Death Hurts Most the First Time Around

By Merle Harton, Jr.

It was hot and the lawnmower I pushed seemed to move slower, slower … slower in fact than I was moving. I wondered whether this lawnmower was as susceptible to the heat as I was. After all, it was a mere mechanical device. But then so was I—sort of. So I asked myself: was this lawnmower actually slowing down by itself, as an act of free will, or was it just it getting tired in the heat, slowing me down, forcing me to work harder? The end result would have to be that the two of us would just stop working. That seemed like a good idea to me.

I parked the mower in the shade of the single oak tree in the front yard and headed for the front porch and the tumbler of ice water. The ice was almost melted, but the water was still cold. I drank slowly and began to think of the utter stupidity of mowing a lawn. I looked around the corner of the porch at the lawnmower standing against the oak tree. It seemed refreshed, in fact more refreshed than I was. I wandered back out into the yard. After all, I have an indomitable spirit and I would vanquish this yard. I turned and looked at our new house, our house of six months. It still looked impressive. Then, renewed with my indomitable spirit, I turned again to the yard.

There was not really much more to mow and the centipede grass in the yard offered little resistance to the whirling blades of the push mower in front of me. A neighbor drove by and waved. I waved back, suspecting that as soon as he was out of sight he would start snickering at me and my pushmower. There are not many of them in use today. Someone called it an old man's mower, which I took to be an intimation that what I was using was actually a piece of antiquity, an item of technology that had been supplanted by something vastly superior, something that was no longer made by hammer and anvil and a strong man standing over hot coals, but some part of a larger apparatus which assembled things bit by bit and then painted them and moved them to showrooms. I've used my share of power mowers. They're noisy, prone to frequent breakdowns, and I just hated having to get gasoline for the things. Besides, unless you use one of those mowers that can pull themselves across the lawn, you still have to use your own energy to move a power mower over the grass, and they're in fact considerably heavier than the mower I was now pushing. Besides, my mower was cutting grass like precision scissors. The only thing it wouldn't cut effectively was weeds.

There's something thoroughly sinister about weeds. Some of them are low-slung and spread out; cutting them only trims their tops, leaving them to sprawl outward. Others are tall, springing upwards, past the tops of the grass they intend to overcome, until they are valiant against my mower's blades, which was able only to push the tall weeds down until they could spring back up, almost triumphant, while the grass around it received its weekly clipping.

Weeds have an advantage over all other living plants. They have been almost entirely left alone to develop, against all the odds humans can throw at them. Poison strengthens them. Uprooting them only amuses them into moving about. Trimming them, cutting them to the same height and size as the grass around them, only gives them a guise which pleases them. They have a resilience and an energy to survive what no other vegetable can endure.

I've heard about people who eat weeds. I have no problem with that. They can come over and eat my weeds any time. As a point of fact, there once was a famous man who ate all kinds of exotic plants and encouraged others to do the same. Not only did he eat weeds, but he ate things in lawns that you and I never even knew were there. He wrote books about it, and even ate tree bark. He died of stomach cancer. Now I don't know whether his cancer had anything to do with what he ate, but I do believe that moderation is a useful rule, if only because we have ample experience with the burdens of excess. Ask any alcoholic. And the Buddha recommended that, as did Confucius, although the latter did seem to spend an immoderate amount of time wandering around mainland China. Jesus didn't have much to say about moderation as a lifestyle choice, but I think that he'd agree that if you're going to eat weeds, or tree bark, you should at least do so with some plan toward balancing your diet to include other foodstuffs we know to be healthful. Surely cancer is another way for the natural body to tell us that something is bad for us on the whole, or for some individual. Even this can promote a lesson of nature: eating weeds is bad for some people. Like sugar for diabetics, salt for the hypertensive, animal dander for the asthmatic. In moderation, these things are not harmful. In abundance, they kill. Take exhaust from the modern combustion engine. It is bad enough to live in a country that cannot do without the combustion engine, but do I really have to cut my lawn with it?

Of course, I have seen (and used) some power mowers whose whirling blades have also had trouble with tall weeds, as though the weeds themselves had some kind of special coating that resisted sharp objects coming at them from the side. What are trees, anyway, but prehistoric weeds? These things in my yard would surely find a way to outlive any kind of lawnmower—or die trying. Such is that entity we call Nature.

