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I grew up knowing death.

I knew three of my grandparents, three of my great-grandparents and multiple great-aunts and uncles. In my family, children as well as adults attended viewings and funerals, and as those great-grandparents, great-aunts and uncles and grandparents passed away, I attended many.

My father kept a huge garden, fruit trees and chickens. Trees were sprayed with insecticide, bugs were removed and dispatched from ground plants, chickens were dispatched to the freezer. I knew that the food that gave me life required the deaths of others. In my adulthood, I found the prayer by Wendy Johnson of Green Gulch Farm at the San Francisco Zen Center to all the plants and animals killed in maintaining a garden:

“Plants and Animals in the Garden,

“We welcome you—we invite you in—we ask your forgiveness and your understanding. Listen as we invoke your names, as we also listen for you:

 “Little sparrows, quail, robins and house finches who have died in our strawberry nets;

“Young Cooper’s hawk who flew into our sweet pea trellis and broke your neck;

“Numerous orange-bellied newts who died in our shears, in our irrigation pipes, by our cars and by our feet;

“Slugs and snails whom we have pursued for years, feeding you to the ducks, crushing you, trapping you, picking you off and tossing you over our fences;

“Gophers and moles, trapped and scorned by us, and also watched with love, admiration and awe for your one-mindedness;

“Sowbugs, spitbugs, earwigs, flea beetles, woolly aphids, rose-suckers, cutworms, millipedes and other insects whom we have lured and stopped;

“Snakes and mice who have been caught in our water system and killed by our mowers;

“Families of mice who have died in irrigation pipes, by electricity in our pump box and by predators while nesting in our greenhouses;

“Manure worms and earthworms, severed by spades, and numerous microscopic life-forms in our compost system who have been burned by sunlight;

“Feral cats and raccoons whom we’ve steadily chased from the garden;

“Rats whom we poisoned and trapped and drowned.

“Deer, chased at dawn and at midnight, routed by dogs, by farmers, by fences and numerous barriers;

“Plants: colored lettuces, young broccoli, ripe strawberries and sweet apples; all of you who have lured the animals to your sides, and all plants we have shunned: poison hemlock, pigweed, bindweed, stinging nettle, bull thistle;

“We call up plants we have removed by dividing you and separating you, and by deciding you no longer grow well here;

“We invoke you and thank you and continue to learn from you. We dedicate this ceremony to you. We will continue to practice with you and for you.”

I also grew up with pets. In an era when people let cats outside, we had many lost to the road. A pet rabbit who jumped over its hutch was also lost to the street. Dogs and a pony died of old age. At the back corner of our yard where the yard met the garden was a little pet cemetery with blue painted crosses inscribed with names and sometimes adorned with a dog collar.

I grew up with death, but it was not until I was nine, and a little girl about my own age whose family belonged to the same church I attended died of a brain tumor, that I realized I could die—that at some point, I would die. It was the same year that I spent some time in the hospital myself having a benign bone tumor removed from my right knee. No one knew it was benign until it was removed and biopsied. I did not know words like benign and malignant back then so did not know enough to worry as much as my parents did, but I am sure I was at least minimally aware of their worry as much as they tried to keep it from me.

At nine, I began to know death not just as what happened to others, but as what could and eventually would happen to me.

I have not attended many of my high school class reunions, but I did attend one of the first, the fifth or the tenth perhaps, I don’t remember. I do remember that as a minister from the class I was asked to read the list of the dead and to say a prayer. There were already perhaps a dozen names. There was a scuba accident, a racing accident, leukemia, AIDS. My high school class was large. I did not know all who had died, but I did know some. While some say that teens and young adults think they are immortal, I never did.  

My first year of seminary at Drew University, I took a part-time job as assistant to the chaplain at the Morristown hospital. It was just the chaplain and me to cover the entire hospital, so he asked that I concentrate on the patients who were in for cancer and cardiac issues, in other words, in the early 1980s, those most likely to die.

One day that year I woke up with the strong feeling that I was going to die that day. It was such a strong feeling that I began to believe it might be true. I wrestled with myself as to what to do. Should I stay in bed? But one can die in bed as well as anywhere else. Should I drive home to Pennsylvania and tell my family I loved them? But I had been home recently and told them I loved them. In the end, I did what I would normally do. I followed my normal routine. I think it might have been a Saturday. I don’t remember going to classes. I know I went to work. I have told myself I had this experience because I was around so much death that year, but it was a good experience for me. I felt confirmed in what I was doing in life. If this was the day I was to die, I would do exactly what I had been doing.

At nine, I learned I would die. At twenty-one, I learned that how one lived was what prepared one to die.

