Death, Be Not Proud

Sonnet X

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

John Donne (1571 – 1631)

John Donne

Yesterday marked the first anniversary of my father’s death. All week long I found myself remembering the week I spent with my mother, my brother, sisters, and others as we kept vigil at his bedside waiting and watching. I do not remember his passing with feelings of profound grief. Believing as I do, death is not terrifying or permanent. I just miss him and the world seems lacking without him in it. I look forward to the time when we will be together again.

My father (1930-2022)

I thought about death a lot during the week, but not in a morbid way. October is a month much associated with death. The ancient celebrations of Halloween, All Saints Day, Samhain, and the Day of the Dead – the Día de los Muertos – all come at the end of the month and in the first days of November. I cannot say my thoughts on death were actually happy, but some of them were amusing.

When we were small, we used to play at dying, like most children do. We acted out battles between various good guys and bad guys with the bad guys perishing in highly dramatic ways. That was normal childish playacting. But I think we might have been a little stranger than other children in some ways. We used to collect dead animals – dead birds, squirrels that had been hit by cars, my cousin’s hamster, and once, a dead kitten that we found in the alley behind our house – and we would hold funerals for them and bury them in our backyard. The funerals were elaborate affairs with homemade caskets, flowers, popsicle stick grave markers, processions, chanting, genuflections, and making the sign of the cross. Very strange stuff for children who were not Catholic. I don’t know where we learned it all. Our backyard on Bridge Street was a regular animal cemetery. It is now covered over by a parking lot, but if at some point in the future archeologists were to excavate it, they would probably assume some sort of sacrificial rites took place there. I guess, being young and naive, death was a sort of game for us.

The first time I began to really understand death came later, when I was fourteen. It was 1972. We lived in Ohio then. Martha Jean Brunner was my Primary teacher when I was twelve and, although she was old enough to be my mother, I had a boyish crush on her. She was funny and kind and pretty to my adolescent eyes. She moved with her family to Arizona where she died of cancer at the age of 45. Her family brought her body back to Ohio for her funeral and burial. It was the first human funeral I ever attended and I remember suddenly realizing that she was gone and that it was a real thing. As we drove home from the cemetery, I looked out the window of the car and felt sad and annoyed that everything was just going on like nothing had happened. They did not know and did not care that a hole had opened up in the world that would never be filled again.

As I’ve grown older, the inevitable encounters with death have increased. I’ve lost my grandparents, a sister, a nephew, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends. In 1992, we lost a child, our fifth-born, Abraham, who died at birth. He would have been thirty-one years old this Tuesday. And last year, my father died.

I do not bring all of this up to wallow in grief or self-pity. I do not look on death that way. Knowing what I do of God’s great Plan of Happiness, of the eternal nature of our existence, I know death is a temporary state. Christ conquered death and so we shall all live again.

“Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Corinthians 15:51-57)

Pumpkins waiting to be carved.

At the end of the month the world will celebrate Halloween. We don’t do much to celebrate it at our house. We decorate with jack-o-lanterns on the front porch, that’s about all. When I was a child we went trick-or-treating. I remember some of the costumes from early childhood that got recycled as our family grew. There was a dalmatian costume, and Tweety Bird, Fred Flintstone, and an elephant. I can still conjure in my mind the smell of wearing those masks. One year my sister Hollie hosted a Halloween party for her friends in our basement on Bridge Street. The central feature was the real human skeleton we had down there named Ernie. My father was a chiropractor and Ernie was used for educational purposes – and to scare unwitting children (and even adults) occasionally. One of the last times I went trick-or-treating, when I was twelve, I made my own vampire costume and thought I was pretty cool. But Halloween was always all about the candy. When Stacey and I had our own children, we didn’t take them trick-or-treating. In California it was too scary and, after we moved here, there really wasn’t any place to take them. We just bought candy and ate it ourselves. We still do that.

Halloween 1962: Hollie as Cinderella, Steve as Tweety Bird, I'm the dalmatian.

