On Death and Defecation

I went to San Francisco a couple of months ago, looking forward to some time alone in a big city. I didn’t do much, but I found a Blue Bottle Coffee shop by the Port of San Francisco, so I knew it was going to be a good day. The weather was beautiful, with just enough clouds to be interesting and the sun shining its approval on the new Bay Bridge. I sat outside with my compostable cup of coffee branding me as a responsible, Bay-Area consumer and watched a crow poop after being chased by little kids. And I thought about death. I don’t really know why the two were associated in my head, but there was a sense of finality to the way the crow defecated and flew away, leaving his mark behind. I thought it was pretty analogous to the way so many of us want to digest life, getting the most we can out of it so that we can crap out a glorious legacy before dying and leaving this earth.

I mean, it seems so simplistic. We go on learning, building, destroying, and loving and then we die. That should be depressing, but honestly, when I think of myself and the people I love as non-invincible, I feel on the periphery of some kind of wonder. It’s kind of humbling and simultaneously empowering to realize that no matter what we do or don’t do, what we achieve or don’t achieve, death is the one thing everyone gets to do. It makes me feel honored, because people like Gandhi and MLK died too. And then my ashes will become soil and the carbon from my body will be a part of new life, just like I got that carbon from stars that died their own, brilliant deaths. In the grand scheme of things, I mean both nothing and everything. Sigh, existentialism.

I should clarify, the prospect of dying also scares the crap out of me the way those children scared it out of that crow. It’s not like I’m looking forward to death or claiming to know what it’s like, and when I think about a world in which the ones I love the most no longer exist, I sense the deep holes death can carve. My family and I’ve talked about this a lot, as we tend to do with the things that make us most uncomfortable (you can either call us growth-oriented or masochistic). My parents have said they wish to be cremated after they die, and have their ashes scattered in various places. My Mom has said that she wants part of her ashes scattered in the Ganges and part of them used in my garden for planting. When I heard that, I oddly enough felt so alive I wanted to cry (big surprise). I think that’s because I realize that the love inside living beings is as warm as death is cold, and that can transfer to new life, just like carbon. I know that death is just another fact in the path of life, for every specie, and that it will be me giving those ashes meaning. I will draw from the flowers born of it a life beyond their photosynthetic functions. I don’t know if that’s crazy, but if I can see symbolism in a crow’s process of digestion, I think I’m allowed to find my mother in a bed of flowers.