The title should perhaps read, Death (Re)defines Me and Us. As a chaplain, and perhaps more specifically, as a human with my particular “Soulcraft,” I think about death daily. It happens to be my road in life to walk alongside those who are dying, wonder with them what death asks of them and of us, and to seek to understand death as best I can. As Stephen Jenkinson teaches, if we didn’t have death, we wouldn’t have life as we experience it. Our appreciation for a flower is very much affected by the knowledge that this particular flower will not be here forever. Our appreciation of the summer is only in the context that summer will change into fall and then into winter. Death does not have to equal trauma, death does not have to equal “giving up,” and death does not have to equal bad. Death IS real and we all will come to our time when it is our time.

My body will nourish the earth one day. I will become the literal compost of new and becoming life.

The difficulty of describing how this lands in my life is palpable. Living and dying is such an individual experience. Each of us has our own take… and to assume I know what it is like for another is ludicrous.And yet, we are so connected. So connected. We as humans have done the earth wrong in a million different ways by forgetting this, by living as if our living and dying is not part of the bigger thing.

For me, I want my to be as aware of my dying as possible. I will tell any who will listen (and perhaps some who won’t) what it is like and how it is to die. Especially my children, and those who I am blessed to elder in their growing and learning. Perhaps one of the greatest gifts I can leave behind is what it is like to go through this particularly individual and uncharted territory, so that when they go through their dying time, they might remember one who has been there before.

I forget sometimes, in any given moment, that I might not be alive in the next moment. Unlikely, perhaps, but things can change in an instant and we do ourselves and others we are blessed to journey with, a deep service to remember this. Life and death, both are good and beautiful things. As Richard Rohr says, “Everything belongs.”

My body will nourish the earth one day. I will become the literal compost of new and becoming life. This is where I belong in the circle of life. The earth gives me life and one day I will give her life. What does this do to us to feel this? To know it deep in our bones as we walk this land? In the depth of our lungs as we breath into our being? To eat our food, each plant and animal having had to die to sustain us?