Halloween 1965: Me in the Karate gi and moustache, Steve as Fred Flintstone, Nancy as an elephant, Hollie as a Gypsy, Mindy inherited the Tweety Bird costume.

I think the nature of the holiday has changed over the years. It seemed a more innocent celebration when I was young, or perhaps I was just more innocent. To me, it has grown more elaborate and less light-hearted, with more extravagant decorations and costumes that seem to focus more and more on dark and sinister things. More recently we have tried to switch our focus more to a modified form of the Mexican celebration, the Día de los Muertos. In 2017, Disney/Pixar released one of my favorite of their recent films (there aren’t many), Coco, that takes place around the Día de los Muertos. One of the things we liked from that movie was the ofrenda, a sort of altar set up to honor and remember the dead. The Thayns have incorporated a version of the ofrenda into their Halloween decorations. They put up photos of family members and ancestors who have died and talk about who they were. It gives the children a deeper connection to their heritage. Here at our house, because we are dedicated genealogists, we live in a sort of perpetual ofrenda. We have lots of photos of ancestors on our walls year round. Where I sit here at this computer, I can look up at the wall in front of me and see the faces of dozens of my kin. While I’m doing family history research, I sometimes feel they are keeping me company, encouraging me in my work.

The Thayn's ofrenda.

The wall in front of me.

It seems fitting that all these mortal thoughts and recollections come in October when the earth looks like it is dying as the trees lose their leaves and frost kills off the vegetative world. It would make me moody (moodier?) if I didn’t have so much to do to keep me busy. It would all seem very final if I didn’t know that in six months, after a cold sleep, it would all begin again.

One morning last week.

We began one of our final harvests on Wednesday. I realized back in June that I hadn’t planted any carrots, so I took some seed and cast it among the gladiolus. I didn’t think it would amount to much. I thought I’d be happy just to get a few carrots. Apparently the carrots liked it. They grew strong healthy tops and when I started pulling them up on Wednesday, I discovered the largest carrots I’ve ever grown. Some were a foot long and many were as thick as my wrist. I pulled up half of them, washed them, and then Stacey wrapped them and put them in the fridge for storage. On Saturday we pulled up the rest along with the last of the beets. Now the only thing left in the garden to harvest are cabbages.

The first load of carrots.

The second load of carrots and beets.

Thursday was a good day. After days of gloomy, rainy weather, the sky finally cleared. The morning was frosty, but the sun was bright and as soon as the frost was gone, I went out and worked. I knew that the forecast called for rain to return the next day and then go on for several days, so I worked as fast and as hard as I could. I spent a lot of time disposing of and dismantling things in the garden. I pulled up the corpses of plants and consigned them to the compost heap. I cut down the jungle of sunchokes out by the asparagus patch and along the edge of the orchard. Midday, I began mowing. The grass was long from all the rain and was full of leaves and it took me much longer than usual. When I finished mowing my yard, I did the Shillig’s and then started on the big property next door. After four hours of mowing, I stopped. I had other things I needed to do, so I didn’t finish. Now having a partially mowed lawn is going to bother me. I hope I’ll be able to complete the job tomorrow or Tuesday. I’m ready to put the mower away for the winter. Stacey and I went up to Wellsville that evening to buy chicken feed. I was pretty worn out by the end of the day.

The path through the wild raspberries to the lily pond.

On Friday, the rain returned, as predicted. I went down in the morning to load the chicken feed into buckets. While I was there, the rain got harder and, not wanting to get soaked, I stayed and worked in the upper part of the barn until it eased up. I knocked down a summer’s worth of spider webs. I rearranged equipment that is stored there. And I swept. The barn is not airtight. There are lots of gaps and spaces where air from outside can get in. It was designed to be that way to keep air circulating so things are dry. But with the air that comes in there is also dust. Living on a dirt road, we always have to contend with dust. In the upper part of the barn, the dust can be a half inch thick by the time I do my fall cleaning. So I swept and swept and disposed of a huge pile of dust mixed with spider webs, leaves, and spilled chicken food. When I was done, the barn, the upper part, looked pretty good. I still have to clean and winterize the lower part, but that will have to wait until the next warmish, dry day, maybe this week.

