Shall We Debate Death?
I have an invisible friend with whom I argue. She and I rarely see eye to eye. She is well intentioned and moral, as I try to be, but we inevitably end up debating the issues that trouble thinking people. Some of our arguments become heated, and I must be careful to restrain my responses when we are out in public, for if I begin to shout and gesticulate when she provokes me, people tend to stare, because only I can see her. Still, I love these arguments. My invisible friend forces me to question and grow.
Recently, as we browsed through a craft fair, she tried holding me to task because I have not renounced eating meat. Realizing that we were headed for another nasty confrontation, I desperately tried to change the subject. However, when she charged me with the crime of insensitivity, of not caring about the lives that ended so that I might eat, I had to respond, for I am intimately acquainted with death. I know that death changes things…. and it is forever.
I discovered many years ago that nothing is the same in death as it is in life. My invisible friend was shopping for a dried flower arrangement, dead flowers, to decorate her home. So I asked her if those dried flowers, as pretty as they were, could compare to a natural garden of live flowers tousled by the breeze in a sunny mountain meadow. Of course, they could not.
Near where we stood, a display of photographs hung on the wall. One depicted a rare beauty, the late Marilyn Monroe. I have seen her movies; they captured some of her essence, even the sound of her voice. But I can only imagine how this might compare to time spent with her, the soft whisper of her breath in my ear, the smell of her hair, or even the brush of her skirt on my arm as she passed by my chair.
My friend doesn't know it, but I have a trophy mount of a bull elk hanging on my wall. I like to think it serves as a fitting memorial to the fine beast that has been feeding my family for a year. A taxidermist did a marvelous job with the bull, he looks very life-like, but I am fully aware that his presence on a wall overlooking the pool table is not the same as the living bull elk I heard bugling in the mountains of Wyoming last autumn.
I concede that death is inevitable. Every seed that sprouts, every egg that hatches, every bawling newborn calf is going to die. Sometimes a life is wonderful and its death a tragedy; often the opposite occurs, a miserable existence but a merciful death. Nobody gets to choose, but nobody escapes, either.
Sometimes I try to deny death, for the images of death disturb me. I turn the page when the newspaper presents photos of a thousand bloated corpses filling a mass grave in some country most couldn't find on a map. I don't look at the tiny calico kitten struck on the road, never to snuggle next to a little girl again. And as a child I ran away from my strangely plastic looking Grandma, lying in a purple box at the front of a room that smelled funny, a room filled by evil sounding organ music and crying aunts that I never saw anywhere else.
But I am concerned with the 'how' of death, for as a society we have no consistency in the way we deal with this. We are horrified by the grisly murder of a child, but would stand in line to torture her killer to death. Some people carry signs to protest a man hunting for elk, then go home to watch endless TV hours of cheetahs that feed their young by chasing down and killing impalas.
A part of a veterinarian's job is to offer relief to animals that are suffering an intolerable existence, a humane death we call it. In effect the doctor conveys a gift of death. This is considered a good thing. But if he were to offer the same relief to his ailing father he would be thrown in jail.
My invisible friend recoils at the thought that I eat meat, that an animal died to feed me, while she is comfortable eating fruit, the unborn babies of a tree. I wonder how anyone decides if any of this is right or wrong?
I'm not proposing we should "kill 'em all and let God sort it out" as some might suggest. But since we all have to live with that person in the mirror, shouldn't we have some latitude to judge ourselves in these matters?
I often ponder how to reconcile the causing of death. I know men who have killed their fellow humans in war with no apparent residual embarrassment, but were paralyzed with grief for accidentally killing their own dog. This year alone, I killed ten thousand ants in my kitchen for no more reason than they bothered me, yet I felt no remorse. And I killed one animal with a rifle, a resoundingly difficult task for me, to put food in the freezer for my family.
Years of introspection preceded, and no doubt will follow, the decision to hunt my own food. To the charge of insensitivity I plead not guilty. I don't know all the answers, or even if there are answers, but it is not for lack of consideration.
And the next time I see my invisible friend, maybe I will ask her this question. If it is wrong to hunt for food and be a taker of life, how can it be right to end suffering and be a giver of death?
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