Tag Archives: Mortality

What We Tend

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Dedicated to Gary — I see without looking.

The rake lay across the heart, as if it were Cupid’s arrow. Beads of water gathered on the thermos, upright on the nearby stone bench, right beside St. Francis of Assisi. Leather gloves and pruning shears bore witness to a gardener. Gary.

I couldn’t see him, but I knew he couldn’t be far away because his seafoam, floppy hat was not on the bench with his other things.

I knew what he was up to.

The time had come for him to do what I had done down through the years since I built the garden, filling it in with tons of tan pea gravel and surrounding it with a hedge of Little Missy boxwood.

Early on, the labor of weeding was easy. The pea gravel kept unwanted growth under control and beneath the surface. But over time the Angelina Sedum, filling the two circles in the heart’s upper lobes and surrounding the Magnolia in the lower cusp’s circle, died out but not before leaping over the rings that held them. Small chartreuse-yellow clusters softened the heart but lessened its definition.

Gary, my partner—the man who now shares this mountain life me—was doing more than weeding. He had already restored the flagstone pathway leading from heart to home and back again. Now he was planting healing Ajuga that will settle in and stay within the upper rings, eventually sending up purple spikes. Now he was cleaning, making everything as pristine as the day I finished my handiwork. I sat down on the bench, surveyed the slope, and sighed,

“Well done.”

I never had any intention of building the heart garden. My late partner Allen and I had tamed our mountaintop wilderness with so many paradisiacal garden beds that we had declared a moratorium:

“No more.”

But when Allen died and I reflected on where I would scatter his ashes, as mutually agreed upon, I could not for the life of me decide upon the right spot.

We had talked about resting places on our mountaintop, usually settling on the peony garden. Once, even, Allen suggested the Koi Pond would be perfect, but amid laughter, we both exclaimed:

“Oh, no! What happens when the pond filters get cleaned.”

Then, a few months after his death, he came to me in a dream, his voice carrying into my awakening and lingering there:

“Build my heart.”

I knew where. Near the house, at road’s edge—an untamed area we thought about gardening if we ever gave our moratorium a reprieve.

I had no idea how, but I figured a little math and lots of heart would make it happen.

And it did. I marked off an area twenty feet wide and thirty feet deep, sketched a heart with a black water hose, freed the earth of weeds, and blanketed it with pea gravel running deep. For Allen’s celebration of life, I surrounded the heart with SunPatiens, alternating red and white with tears and rain. I bought a wooden Zen rake, perfect for committing Allen’s ashes to the gravel, leaving tracings that mirrored the heart’s design, growing smaller and smaller as the center neared. Later, I planted the boxwood hedge.

Thus, the heart’s beginning.

Time has been kind. But still, the heart needs Gary’s loving care and tenderness. It rests within the landscape, its presence a part of forever.

The morning after Gary finished, we decided to amble down the path, pristinely cleaned and gently curved, with the heart in clear view.

“You go ahead. I’ll be there shortly.”

“No. I’ll wait. For you.”

It was peaceful and inviting.

We talked a little less than usual, as the morning chill quickened us and a Northern Cardinal in the treetops above whistled out its own litany of little questions.

“I want your ashes to be happy here.”

They will.

And when Gary’s time comes, I’ll board the train, his weight on my lap, my hands on the box, making his final journey to Minnesota where his story began.

Death Watch

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“Life is in the transitions.”
—William James (1842–1910). American philosopher, psychologist, and father of American pragmatism.

I was seven, a skinny, average-height boy standing on the neighbor’s porch. The white clapboard house rose tall, its long windows draped in lace curtains. But at one window, the curtain had been pulled back and the green blind raised, as if inviting me to press my face against the glass. Inside, an open casket cradling an old woman. Her dress, light lavender with a large lace collar. Her waist, small. Her figure, tall and slender. Beyond the casket, the room dissolved into shadow.

I had seen a dead person before, so it wasn’t death that lured me across the road that afternoon. But I had never seen anyone laid out in a casket, all dressed up for a wake.

My mother had talked about wakes. People stayed up all night with the body, neighbors carried in food, and children fell asleep in corners. I never went to one. What I knew came from scraps I overheard—the rustle of women’s dresses, the scrape of chairs on pine floors, the low murmur of prayers. Where I grew up in southern West Virginia in the late 1940s and ’50s, a wake was as ordinary as rain.

I’ve thought about my neighbor’s wake now and then for seven decades. Each time, I return to my seven-year-old self, standing barefoot on the porch, looking in the window, mesmerized by death’s pale lilac gown.

All those years, that was as far as my reflections went until recently when I was listening to “Four Days Late.” Eight words grabbed hold of me:

“The death watch was over.
Buried four days.”

I know the Biblical story. Jesus waited four days before calling Lazarus’s name—long enough, it was believed, for the soul to depart and the body to begin its decay. What followed could only be proclaimed a miracle.

What grabbed me wasn’t the miracle. It was the emphatic statement:

“The death watch was over.”

With that line lodged in my mind, I began noticing how often the idea of a death watch appears, even when we don’t call it that.

In Judaism, the dead are not left alone. There is shemira—watching. Someone stays with the body, for hours or longer, reading psalms, keeping vigil. The tradition holds that the soul lingers nearby for a time, not yet ready to depart. What struck me was not the theology, but the instinct: don’t leave yet. Something is still happening.

In Islam, too, death unfolds rather than strikes. The community gathers quickly. The body is washed, prayers spoken, and the dead oriented toward Mecca. Nothing casual or rushed. The living tend to the dead carefully, attentively, as if aware that departure is not abrupt but gradual, and that presence is a form of respect.

Buddhist and Hindu traditions go further, understanding death as a process that may take hours or days, consciousness loosening its hold slowly. Those nearby are encouraged to remain calm and steady—not to cling or hurry, but to remain present while something completes itself.

Even in the folk practices my mother described, the same posture holds. People stayed. They watched. They waited. Death was not treated as an emergency to be cleared away, but as a threshold to be witnessed.

I wonder what, exactly, those watchers believed they were watching for.

Not for proof. Not for reversal. But for something to finish—or something to begin. Across cultures and centuries there is a shared intuition that death is not an erasure, but a passage. A crossing—something that unfolds just beyond our ability to see, but not beyond our need to attend.

So, we stay.

The seven-year-old boy I was could not have named that instinct. He only knew to stand barefoot on a porch and look through a window. He didn’t understand death or wakes or souls lingering nearby. But he understood—without words—that he was standing as witness at the edge of something mysterious.

Perhaps that is what a death watch has always been—not a refusal of death, but an act of faith in continuance: a willingness to be present at the threshold, to witness a crossing we cannot explain.

Maybe the watching is how we admit we don’t believe it’s over.