On a morning walk last week.

Friday afternoon I took a bucket of kitchen scraps out to the compost pile and found the hazel hedge full of blue jays. They flew off when I approached, making a ruckus as only jays can. They are eating hazel nuts. We’ve done two pickings of nuts, but there are still lots of them high up where we can’t reach. The jays love them and are welcome to them. I like seeing them and hearing them as they fly in and out of the hedge. They sound happy and that makes me happy.

Hazels in their fall finery.

The nuts the jays were taking.

Miriam and Hannah went down to the Thayn’s house again this weekend. They plan to be there every weekend this month. So Stacey and I were home, just the two of us again. We went on a date to the movies Friday night. We went to see The Creator, a not so great and disappointing science fiction movie.

A tiny bit of sunshine one afternoon last week.

After a brief moment of halfhearted sunshine in the morning, Saturday, yesterday, was another rainy, gloomy day. I took a walk in the morning to enjoy the bits of bright color still holding on. Later in the morning Stacey and I took a drive out to Yorks Corners and bought another bushel of apples. We bought three different varieties this time – Cortland, Fuji, and Rome. There is still a little color in the trees here and there and it would have been a prettier drive if there had been some sunshine.

One of our little blueberry bushes.

More apples: from the top clockwise - Rome, Cortland, Fuji.

Later on in the afternoon, we went for another drive with Julie and Jillian to visit a sugar shack over in Hector Township. It is a very nice business called The Sticky Bucket. They tap 14,500 trees in the spring. They have a beautiful evaporator and lots of delicious maple products and gift items. We took a little tour and sampled some of their products, made a few purchases, and came home again. We left Kurt on his own while we were gone. He is on the mend from his surgery, but still coping with pain and other side effects. We were only gone an hour and he was fine.

On our drive to The Sticky Bucket.

The evaporator at The Sticky Bucket.

Saturday evening we had another date, of a sort, at the movies. We worked on processing food upstairs and watched two great movies while we worked. I vacuum sealed freeze-dried carrots and sofrito. Stacey cubed beets and carrots to prepare them for the freeze-dryer. The movies we watched were  Charade, starring Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant, and To Catch a Thief, starring Grace Kelly and Cary Grant. I guess we were in a Cary Grant mood. After being subjected to all the mediocre and ridiculous stuff Hollywood puts out these days, it’s always nice to revisit great films.

The corm patch.

It’s another gray and rainy day today, but it looks like the last one for a while. Today at church the president and matron of the Palmyra Temple, President and Sister Pitts, were our speakers. They gave great talks. Unfortunately, there were only nineteen of us there to hear them. I know partly why our attendance has been so low these past weeks. Some of our members are sick, or recovering from surgery, or traveling, but even so, I wish we would have had more people there to hear such great talks and participate in the great lessons that followed. As branch president, it concerns me. It seems our little congregation is dwindling. On the way home the weather began to clear. It’s nice to see some sunshine.

It looks like we’ll have sunshine for most of this week, but it will be cooler. I don’t mind that as long as things dry out a bit so I can finish the things I need to do before the really cold weather arrives. I will have a busy week and I look forward to it.

Ervin Gingerich and his crew are coming tomorrow to finish the roof. It’s taken longer than I expected, but it looks great. I’ll be glad when they remove the huge lift and trailer from the front yard. Sitting so long on the lawn, they have done some pretty substantial damage – deep ruts and dead spots that I’ll have to fix in the spring. I feel relieved and blessed that we have a solid roof over our heads that will last for fifty years or more. I can cross that one off my List of Repairs and Improvements. Next on the list – redoing the kitchen. There’s always something.

Work on the roof almost done.

Lunch is almost ready. Stacey is making oatmeal burgers and home fries and it smells wonderful. After lunch I hope to take a little Sabbath nap. Later this evening Miriam and Hannah will return home. And then away we go into a new week. Good Sabbath.