Death is all around us. Different, but related: Non-life is all around us. There is a lot of matter in the universe, and there are lots of things on Planet Earth. Hardly any of this is alive. Life is bizarre, and improbable, and very, very rare. Except for the things that are alive right this second, everything that has ever lived is dead.  Of all the rocks and dirt and mountains and water molecules, none of them are animated by life. As far as we know, the vacuum of space contains no life – and certainly everything nearby that we have seen in our solar system is without life. 

There is a lot that this scarcity has to teach us about those things that are alive. For one thing, what a sacred gift to have this life. It’s extraordinary enough, as a single organism, to breathe, digest, and practice cellular mitosis, but when you realize the tiny percentage of matter that is living on the planet also includes living cells as varied as algae and dogwood trees and tapirs and Noel Fielding from the Great British Baking Show, it’s a dizzying kaleidoscope. Add to that our newfound and ever-expanding ability as a human species to understand this life – “the human brain learning about itself,” as they say – and I could weep at the wonder of it all. 

Then I think about all the capricious ways we are cavalier about ending life. Killing the ants – the industrious, clever ants! – invading the cat food bowls. The torture of pigs in a slaughterhouse – pigs that would be funny and wise if you got to know them. Hunting our most charismatic giant mammals for their tusks and skins. Razing 400-year-old trees to make way for suburban sprawl These are only obvious and direct examples – factor in the far larger-scale crimes of taking over territory animals need to live, and the poison we’re pumping into the water and air, and the forests cleared for fields, and the warming of the planet, and the destruction is unfathomable. I’m guilty of callous disregard for life all the time, and think our future generations will judge us harshly. We’ll deserve it. 

So death is all around us. And death is right next to us, too. When I love a living being, there will come a time when it will die, and there will be so much grief. It’s a tough fact – everything I love will die, until I die, and won’t be around to watch things die any more. Yikes. 

When I think of death as stealing something from me, it makes me feel cheated and bereft. There’s another angle – what a miracle this living thing was here to begin with. Sometimes I’ve thought that life is the default and death causes a deficit. When I zoom out, I realize a different orientation. There are some things living now. Overwhelmingly, the things around us are dead, or were never alive to begin with. Life is an extraordinarily weird phenomenon, and you can’t expect life to continue any more than you can expect for your Powerball Jackpot numbers to hit five times in a row. It’s absurd and wonderful and bizarre that it’s here at all, and I can’t feel cheated that it’s gone, so much as feel grateful beyond measure that I got to experience such a miracle.

I don’t mean to undermine what people might get out of this by bringing in an element of the spiritual, but this happened, and it’s another of these powerful coincidences that feels more like someone’s trying to tell me something. Weirdly, I was trying to explain the above perspective to Dan one autumn day as we were driving along the Columbia River Gorge, with changing leaves alternating between the evergreens and the feeling that all was right with the world. That very evening, we listened for the first time to this song by Laura Veirs, articulating the Exact. Same. Thing. Except she said it in 4 words, while I’ve been going on for 400:

It’s not too far from Dr. Seuss – “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” And it’s real close to, “From dust we emerged, and to dust we will return.” Death is a return to the way nearly all things are, nearly all of the time. It doesn’t mean something’s been stolen from me, it means something that was so unlikely to be here in the first place had to return. 

“Life is the exception, don’t you forget it.”