But Nature isn't as generous with humans. It's not so much that we can't reason our way through a patch of weeds; it's rather that we get a plethora of choices in life and some of those just happen to be aesthetic. Surely it's aesthetics that prevents us from coexisting happily with weeds. How much simpler life would be without that curious sensibility. Without a sense of aesthetics, we could buy food based on smell and taste alone, and not on packaging. We could all get around on public transportation, and there would be no graffiti to see; and if there were, we wouldn't care. We could get more things done, since television would not be a medium of entertainment but rather of information alone. Sex would be so much more accessible, if quantity over quality could coherently replace what is lost by the rituals of courtship and foreplay. Important people—that is, persons in political and ruling positions—would be required to keep diaries, for all histories would end up as chronologies. Music would no longer be a form of entertainment, but a tool of ceremony and of therapy. Our clothes would be simpler, and the choices would be solely utilitarian and economic.

How boring! But that was a comment from a man in an aesthetic mood. I've contradicted myself, you say? Okay, so I've contradicted myself. You figure out something better to do with these weeds bending down, as if it's all a great game, beneath the churning blades of my push mower.

I'll be honest with you. I rarely attempt this in the blazing sun and the usual July heat in Louisiana, but today was different. I had a need to expend energy, which came out of nowhere when I learned this morning that my friend Robert Jollisaint had died. Forty-two was too young to die. If he had been an invalid, or succumbed to some exotic terminal illness or perhaps some rare congenital affliction that could have prepared me for his end—that, I think, would have made his death a transitional passage, something anticipatory, like the end of a movie. We know it's going to happen—and we accept it, like a fact.

Robert's death was more like you're watching the movie and the power goes out. Suddenness is really what makes Death a dangerous presence, because it's hardly ever predictable, and God knows we humans like predictability. That's why science eventually became so popular, once scientists figured out how to get it to work. In many ways, living without science is like living as a foreigner in a strange land. You never know when someone's going to walk up to you and say something you can't understand. It's really unnerving, having to live with that kind of unpredictability. Modern science now gives us a kind of translation, or perhaps a transliteration, of the language spoken by the natural world. It doesn't always say happy things, but at least now we anticipate the voice and fathom some of the grammar.

The yard was just about done. The little clippings from the pushmower were lying around, little cellulose hairs full of water, ready to return their small treasures to the soil. Grass thrives on its own mulch. It is not cannibalistic, but with the aid of microbes what has been sloughed off becomes a kind of food. Strange, indeed, but then grass has its own natural agenda and the aesthetics of food never stands in its way.

Having mowed the lawn, my last task was to go around whacking down the weeds. The tallest ones I cut close to the ground with the whirling nylon strand from my rechargeable-battery-powered hand-held weed cutter. Those weeds that look thoroughly menacing, looking as though they were bred to last longer than trees, I pulled up by hand. I would grab the unruly weed as close to the ground as possible, taking into my hand as much of the base as could be grasped, and pull upward. Sometimes I would get the entire rascal, roots and all. More often, though, I could only get the whole of the top, leaving the roots beneath the soil to taunt me at a later date with a new growth.

My pulling and tugging was yielding some devastation, as I omnipotently took it upon myself to expel from the universe as we know it future specimens of well-fitted survivalist weeds. One particular tough guy fought back, holding his ground with roots I imagined to extend 3 or 4 feet deep into the soil. I pulled until my back throbbed. I rose and rested and then quickly, as if to take him by surprise, grabbed a hold again and pulled. Almost all of it came out of the ground. A sliver of blade remained with roots attached. It was this piece of left weed that sliced through my index finger, right at the joint under my knuckle. Blood hurried from the wound. I wrapped it with the sweat band I kept around my head. That can't be the best thing for the wound, I thought, but then I had nothing else to use, other than my shirt or pants, both of which were as far from antiseptic as the band that was now turning red from the flow.

Watching my sweatband growing redder, I was taken aback by the thought that, were I a second-century Roman centurion, I'd be more concerned about the blood leaving my body than I am now, being a 21st-century suburban lawn warrior who's concerned about what's sneaking into the wound. It seems the more we know, the more we have to fear, especially things—things that not even electron microscopes can disclose—that only scientific theory can vouchsafe exists. Thank God for my natural defenses, battalions of them, ready to battle the little microbes that waited on the weed's skin to enter a human fort and attack it from within. I was thankful for the helping hands of humans who found these things in theories and could conjure up, from their cerebral alembics, antidotes and cures to help my natural defenses, like reinforcements, cope with the new techniques of hitherto unknown intruders.

I pondered these wonders further as I went inside to wash my wound and apply a dressing. After all, I have an indomitable spirit and a little blood-letting was not going to buckle me.

"What happened?" Christine asked, catching me in the kitchen over the sink with my slashed hand under running water.

"I lost a battle but won the war," I answered.

"Oh."

"Is that all you can say? I am standing here, my life blood flowing into the sewer system, and all you can say is 'Oh'?"