My first congregations out of seminary were two small United Methodist churches in the coal region of eastern Pennsylvania. My parents drove with me to my new home, a parsonage in Weatherly, Pennsylvania. As we pulled up, I could hear the phone ringing. I managed to get out of the car and run in and answer. It was the wife of the previous minister. There had been a death in the congregation; could I handle everything or would I like him to return? I said I could handle it. I had three funerals in one of my two congregations my first month there. When I told my sister that, she said I must have an awfully sickly congregation. I told her the youngest of three people who had passed away had been 87.

I had grown up with the old dying. This was the way of life, but when I moved from being United Methodist to becoming Unitarian Universalist, I needed to belong to a UU congregation as a member for a year. In order to do that, I did a residency year of Clinical Pastoral Education at St. Luke’s Hospital in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and attended the UU Church of the Lehigh Valley. My first day on call, I was called to the emergency room for a crib death. I did not handle it well. When the family’s priest arrived, I fled. Not only was this the death of a child, but my cousin had also just recently lost her first child to preeclampsia. I learned to handle the death of children better over the course of that year, but my least favorite calls were always the ones to the OB-GYN floor or the NICU.

At the congregation I served in my Unitarian Universalist supervised ministry immediately after that year of Clinical Pastoral Education, I officiated at a memorial service for a child the parents had lost soon after his birth. I wrote this poem for the ceremony, “In Memory of Eric.”

Red and wrinkled they come from the womb.

Are they newborn or is the world?
The universe changes with their birth.

A thousand promises lie within the child
A day, a year, a score, three score and ten
With what measure of life will they grace us?

How many smiles, how many tears will one life evoke?

New life dawns,
Shining as briefly as a firefly
Or as long as the summer sun.

It shines and there is light.

***

At nine, I learned I would die. At twenty-one, I learned that how one lived prepared one to be ready to face one’s own death. In my thirties, I began to know the pain another human’s death could provoke.

The twentieth-century Belgian-American poet and novelist May Sarton wrote, “I am not ready to die, but I am learning to trust death as I have trusted life.” She is obviously speaking of her own death, but slowly I am learning to trust others’ lives to death as well as life.

I am agnostic about what—if anything—becomes of us after death, but since as a good Universalist I have no belief in eternal punishment or damnation, I trust that all will be well.

Both my parents have died, and I miss them. I know that if my daughter or one of my grandchildren died, I would mourn more than over my parents, feeling that I had not had the time with them I wanted or expected, but I would survive. I trust I could live with even such a loss. I hope I never need to find out.

Now I am 65. My parents and all but two of my aunts and uncles have died. I will soon be the oldest generation. I am the oldest sibling. Will I be first to go? My sister has MS. Will she be first? Or my brother? Or my sister-in-law?

I think now not of death, but of dying.

Soon before I left my Florida congregations to move here, a congregant in her nineties died. She was in the hospital waiting for a hospice bed. I stopped by to visit. She had fear in her eyes as she clutched my hand and told me she was dying. I said, yes, she was dying, but the nurses were prepared to do all that was possible to keep her comfortable through the process. She was, indeed in that moment, in the process of dying. I sat with her for the hours it took as did her neighbor, the congregation’s president, who came and joined me.  

I know the fear of not being able to breathe. I only learned to swim last year because of that fear. One of my favorite poems is “Oxygen” by Mary Oliver.

Everything needs it: bone, muscles, and even,
while it calls the earth its home, the soul.
So the merciful, noisy machine

stands in our house working away in its
lung-like voice. I hear it as I kneel
before the fire, stirring with a

stick of iron, letting the logs
lie more loosely. You, in the upstairs room,
are in your usual position, leaning on your

right shoulder which aches
all day. You are breathing
patiently; it is a

beautiful sound. It is
your life, which is so close
to my own that I would not know

where to drop the knife of
separation. And what does this have to do
with love, except

everything? Now the fire rises
and offers a dozen, singing, deep-red
roses of flame. Then it settles

to quietude, or maybe gratitude, as it feeds
as we all do, as we must, upon the invisible gift:
our purest, sweet necessity: the air.

***

I trust death, but in my dying I trust in medicine and my family and friends. Keep me comfortable and be with me as I pass from this life.

Finally, from Rabbi Rami M. Shapiro,

Life and death,
A twisted vine sharing a single root.

A water bright green
stretching to top a twisted yellow
only to wither itself
as another green unfolds overhead.

One leaf atop another
yet under the next;
a vibrant tapestry of arcs and falls
all in the act of becoming.

Death is the passing of life.
And life
is the stringing together of so many little passings.

***

Life and death. I trust myself and those I love to both.

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