Death is Planting

Fall is my favorite season.

I’m fortunate enough to say that where I live, the season of summer gets disqualified on blistering heat alone. I live in a lake town that is transformed in the summer, and I win no friends by complaining about how uncomfortably hot it is for anyone not wearing a tank top and shorts.

So I keep my sweaty grumbles to myself.

In fall it’s blissfully back to jeans and plaid button up shirts, cardigans and even an overcoat on a cooler day. Every male my age (let’s say mid 30s) looks about the same come fall. But we all look good.

The days are still bright, but also crisp. Less insects buzzing about your ears, and less noise overall. Everything seems slightly subdued in fall. Until the leaves begin to change. Then the noise is visual, not auditory. A vast field of green changing to yellow, gold, amber, orange, pink and red, not all at once, but in a chorus. These are the photos we take. The best photographers and best equipment still failing to capture the jubilation before them.

But that is not the fall around me now.

Because I am writing this in late November. Yellow, gold, amber, orange, pink and red have all gone. Now there is only brown. Snow, rain and wind have stripped the trees bare. And their once vibrant leaves are now compacted into the muddy ground. The days are much colder now, and darker. No snow covers over the decay and death around yet. We are in the in-between time. Past the magic of autumn, and before the magic of winter.

Perhaps not surprisingly, we often think of death in late fall and winter. As beautiful as the falling leaves are, we know that the vibrancy of spring and summer is coming to an end. We know that the gorgeous colour comes from the death of the leaves themselves. As we think about the seasons, we most often consider late spring and summer to be full of vibrancy and life, not so much the darker, colder months of fall and winter.

But we don’t get to spring and summer without the death and rest of fall and winter. We know this of course, and we still act like it is a mystery. When I see that first crocus break through the snow in late winter or early spring, or the first tree buds begin to awake, I’m always amazed. “How did this get here!?” I wonder, ignorantly.

I say ignorantly, because I don’t think of the planting that is obviously happening in fall. Death, is planting. The tree doesn’t get to keep its leaves through the winter and still develop new buds in spring. The seed must be buried in the ground and hidden, before the spring flower blooms.

In the seasons, in nature, we see that death is part of the deal. That the new comes at a cost, and that cost is the old passing away. There is no change, no new growth without death.

How have we convinced ourselves that our life and growth would be any different?

When something new has begun, it is because something else has ended. Despite this, some change we don’t call death. Some change, we simply acknowledge as progress. Before I began my current job, I had to say goodbye to a workplace that I had invested in and grown with for years. It was an ending, a death of sorts, and so it was grieved, but it was easier to see the new that it was making room for.

But sometimes the new is hidden. Some change is so devestating, it can only be thought of as death at the time. It may be a physical death of a loved one, a divorce, a betrayal, a job loss, an upheaval. These things don’t feel like the ebb and flow of progress. They feel like the end of life. They feel like the dark brown dead leaves trampled under foot, it feels like darkness when you wake, and darkness when you head home. It feels like winter.

A few years ago my wife and I lost a child in the second trimester of pregnancy. And then it happened a second time a year later. We named those children, marked their death, and began to mourn.

Those deaths, signaled another unexpected death. The death of our old life.

Sometimes, we tried to go back to our old life. But it was gone. Like trying to come back to a house that you’ve moved out of. You walk up the steps of the landing, reach for the doorknob, but it won’t open to you. Even if the door is unlocked, the house you walk into is no longer your own.

What do you do when your old life is dead? You start living a new life (whether you know it or not, admit it or not). A new life that includes the excruciating event you both went through. Maybe you stay at the same place you lived, maybe you stay in the same jobs you worked previously, maybe you have the same friends and family. But you have changed, and so everything has changed.

It took a long time for me to admit that my old life was dead. Like that person who insists on wearing shorts in December, I was in denial that the seasons had changed.

When I finally did admit that the old life was dead, I began to grieve it, as well. White hot seething anger, unexpectedly crying at both the best and worst moments, both needing loved ones and withdrawing from them, and eventually  identifying and making peace with a deep sadness within me.

If someone were to tell me in those dark and cold days that everything was going to be alright, that spring was just around the corner, I might want to punch that person. Because the awful, the Earth shaking, the dream stealing losses in our lives need to be mourned. We do ourselves no favours being dishonest with ourselves, denying or suppressing the winter of our hearts.

But hidden from my eyes, in my grief, in my anger, death was planting something new. It grew without my awareness, often certainly without my permission. It grew under snow. And then suddenly something new appears, like the first crocus peeking through the snow. The first signs of life where you only expected, and accepted, death.

In the midst of my winter, a friend expressed that his hope for me was that I would come to see all of the events of my life, including our losses, with thankfulness.

I wanted to punch that person then, too. It seems cruel, and disingenuous to ever consider something so horrific with thankfulness.

But I live with the paradox that without the death, the person I am now would simply not exist. Death was planting within me a new way of experiencing heartbreak, and also a new way of identifying with those who are suffering (psst – that’s all of us). Death showed me what it was to greive and grow towards another with whom you are simultaneously both unified with and separate from. Death freed me to challenge the way I thought about the Devine, to rage against and eventually forgive God, and then myself, for the failings of my previous certainties.

Simply put, death was planting a new way to think about everything. And for that I am thankful.