Christine pulled some supplies from a cabinet over the toaster and came toward me. She was, I then pictured her, a nurse with dressing for a soldier in a MASH unit. Her auburn hair, with a loud suggestion of red when the light shimmered just right, fell down in front of her face, a little curl dangling over her left brow.

"This ought to help," she said. I dried my hand and watched as she laid a quarter inch of antibiotic ointment on the cut and covered it with a Band-Aid. She straightened and looked at me with moist azure eyes. She smiled and a wrinkle appeared at the top of her nose. Her nose. She hated her nose. Too big, she said, but to me it was a perfect nose, or at least perfect for her face, which is the way noses are supposed to be on a pretty face.

"Thanks," I said, stealing a kiss.

"My hero," she said.

"Thanks again."

She searched my face. "You've had too much sun. Why don't you drink some water—not cold water, now—and then lie down and rest. You can shower later. Robert's wake is not until 5."

"Will you wake me up?" I asked, taking a glass from the overhead cabinet.

"Yes, I'll wake you up."

I filled my glass with tap water, and drank it slowly before heading for the bed. I stretched out on my back and tucked under my head one of the small sofa pillows Christine had laying over the bed pillows. With my feet, shoes and all, dangling off the foot of the bed, I laid my arms up above my head and closed my eyes and—

"—Get up! Marc, wake up!"

I think there should be a study done on the sleep habits of men and women and on the differences that such a study would reveal. I really think that more men are killed in their sleep than women. This is so, I think, because men approach sleep with a double purpose: one, to sleep as soundly as is possible and, two, to sleep as often as possible. It's not that we would seek sleep were some other task set before us, but rather that the want of sleep overcomes us more often than it does women. I've heard reports of men who survive on 5 and 6 hours of sleep a day, but then I've been lied to before. Surely such men must die young. A man who sleeps well and sleeps often will live longer. He'll miss a lot of life, but what he does get out of life is more appreciated, since there is nothing like stepping out into the world after a really good rest. They key to the good rest, though, is to do so until your body wakes you; waking up before that natural alarm is like being half-sober.

"Marc! We have a funeral to go to! Get up!"

So I got up, half-sober, but harboring the realization that women will never understand the importance of sleep for a man's total well-being. I hopped in the shower, dressed, and in a few minutes was presentable in my best dress clothes.

We left the house to our 13-year-old, Kimberly, and Marshall, who is 10, and drove out to the Hall of Eternal Peace mortuary, arriving at about 4:50. The parking lot was scattered with cars and we could see strangers walking in pairs into the mortuary. We parked and went up.

Inside was a young man dressed in black, as I was, except that my tie was louder than his. A message board directed us to the wake for Robert Joulissaint.

The room was crowded with strangers, all with sad faces. I was sad, but not broken up. I was sad, but sad for these people. Death is something I have had to deal with before. Death to me is my father in a box, lying inanimate and as inaccessible to me as he was when he was a stranger. Death is my grandmother when I came home from 8th grade. Her broken hip kept her bedridden and helpless and I still get a strange feeling when I think about emptying her bedpan. It was not the bedpan but the look on her face that haunts me. When I came home that day, my father came to the door and said, "Your grandmother just died," and he looked sad, but he was only wearing the mask of a sad person; behind that mask was a man whose emotions were as hollow as his words to me. My mother was in tears; this was real sadness and I knew that. As I walk into her room, which she shared with my two sisters, there is an unsettling calm. Before me on the bed, lying still, was a dead body, yet a peaceful piece of amber. Before she died, she told my mother, who was not expecting her death, "Papa is coming for me." This saddened my mother, because she believed her. My grandmother possessed a sensitivity that my mother, too, was given. She read the Taro cards and could, even without the cards, amaze her listeners with her prophetic words. My mother believed her, and so did I. My grandmother's foreknowledge of her own death brought her not terror but relief and happiness.

I know that birth and death are kind of opposites, but it's a shame that we can't deal with them in the same way. I mean, at least we can anticipate a person's birth: we know what is about to transpire and prepare for it and celebrate it. There was once an obese woman who went into Charity Hospital complaining of a stomachache. The pain subsided when she gave birth to a baby boy. Only in the rarest of cases do we find birth by total surprise. Death, on the other hand, almost always surprises us. If only we could prepare for it, as my grandmother was partly able to do, and to celebrate it, as another real part of being human.

But then I'm not in control of my society. I don't make the rules. I can comment on them and make recommendations, but alone I can do nothing. I could, I suppose, run right on over to Robert's body, turn to the crowd of mourners, and with a smile rejoice: He's dead! That's great! He was a miserable man—you all know that! Hey, now, why the long faces? Come, let us celebrate his newly found peace! Grab your hymnals! Let us sing! What? Selection twenty-three, "Is My Team Ploughing?" Excellent choice! All together now….

