These last months I have thought a lot about death. This last week during All Saints and All Souls day I lit a candle for my dear childhood friend who died in a tragic accident this August. Seth’s death was my first experience overwhelmed with the grief of someone my own age, someone whose death came abruptly in a late night phone call from my Mom, shaking me to the core. I brought my heavy aching heart to the farm.  An ache that in these last two months has found a place of comfort and balm for the pain in the connection to the earth through farming.

Death is a part of life. Everyone’s physical space on earth is someday going to come to a end. Just as lives are constantly entering this world others are leaving it.

As much as I knew those realities in a head conceptual way I wasn’t prepared for the swarm of confusing questions that came as I suddenly faced the reality of life’s end in a new way. I attest some of this to how far removed I am from the daily experience of death. In my normal life death flashes by in the sound of ambulance, it is housed in sterile hospitals, or read about in newspaper statistics–a typed number, a far away name.

Walking through the farm field it is impossible to forget life’s cyclical track. Wading through the tomato line my boots squish over fallen tomatoes and the smell of the rotting sun warmed fruit rises.  Though that tomato is not done even in its human labeled  “gone” decomposing state, rather is in a continued state of giving of pouring nutrients into the soil, of shedding seed, of rejoining the earth in a way that gives nothing but possibility for new life. The tomato lines are now gone, tilled and ready for the next planting but I don’t see that space as empty, no it is full of life, full of what was that will enrich the what is to come.

I have been reading a lot of Wendell Berry lately and copying gems of his words on scraps of paper that are now tucked in my brimming journal. Words that put concreteness to faint musings I had as I squashed through juicy tomato lines.

“The second reason for the failure of industrial agriculture is its wastefulness. In natural or biological systems waste does not occur. All that is sloughed off in the living arc of a natural cycle remains with in the cycle; it becomes fertility, the power of life to continue. In nature death and decay are necessary–are one may also say, as lively–as life; and so nothing is wasted. There really is no such thing, then as natural production; in nature, there is only reproduction.”

Just as the tomatoes are in a tangible way  gone from this earth, Seth is gone. While this daily fact is still hard for me to think about, to place in typed words. I find comfort in the fact that just like the tomato patch the space he left is in no way empty. He has left with him 20 years of living; times of thriving, times of pain, booming laughter, present eye-contact, natural leadership, gentle compassion, insight filled wisdom, inspiring curiosity, contagious joy, deep love, all these things and layers more this richness now added to the soil of life. A soil now drenched with the salty tears of us who weep. Soil in which I have already seen sprout beautiful seedlings of new life, reproduction.