A FALLEN TREE

On a recent walk, I came across a dead pigeon at the side of the road, a worm on the pavement and a fallen tree in park land. The pigeon had taken one risk too many on a busy road. A mother and daughter walking ahead of me on the pavement picked up the worm and put it gently in the grass before I could tread on it - a lovely gesture. The fallen tree was at too much of a distance to determine how it came to be down amongst its healthy woodland companions.

This sense of life and death going on all around was brought closer to home with the recent illness of a family member - an illness that he is surviving but the repercussions of which will affect his life choices for some while to come. That image of a fallen tree amongst healthy ones stays with me as I think of him. At a younger age, I might have been shocked by this turn of events. As an older woman, I am dismayed but not surprised. If older age teaches anything, it is not to take good health for granted.

I know that some trees re-root after they have fallen and others provide decades of sustenance to insects, birds and small mammals as they lie on the ground. Perhaps it’s a bit of a stretch to say that hospital staff are gaining spiritual sustenance from looking after their patients, but it certainly helps pay the bills. And some may even be changed by their experience. I am hoping that this much loved family member will re-root and grow new shoots.

And then yesterday evening a mallard flew down onto the path in front of me disorientated, sashaying this way and that, so that I waved an oncoming car to slow down. The driver saw the duck careering from one side of the road to the other and smiled at me, each of us sharing a moment of this duck’s madness and a moment of kindness towards another creature.

I wonder if it is easy to be rather blase about the ubiquity of death, to believe that we have made an easy pact with death rather than live with the enormity of the thought of no longer existing. Sure, most of us are no longer burdened by religious warnings of everlasting agony, nor do we have to live with the dread of diseases that carried off our ancestors. But I am not sure I fully engage with the reality of my own death and the fact that some will die early and others late. The natural world is a constant conveyer of truth in this, as in so many other things. When I see combine harvesters reaping the wheat and barley at this time of year, I wince slightly at the sticks of corn crushed in a second by vast machines, cut down without choice or comment, cut down because that is their lot.

And then yesterday I was with a 90 year old, bent over as a desiccated reed, tired of her long life and waiting to be flattened into the welcoming earth. We grow into our own death, I think, if we are lucky enough to live into older age. Message to myself: stay conscious, pay attention to life and death, everywhere.

Some words of John Donne passed on by a friend who’s just read a new biography - “It is an astonishment to be alive, and it behoves you to be astonished.”