. I am doing everything in my power for her to stay with me because I love her with every ounce of my being, but also out of my own reptilian preservation of what it means for me— when she’s gone, I’m up next.

And I am figuring out how to be with this — and it’s a lot.

Yet this is part of being human- right? The one certainty we are all guaranteed is that we will die.

My 86-year-old neighbor Jim almost welcomes Death now - seeing his mobility and freedoms being limited, perhaps tapping into an elder wisdom within ,that only shows up as we age, that a new freedom will come after his last breath.

He jokes with me how he’ll be the dead guy at the funeral and he will be lucky because he’ll be the only one without any problems. He means it.

I laugh when he shares this with me. It’s true and honest, yet while I smile, I can’t help but see myself in a coffin, my daughters looking on, full of problems and heartache and nothing about this is funny to me. I find my body tense up, ready to fight off the inevitability of my Death.

Sturgill Simpson sings, "There’s no happy endings, only stories that stop before they’re through,” and this is makes me look at Death with scorn.

I don’t like permanence, I want another pot roast and carrot supper with my grandparents, but this time with my children seated at the table. I was never ready for that to be over and yet Death took that from me when it took my grandparents.

Yet inching closer to my inevitable Death it forces me to confront how much love I have for life— these tender moments of nestling my toes within my husband’s feet . Watching a wave form and break in the ocean. Feeling the saliva in my mouth gather as it sees a slice of carrot cake at the bakery.

These moments and experiences are fleeting, which leads my wayward mind to a new place. How doe we truly appreciate the moments of our lives if they never have an ending?

If I got to have pot roast and carrots on repeat- would it hold as much significance? Would I even show up to them? In the certainty that all moments end I become more alive, more attuned to watch the head of the crowned sparrow bob side to side and savor it knowing it will fly off and I will go inside the cabin. And for this I feel appreciation towards Death.

I sat at my desk typing today staring out the window seeing the tree outside near our cabin. Naked now, its branches devoid of signs of life in the dead of Winter.

Embodying this tree I see myself as a slightly weathered bud that has been hit by the first of Fall’s winds. Alive, yet slightly past its prime, yet still stretching towards the light of the sun, enjoying the liberation that comes after blossoming, but also now positioned to notice the dark ground below.

In seeing the soil below and the inevitability of my journey there I wonder if Death itself is the only thing that does not have an absolute ending? What if like the little bud, once it blows off the tree, there is no end, but only a continuation of energy that perpetuates into supporting new life that will later bloom. This brings me a degree closer to accepting Death, both of others and for myself.