Let the end come
as the best parts of living have come
unsought and undeserved
inconvenient - Rita Dove
I’m starting to miss peaches even before they disappear from the market. When sinking into one of these late summer beauties, I experience their tangy sweet, juicy sunset essence along with a flood of emotions. Pleasure, gratitude, marvel - which then gives way to melancholy, as peach season will soon end. And it reminds me that my life is finite, and I fear that after we die, there are no peaches on the other side. I’m not sure why of all things I love on planet earth, the peach makes me sad about death, but it happens each year about this time. Usually hanging over my kitchen sink, juice running down my arm.
Thoughts of death are not unhealthy, but something we should cultivate more of in our lives. To make death a constant presence would sharpen and focus my daily existence and edit out all that isn’t necessary. If my time here is limited, how do I want to spend it? What do I need to learn? To live in perpetual state of awareness about enhances my sense of what a gift life on this beautiful planet is. And what am I giving back? Do I even know what my gifts are yet? “The Denial of Death” is a fascinating book published in 1973 by anthropologist Ernest Becker. In it, he argues that we are so terrified of death that our avoidance of it shapes our lives. “Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing,” Becker wrote. (Social media would count. Yes, I’m guilty – follow me on Instagram!)
Our awareness of death is core to our humanity – we assume animals don’t live with the anxiety of this knowledge -- salmon race to their death upriver with myopic purpose, and gods are immortal. But we know that we will someday not exist and we will eventually be forgotten. People can push this truth away with busyness and avoidance. This dark, misunderstood uncurrent could cause humans to join a supremacy group, a gang, a zealous religion and hurt others for some twisted sense of purpose and fear mongering. Or, this awareness can challenge us to be our best selves – in the form of leaving a lasting legacy, a hero project that immortalizes us so we last longer than our earthly lifespan. We could also just plant trees.
There is a feral peach tree in my neighborhood, growing from a crevice between a fence and the bay. It looks as if someone tossed a peach pit over their shoulder, and voila, a miracle of fruit. Yet right now, the only peaches left are on the very top, out of reach. As peaches disappear from the farmers market, pomegranates start to appear. I adore these red globes with ruby beads of fabulousness inside. These are the symbol of seasonal change and transition between life and death. When Demeter, goddess of the harvest, lost her daughter Persephone to the god of the underworld, she grieved so ferociously that life on earth stopped and all became barren, or what we know as winter. So her daughter was sent back to earth, but with a pomegranate seed slipped under her tongue, to guarantee her return to the underworld. She returns to her mother on earth for springtime, then back to her husband in the underworld in the fall. It’s the cycles of fall, winter, spring. Life and death. (Marriage somewhere between all those.)
Pomegranate seeds are considered symbols of marriage and of fertility, but also of compassion. Maybe that’s the greatest lesson we can learn from death. We can spread this like pits and seeds, not knowing when they go or how they land and if someday they’ll take root and grow magical peach and pomegranates in unexpected places.
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