Tag: death

Cruel Aesop

photog Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner , , ,

The last two weeks have been unseasonably warm here in Dunwich.  And believe me I’m not complaining.  Summer-like days and mild nights is wonderful.  Not to mention I must be saving money on heating oil.  And it means we can enjoy the summer activities a little longer.  For instance, the raspberry bushes are still producing fruit.  Not as many as last month but enough to enjoy a treat from time to time.  And I can still go out and take some macro shots of insects and the few flowers that haven’t completely died.  In fact, the wolfbane is about to bloom in the next week or so.  And every night when I bring the dogs out for their final walk, I can hear the crickets chirping away.

And there is an enormous number of them because the sound is everywhere and it is fairly loud.  But at the same time, it has a different sound in the fall.  This is based on the air temperature.  The lower temperature means the sound will be lower pitched and slower.  It’s almost like a power hum that has fallen an octave.

And to my subjective ears it sounds sad and confused.  It’s as if the crickets don’t understand that they are preparing to die.  Unlike Rutger Hauer’s character in “Bladerunner;” Roy Batty, they don’t realize “it’s time to die.”  And that’s exactly the vibe I get when I see the last of the dragonflies moving around the fields.  They’re confused and slowing down and it’s as if their programming is failing.  It doesn’t cover the case where the weather stays warm after they’re supposed to have died from freezing.

It’s also the case of the preying mantises.  They’re still walking around the gardens trying to find food or mates but they’re running out of steam.  Their eyes are already dark and they’re going through the motions but they’re already the walking dead.  Even if I handed them food, I doubt they could eat it.

The only insects that haven’t succumbed to seasonal despair are the honey bees.  They still go around visiting the last living flowers gathering pollen and nectar to bring back to the hive.  And that’s because they have a future and a plan.  They’re filling up the remaining cells in their combs with food to keep the hive going right through winter and into spring.  Their program hasn’t run out.

Now, I am aware that this is just my emotional response to the realities of insect life and its relationship to seasonal variation.  Evolution has crafted the life cycle of most insects in the non-tropical regions to include the death of adults in late fall.  This is the result of millions of years of evolution and it’s a fact of life.  But humans are affected by these facts and have speculated about them going all the way back to Aesop in ancient Greece.  He talked about the ant and the grasshopper that brings up the same exact dichotomy that I see between the honey bee and the cricket.

And humans anthropomorphize these creatures making the ant a hard-working and thrifty fellow and the grasshopper a lazy, hedonistic good-for-nothing.  Well, Aesop was preaching.  While I find the cricket and even the dragonfly sad figures.  After all, don’t we all eventually find our lives winding down?  And even if it is the circle of life, it has a certain tragic aspect.  Well, just a bittersweet reflection on the beautiful Indian Summer that we’ve been gifted with this year.

You Have to Acknowledge the Losses

photog Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner ,

I’ll be travelling Saturday and Sunday.  I’ve got a meeting with the boys up in northern New England.  I’m driving up Saturday morning and driving home Sunday late morning.  Then I have two long days at work Monday and Tuesday.  So, posts will be on a best-efforts basis.

But my life has always been (from my point of view) on a best-efforts basis.  None of us has much (if any) control over the vicissitudes of life.  The weather, our health, the actions of family, friends and especially enemies and total strangers intervene to make the best laid plans of mice and men playthings for the gods.

So, all that is true.  But working our way through all of the twists and turns of life is infinitely compelling.  Even if we have a mundane, even boring week we hear about someone’s disaster, someone’s tragedy.  Someone sentenced to death, someone struck down with awful injury.  And when these are good friends; good people, you’re stunned for a second, “How could that be?  I just saw him.  He was solid and animated; busy!  How could he be dead or dying?”  But very soon he’s gone.  Pretty soon you struggle to remember details of recent visits.  People fade out of our lives.

Well, it’s a matter of bandwidth.  I can only concentrate my mind on a very few things at a time.  So, the periphery has to stay there at the edge.  If someone I haven’t seen in almost exactly fifty years dies, even tragically, only a moment can be spared to acknowledge the loss.  You can only hope that the last fifty years were packed with significance and striving for some lasting impact on the people around him.

I guess what’s important for me is to reflect on whether I have achieved any lasting impact on those around me.  I know of at least one affirmative.  I have impacted Camera Girl in a lasting way.  She has been irritated by me for fifty years now.  That’s got to be significant to her!  To a lesser extent I’ve left some impact on my children and an even more tenuous impact on their children.  I’ve had friends and family in my life.  That counts for something.

