Tag: death

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Death is swallowed up by life

Between my dad’s death and his funeral, I dug a new vegetable plot and wove a fence around it using willow branches I had just pruned away. Dad’s body was placed in a wicker coffin, and this plot reminds me of that. With the coming of Spring, the upright branches have begun to sprout with new life.

I tend to talk about my dad dying rather than passing away because I want to face what happened head on. This was my first direct experience of death and, although it was a great privilege to be with my dad as he died, it was quite confusing. He suffered a heart attack and while I waited for the ambulance I tried to reassure him that I was with him, at the same time as not being sure whether he was still with me.

I witnessed my dad struggle to cling on to this life – but what was going on with that eternal part of him, his ‘being’, for want of a better word? As I read 2 Corinthians 5:1-5 the other morning, I was struck by these words in verse 4: so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. This is an extraordinary image of what happens when we die – our being is somehow engulfed in that greater life that is God. Our very being joins with the ground of all being and we fully realise our unity with God, as we are hidden in Him with Christ. My dad was not religious, and he had good reasons for that, yet the things that were most important to him: justice, integrity, and the equal value of all human beings, are important to God too and, I am sure, continue to bind them together.

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Slugs, scissors and the denial of death

This lucky one escaped the slugs.

I shocked and horrified a colleague the other day by explaining that my approach to dealing with the overwhelming slug population in my garden was to snip them in half with scissors. Apparently, she will never look at me in the same way again. I admit that it does sound pretty horrible, perhaps she imagined me hounding the poor defenceless creatures and bloodthirstily relishing the moment of their demise? Let me assure you that nothing could be further from the truth.

As I tried to explain to my colleague, by then in a state of shock and not very receptive to reason, it’s surely more humane to kill them quickly than to drag out their demise using salt, poison or beer? What’s more, I leave their uncontaminated remains to be consumed by other members of the ecosystem (which are probably other slugs, given the fact that the remaining individuals are getting progressively bigger). And I do feel bad about it, it gets harder the bigger the slugs get, and it’s especially difficult when they raise up the front part of their body in an attempt to ‘look human’ and shame me into sparing them. At least I do generally apologise to them first (unless I am too angry about the damage they’ve just done), but when push comes to shove, it’s between them and my vegetables (and they’ve already had more than their fair share).

My daughter, a slug-sympathiser who NEVER lies to me, wound me up terribly the other day by pointing out that slugs had an emotional capacity similar to that of dolphins. After a few seconds of stunned silence, I came to my senses, and continued snipping.

I know there are other methods, I tried out elaborate plastic cones this year that claimed to prevent the entry of molluscs, but my slugs clearly hadn’t read the instructions. Other people collect their slugs and snails and deposit them miles away, to prevent them from returning – but is that kind? Deporting them to unknown territory where they will probably get picked off anyway? Plus, I’m not willing to spend my limited energy on that kind of shenanigans. You might ask where the hedgehogs are in all of this? Well, I saw a couple of them under the hedge earlier in the year, but now they’re nowhere to be seen, and I can’t exactly import new ones.

Why is slicing slugs so problematic? I think it comes down to a denial of death. Killing slugs in this very direct way makes me face the unpleasant fact that I am taking their life away, but it’s their life or the life of my vegetables, and by extension my life. Beyond my hobby gardening, many other organisms have to die for me to live –even if these are usually ‘only’ plants. You can argue that not all forms of life are equal, but the taking of one life to sustain another is just a fact of existence. Or maybe we can look at it the other way around, that life is given, relished and then offered up to another form of life. When my time comes, I look forward to feeding the mushrooms.