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.
1
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.
Thanks Kimberly, that was excellent as usual. Full of goodness and love.
And that’s the thing isn’t it? Death being game over. No more playing. No more goodness and love. Whether a chicken, or a crab (long story) or a person, that vacuum where they once played upon the living plane is deep and dark and strange.
Thanks for a beautiful read
"Hello, death. We’ve met before, but I always forget we have."
Oh Kimberly, I hold your sad heart close to my own. There is no reconciling or placating heartbreak. No matter how many times it greats us with its finality, the blow is lethal undoing.
I didn't write of this - once, back in January, was enough; three weeks ago, on a glorious Wednesday afternoon, I returned from a walk in the valley to the sound of barking from my below the house in the meadow, I knew that sound. I ran like a furious wind with camera flying, backpack still on, screaming past the door to my husbands atelier (he heard nothing his music too loud) through the alley, down the lane to see the same two St Bernards that had visited before leaving at speed. What I saw when I finally unlatched the gate was Sonny, laying in a cloud of wool in the grass. I don't know where the sound that left my body came from but can only describe it as a war cry... my neighbour heard from his garage 500 m away. There was no sign of the other three...
Thankfully I must have scared the dogs before too much harm was done, as I ran over to my poor sweet motionless Sonny - the only one to have survived the last attack - and fell to my knees, he got shook his head and trembling still from the shock, clambered back to his feet. There was much blood and bare patches of skin but no harm otherwise. He ran immediately in search of the others who were cowering under an old fallen elder.
When I eventually calmed my own trembling hands enough to call the owner, he tried to deny they was his dogs, again... but this time I had proof - his reply, "they've been so well behaved since".
They will return, of this I'm certain, and still I won't be ready....
All my love sweet soul, I hope your hens have met with my poor lost flock and are having a joyous time elsewhere... xxx