Death and Rebirth and Death again

It is autumn, the season of the crone and decaying leaves. The time for surrender, to prepare for the natural world’s death.

My daughter Charlotte has always been interested in death. In the country village where we spent our weekends for the first six years of her life, a funeral home held a prominent place in town- right next to the 1950s style diner we frequented for moussaka and waffles.

“What’s in there?” she’d ask as we passed by on our way to eat. The funeral home was the only building in town with an extravagant awning and not a lot of signage.

“That’s where they take dead people,” I said, “So that their families can say goodbye before they’re put into the ground.”

“After they say goodbye, they go in the garden with the blocks?”

“That’s right. The garden near the church.”

The tombstones do look like enlarged toy blocks- especially the older cemeteries with their obelisks and urns.

Ever after those toddler discoveries, she’d point to the funeral home to tell me, “Dead people are in there.”

“Yes,” I’d say. “Dead people are in there. And in here too,” and I touched my heart.

We carry them with us after they’re gone- their memories and actual little bits of them too.

I tell her how when her grandma gave birth to me, Ialready had the egg inside me that would become Charlotte.

And that she has the eggs inside her that might become her children- if she chooses to have them.

I tell her that her cells float around in my body from when she was growing and still connected to me by a cord. We could find them if we went looking.

So it is with the dead. If we have spent time around them, we have inhaled their scents and touched their fingers, their cheeks, their cardigans.

We have imbibed who they are and keep little bits of them alive with us long after we have said goodbye.

Death has seemed so much closer in the past 18 months. And strangely it feels like more people have passed into the next world than is typical.