Well, I guess it’s the nature of life that as we age, we begin to anticipate death.  How will it intersect with life?  How much warning will there be?  I’ve known some people who were terrified of it.  I’ve known others who were serenely calm about it.  I remember many years ago as a teenager I was working in a hospital and I asked a middle-aged man why he was in the hospital.  He smiled at me and said, “I’ve got a touch of the C.”  I looked at his chart later and he had metastatic bone cancer.  He died a day later.  But he took it all in stride.  So, there is a continuum of human attitude toward mortality.

Recent events around me have got me thinking of such things.  I used to say that the break even point in life is fifty.  If you were allowed fifty years of healthy life then you couldn’t rail against fate as having played you dirty.  If you didn’t dawdle fifty would allow you to raise a family and leave a mark on the world.  Of course, as you get older you can see how sixty and seventy enhance the satisfaction of seeing the future come to fruition.  But the fifty number still makes sense to me as a break-even point.

Okay, enough maudlin sentiment.  Mortality is a fact of life.  But every once in a while, something around you catches your attention and you realize that the stage is changing.  Faces appear and then disappear.  You have to acknowledge the losses.

I’m Still Working Out the Details

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner , ,

So, which is it?  Rage against the dying of the light or serenity in the face of the inevitable and natural cycle of life and death?  I was at a funeral and I looked at my cousins and saw what time was doing to them.  All of us were proof of the inevitability of aging and death.  Each one was a slightly different take on mortality.  Some seemed to be aging gently and they exuded humor and calm.  Others looked very tired and deeply saddened by how hard the way is.  Well, that difference comes of a combination of internal and external factors.  Luck plays a part and also wisdom and also temperament.  If I’m going to guess I’d say luck and temperament play the largest parts.  I mean I guess someone like Gautama could remain tranquil in the face of fate’s onslaught against our loved ones and our selves but most people are not so stoic.  We need some luck to keep us going.  Even Job finally had enough and wanted a word with the Big Guy Upstairs about all those boils.

So, is there a correct attitude toward the Big Sleep?  I’ve always taken a somewhat legalistic attitude about what kind of deal we get from fate.  When I was a bit younger, I used to say that fifty years was somewhat the break even point.  What I meant by that was if fate gave you fifty good years you should think that you got a decent deal.  Not great but decent.  The first fifty years are the best part of a life and with any reasonable amount of effort you can get quite a bit done in a half century.  You can raise a family.  You can become an expert in your profession.  You could even have served as President of the United States by then.

It’s not really a full lifetime but if you don’t lollygag around until forty you can cram a lot of living into fifty years.  So, if you live comfortably to seventy, I think you can feel like you got a pretty sweet deal.  I’m approaching the biblical “three score and ten” mark myself.  And even though I’m not anxious to throw in the towel quite yet I can’t see myself going through the whole wailing, gnashing my teeth and shaking my fist at heaven act.  I feel it would reflect a certain amount of ingratitude.  After all, think of kids who die of cancer or some other terrible disease before they ever get their permanent teeth.  That’s where I see someone lodging a legitimate grievance against the way the universe is run.  I’ve always been repelled by the suffering of the innocents; “the problem of pain.”

So that’s my somewhat simplistic but easily explainable philosophy of life and death.  God owes us fifty good years.  And we owe it to ourselves (and Him) to use the time wisely and diligently.  And this is coming from a profoundly lazy man.  No male in my family has ever truly grown up before thirty.  We have a talent for floating above the ground for an inordinate amount of time before being forced to finally settle down and get to work.  For this reason, I feel like I have been blessed in having reached my age with all of the milestones accomplished.  Of course, all of the credit for this goes to Camera Girl.  She refused to let me stall her plans and so she had her kids while we were very young.  Which means we were desperately poor for the first ten plus years of our married lives.  Which means I was that much luckier to get the whole thing to work out.

So, seeing death and dying is a humbling experience.  But it also makes me grateful for what I’ve already been allotted.  And honestly, I’m not very excited about ending up a nonagenarian or even an octogenarian.  I’m hoping for some very lazy death.  I’ve toyed with the idea of starving myself.  But I’m afraid I might keep putting it off every time I smell something good on the stove.  I’m still working out the details.