"Marc. Are you all right?" That was Christine. She had her hand on my arm and she was moving me through this crowd of sad faces. We made our way among a swarm of bodies, until I was face to face with a woman who was sobbing uninhibitedly. As she cried, she kept her eyes closed, but I think she had no choice: her eyes were closed shut by a potent grief, the kind of grief that makes you want to shut out entirely this world of light, this world of smiles and flesh pressed gently and blushed cheeks and a bright sunlit bedroom on a late Saturday morning and sunshowers on a garden of pretty many colored flowers which wait in patience for the tender hand of a lover, who will exchange them.

"Ellen, we're so sorry about Robert." That was Christine again, speaking to the sobbing wife of my dead friend. Ellen was surrounded by others who were encouraging this party of sadness. Really, who would want to attend this kind of party? There is no music, no noisemakers, just silence and moans; no dancing allowed, only standing, now on one foot and now on another, and sitting with hands clasped and talking with voices that you would only use on an occasion such as this; no balloons, only flowers—lots of flowers—in extravagant display around the room, on tri-part stilts, in big jars that no kid would ever think of picking cookies out of, in ugly tall green glass vases with scarab-like bumps all over, in arrangements that Nature alone had never conceived and placed there by hands especially skilled in the killing of lovely vegetation. But forget about the many colors: there were a thousand fragrances wherever you pointed your nose; there was rose, tulip, camomile, magnolia, jasmine, and new light sweet odors that could be flowers, but perhaps not; there were smells that evoked images of sea and wind, and of leather, and of wood; there were thick heavy maple fragrances and sharp pine and exotic spices and strange mixed concoctions, like those that cling to your clothes after passing the department-store beauty counter, and rouge and fruit-flavored lipsticks, and astringent lotions, and five kinds of bath oils, and animal musk, and smells that may hide luring pig pheromones; and there were a hundred soaps—deodorant soaps, detergent bars, skin-softening cold cream-filled beauty soaps, soaps in funny shapes that sit in a small pile near the sink of the guest bathroom. And nowhere was there a hint of dead flesh. And the woman cried, because in this room was a mass of dead flesh, but it was flesh that had been made up to look as if it were alive but asleep, animated but now at rest, a living force that could not now be quickened. And the woman cried because she knew no better than anyone else around here how again to touch something that had once been warm and vital, or how to speak to someone who was no longer there. Robert Joullisaint was dead and she could not deal with that. And she cried openly because her grief could not be contained in the gaping wound in her chest. And she could not stop crying because God would not comfort her and the mortals she was left with were blind apprentices, unskilled and possibly with little potential for the mastery over emotions that death asks us to challenge.

And I spoke to this woman, the wife of my friend, but with words I do not now recall. And she spoke out loud, perhaps to me, perhaps to the group around her, about the health of her husband, the surprise of his death, and the events that preceded it. And as she spoke, still I heard nothing.

And I left the woman weeping and walked to the casket to pay my last respects to my friend who was waked. How peaceful he was. The tanned face and the tanned hands crossed on his chest were unfamiliar to me. Robert was always pale, for he was always inside some building or other, whether at work or at home, and sheltered in transportation by a car. And I thought of the last time I had been with my friend, as we sat together during some dinner occasion at his house and talked about computers, and his in particular, and the programs he used and desired and the best ways to optimize the equipment he had.... And I looked long at his face, trying to picture him upright, since I had never seen him lying down, and trying to see him as the pale man I knew before, beneath the makeup, for I knew that his natural color must now be yellow-brown, the color of amber, like my grandmother Andersen. And I accepted that he was not sleeping: he was dead. This was death, where someone we love is no longer responsive to our words and the flesh is still, and amid the tumult of emotions and memories there is a fleeting feeling of peace and compassion and a happiness in the small thought that this being cannot feel, like a living human, the pain we feel at the suddenness of a departure toward a place we do not know. This was death, this being now changed; an inanimate thing, yet somehow still a person, which held within it something unspoken, something that could be discharged if I touched it, or even neared it, like a hot spark.

And Christine and I left the wake, saying our goodbyes as we walked out. And we got in the car to leave. And I frightened Christine then, because she had never seen me cry. And I was frightened, too, because I could not control the tears, and I did not remember how to stop this and I sobbed in a voice I did not recognize. And with my hands on my face I tried to cover my eyes and my mouth, but still I continued to cry, and I cried until the memories hurt me no longer.

The New Quaker (Fiction): "Death Hurts Most the First Time Around"
Copyright © 1999-2004 Merle Harton, Jr.  All rights reserved
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