Death - again

The squirrel had apparently tried to get into the Lodge and showed no fear of humans. It looked weak and was behaving oddly. Another of the same age came and joined it - a sibling, perhaps - but this one was found dead the next day. The other was not evident. I wonder if the mother was run over and the youngster was hungry? Or if it had been poisoned or had some disease that might explain the behaviour?

Mischa was upset but as squirrels are 'not native' she knew that wildlife hospitals won't take them. I wish I had been there. I know my Dr Dolittle friend Clare would have taken it, cured it and had a friend for life.

This was yet another death.

A few days before I had come upon this murder-scene/dinner plate as I was dragging my weary frame across the fields. Someone got a pigeon. Female sparrowhawk, perhaps? I don’t usually see them here. There are kestrels, kites and buzzards. Maybe a buzzard. Kites can kill pigeons, but it’s less likely.

Anyway.

A little later I saw what looked like part of a rabbit. A very small part of a rabbit.

Meanwhile, I’d been listening to Sam Harris talk about death with two people who’ve written a book about dealing with death. And as I was listening, I was thinking, what’s the problem? Get over yourselves! We’re animals, FFS! Of course we die. There’s nothing to deal with. Life is a terminal condition!

Sam Harris is so proud of himself to have accepted his own death – though he worries about how sad his wife and kids will be. He said how he’s thought about death and tried to understand death for say forty years. And I thought, what a waste of time! Death just is. Like gravity. It’s like saying, well, it’s taken me forty years to come to terms with the fact that I don’t float off into the atmosphere. I mean, really.

What gets me is this sense that people think death is unfair. Look, I can understand it’s sad when, say, a young person dies. But it’s not unfair. There’s no lifespan that we are assured and which, if we don’t reach, can be used as a marker for whether we have been fairly treated by fate. Nor are we lucky to be alive or given a gift. There’s just no counter-factual against which our existence can be judged.

What’s even more bizarre about this is how we then relate it to other animals.

Most people seem to think they are owed some long, happy healthy life, anything else is unfair, but animals are owed nothing. They can just die – and battery hens should be grateful to have been hatched. Others think they are owed this long etc life, without pain and with on-going hospice care into their 100s, and so are all other creatures. Like, that works on a finite planet. Grow up!

What I think is that while you are doing things that matters to you, you just don’t sweat the small stuff – like what is not actually happening right now – that, all that future and past malarkey, is the small stuff.

Sadly for us, little really matters. We know we’ll get fed; we don’t tend to suffer from predation; we live so much in heads and thoughts that we hardly value simple bodily pleasures and we are so shit at intimacy due to our screwed up upbringings and culture that we seldom enjoy the easy intimacy of just being with a close companion. So, all the time, we can sit around and worry about death.

Poom! An explosion of feathers – claws, beak, flesh torn, pain, blood, the rush of hormones to dull pain – never enough, but it’s something… and then the lights go out… and the sparrowhawk takes the pigeon’s life and turns it into her life and when she dies the life is back in the soil with the worms and beetles and fungi and bacteria… and then in the roots and the leaves and the flowers… and in the moth and in the bat and in the kestrel and…. This is how to avoid death… give your life back to life.

So say the trees.