mortal soil

A couple of things have recently gotten me thinking about death; the passing of a friends father, hearing about ghostly encounters in some rooms just around the corner from my office, and an essay by Edward Hoagland entitled "Curtain Calls" that was published in the March 2009 issue of Harpers Magazine.

In the essay Mr. Hoagland, now 76, writes about aging with clarity and insight that dispels the illusion that age clouds the mind at the same rate it weakens the body.

"Haven't we "seniors" blitzed our patrimony enough? The scaled vistas testify to that; and it seems unseemly to ignore our natural shelf life to such an extraordinary extent - ungrateful and unflattering to the planet to resort to garish geriatric surgery or drugs to hog the stage, try to prolong our curtain calls".

Hoagland also reflects on his life and dying.

"Against untimely death we'll thrash like a baby with all our limbs and faculties, unless we've been weathered down to slip into it naturally, after processes perhaps symmetrical to some of childbirth's, such as the bloating and eye-popping pain, plus mental recalibration, till death becomes a kind of light-and-shadow show, like sunrise slipping down a mountainside".

"Accepting death as a process of disassembly into humus, then brook, and finally seawater demystifies it for me".

"Gazing out the window, I see nothing but motion, high and low - scudding clouds, swinging leaves, right down to the millipedes seething in the soil. Death, be not proud. Plant me when I die so that I can seethe with them".

It's a compelling essay, and I found myself agreeing to many of his views and the ultimate aesthetic he presents of being recycled back into the seething soil. And even though it's not something I like dwelling on, it has moved me to decide that when I die, I want my cells and synapses to be recycled as well. No embalming fluid, no sealed coffin, no crematorium. Wrap me up in rough cotton, plant me in the ground, and let a sapling take up my water and grow on top of me.

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