Member-only story
Hello Death. I’m a Farmer.
Why America needs to small farms to rediscover reality.
Today I went to a funeral. Then I went home and found out a fifth chick we received yesterday died, with another heading down that path as I write this. That’ll be six from this order (of 20) that didn’t make it. These events and several others recently make it seem as if death presses close these last few weeks.
I picked up that little chick this afternoon, the one barely hanging on, and took him outside so he could at least see the sun before he passed. Human sentimentality certainly, but as I sat holding him and watching his poor labored breathing, it occurred to me how much of my day was about death. We seem to think remarkably little about such an inevitable and monumental topic in the modern world. It’s incredible how successfully we’ve removed death from our daily experience. But is that actually good?
When a child grows to adulthood without the inoculating experience of the death of animals, a neighbor, or a community associate and their first experience with death is a critical structure of their world, perhaps a mother or father, they are absolutely devastated because they’ve never grown in grief. They don’t know that tomorrow, or the tomorrow after, or even the tomorrow after that, things won’t hurt so much.
