In defense of death

/ not for the sake of healing but feeling /

Dear friends,

This past week, death visited. My mind, desperate to escape the ache, tried to pull me toward the light—toward renewal, beauty, and the comforting truths about death we often lean on. But staying with grief is harder for me. It’s a practice I’ve begun to learn through my own body and chronic illness, yet death is a deeper lesson altogether.¹ With time I am learning: intimacy with the insult doesn’t necessarily promise lift or renewal, but a more lasting grace with irreconcilable truths and the raw feeling they demand.

As always, thank you for your penetrating, insightful reading.

I don’t want to defend death—
not now, not while I still bleed
from bobcat’s hungry lashing,
not while No, alongside lavender wings,
thrashes into silence on the coop floor.

I ran away with eyes pinched shut,
No no no no no
while death crouched, warm-bellied 
with yes. Yes.

I could defend—
it’s nature’s way,
life eats life for more life.
But my four-feathered chambers
reject autumn's pluck for tomorrow's peep;
stuck instead on replay, 
on violence,
as if spotting signs, editing ending,
could fix what I refuse:

No resolution.

Only aching, missing, emptying—
(not for healing but feeling).

Hello, death. We’ve met before,
but I always forget we have.
Each time, a cold improbability—
irreconcilable as love itself,
returning again and again
to be crushed beneath canines
while my warm lap cradles his tiny kin.

Dotty, Phyllis, Joan and Laverne, may you fly in peace with your countless feathered ancestors

1.

Chloe Hope

is always a balm but was even more so last week when her post arrived just days after the event. She writes: “Even in the throes of Death, Birds will display a final, visceral choreography of violent and sacred movement, wings fanned in loving farewell to flight—a sad, strange, and strangely beautiful act of beginning to become immeasurable.”

May the immeasurable hold us close as we lean into the irreconcilable.