The year of dying (an essay)

Sometimes, death wins. My cousin Joel, who’s about my age and a nice guy (why is it always the nice ones), is dying (cancer). And today, as he begins hospice, we had to give up on our pear tree, as it’s finally succumbing to blight. There’s no cure for this cancer, nor this blight. Last year we saved the pear, or so we thought, and had nine fruits from its branches. My cousin got an “extra” year, too, but now it’s 2023, and Death comes to claim them both.

This year seems to have taken up dying as its prevailing theme, at least here at our house.

The business I launched seven years ago and grew to employ six writers at our peak is slowly dying. A company is not a person. But a small, family business, as ours was, has a certain life of its own, and when the people who made it what it is are let go, the death is palpable. We wrote dialogue for video-game characters for a living. Our voice actors gave each character speech. The laughter we shared on table reads, the spirit we breathed into tiny screen images—those had an energy, and that energy has now gone cold and dark. Dormant, like the earth in winter.

The business of dying, too, is serious. My cousin Joel and his wife kept birds, and in the final weeks of his life, he requested the birds be homed elsewhere so that he could die in quiet. It takes concentration and effort to leave this world, as I have seen in other people who are dying. My husband’s mother, when she left, had to work at it. It took everything she had to die.

But dying is not always quiet. This spring I raised five chickens from day-old fluffs to gangly, eight-week-old teenagers, at which point they were all killed. A friend who unlike me has many years of chicken raising behind her calls this phenomenon the “May murders.” It’s a springtime rush for everything to eat and feed its own young, often at the expense of someone else’s.

Fudge Pie, the runt, the one I’d bonded with the most, went first, of course, as this is a year that finds it amusing to take your favorite chicken. She’d slipped out of her enclosure and was wandering in the open garlic bed, likely oblivious to the danger, when the kite or hawk—I’m not sure which, as our urban neighborhood hosts both—swooped down and sunk its claws deep into her skull, breaking her neck. Mercifully, she must have gone fast. I came home from wandering a used bookstore, ignorant of the crisis facing my chickens, and found her still warm but gone from this world.

The others were not so lucky. One night, a slithy tove stole into their coop through the egg door—a posthumously-noted flaw in the coop design—and brutally slaughtered the lot of them. There was a struggle that left behind the culprit’s claw, ripped out and still clinging to a hunk of paw meat. So one of my flock, probably the leader, Queenie—who’d eyed me through a crack in that egg door the night before with a look of suspect derision—had extracted at least her pound of flesh. The scene that greeted me that fateful May morning was like something out of a slasher flick, with feathers and legs and pieces of my sweet chickie-boos strewn carelessly around the coop. I thought the tove, probably a mink, took one body away to feast on later, but then I found what was left of her, drowning in the water bowl.

When we raise livestock, we make a pact with them to provide for their needs and protect them so that they will in turn provide for some of our needs. My chickens held up their end of the bargain, tilling the soil, fertilizing it, and eventually, they would have given their eggs. I, in turn, failed them. That’s on me, a lesson for another go, if I’m so brave.

I’m an urban farmer, and I use the word farmer literally, as we are officially one of only two such farms in the St. Louis area. Due to more flexible size limits and use regulations, backyards like mine of just a quarter of an acre can now be declared a “farm.” This change might bring new life into farming, a dying occupation, or at least maybe that’s the hope. Fewer than one percent of US citizens are farmers, but it’s even worse than that sounds: “Farmers” are defined as principal producers, according to the latest United States Department of Agriculture Census, from 2017. “The term producer designates a person who is involved in making decisions for the farm operation,” says the USDA. So we’re not defining “farmer” as the person who owns the land, as I own this quarter acre, but in this somewhat amorphous category of “decision-maker,” which is more loosely and variously assigned.

My cynical mind, now attuned to so much decay, wonders if the relaxed rules for the farm designation isn’t just a ploy to make the dire picture of agriculture in these United States look less alarming. If your average urban small-flock chicken raiser can now don a pair of overalls and call herself a farmer, especially with government grants on the line, that paltry less-than-one percent number will surely go up.

This is my first real strike at farming, as I’ve lived in either suburbs or their cities proper practically all my life.

The rest of this is free to read here. If you don't want to subscribe, just hit "CONTINUE READING," though if you like this maybe you'd want to subscribe, which you can also do for free.

Other Permie threads that relate:
- How to Homestead When You Don't Have a Homestead
- Chicken coops/runs/tractors/paddocks, etc.

That was an intriguing read, thank you. Very well written.

All years are years of death- and life. Life and death are top and bottom, left and right. Different ends of the same. "Both" are coexistent with each other,  only appearing to be separately occurring due to perspective. It is a cruel design of the demiurge that each birth is also a death sentence.

Obviously, human deaths that occur relatively early seem tragic to the surviving observers.  Those deaths are spared, at least, from what appears to be the slowest, cruelest human death- that of old age. This is another cruel yet inherent truth of this realm.

Your observations  on physical death are all valid and coherent and true, but all those ships have sailed.  The year has no identity other than what you give it.  If you make it the year of death in your head, it is not death or the reality of death or the mean old demiurge causing that gloomy outlook.

One of the best things about permaculture/homesteading/farming is that we consciously surround ourselves with life and all of life's attendant activities. We have eschewed the death focused culture of industry for life and growth and cyclical understandings. You have all of that around you. That is a gift you have given to yourself.

Perhaps shift your perspective and recall that is also, and always, a year of life.

Jeff Lindsey wrote:That was an intriguing read, thank you. Very well written.

All years are years of death- and life. Life and death are top and bottom, left and right. Different ends of the same. "Both" are coexistent with each other,  only appearing to be separately occurring due to perspective. It is a cruel design of the demiurge that each birth is also a death sentence.

Obviously, human deaths that occur relatively early seem tragic to the surviving observers.  Those deaths are spared, at least, from what appears to be the slowest, cruelest human death- that of old age. This is another cruel yet inherent truth of this realm.

Your observations  on physical death are all valid and coherent and true, but all those ships have sailed.  The year has no identity other than what you give it.  If you make it the year of death in your head, it is not death or the reality of death or the mean old demiurge causing that gloomy outlook.

One of the best things about permaculture/homesteading/farming is that we consciously surround ourselves with life and all of life's attendant activities. We have eschewed the death focused culture of industry for life and growth and cyclical understandings. You have all of that around you. That is a gift you have given to yourself.

Perhaps shift your perspective and recall that is also, and always, a year of life.

I really thought I did that with the essay's closing, but maybe you didn't get to read it at the link? If so, then I have simply failed in my attempt.

You haven't failed, I was only responding to the post and didn't click the link.

I have a follow up question. We sometimes play old school video games but I am not a "gamer."
I do see that the video game industry is booming but that AI "generated" voices are also booming.

Is AI the cause of your company's downturn?

Jeff Lindsey wrote:You haven't failed, I was only responding to the post and didn't click the link.

I have a follow up question. We sometimes play old school video games but I am not a "gamer."
I do see that the video game industry is booming but that AI "generated" voices are also booming.

Is AI the cause of your company's downturn?

Well, I'm glad you found the link!

The game industry isn't booming. It's been a solid year+ of layoffs across the board, with recent jobs for game writers attracting as many as 3,000 applicants for one role. It's a complicated situation, and, I think, a bit off-topic for Permies.