Living With Death

[Listen to an audio version of this blog here.]

“There are no cemeteries here,” Mike said the other day, as if he wanted there to be lots of cemeteries everywhere, always. We were driving somewhere, and he thought, for a split second, that a grove of young trees wrapped in burlap were headstones. He seemed disheartened to realize that they were just saplings, not dead people.

Of course, there are cemeteries in Orange County. Plenty of them. With over 3 million residents smashed into 948 square miles, there is bound to be more than a few deaths each day. The fact that neither Mike nor myself could articulate where one cemetery is though, seemed odd. Our ability to tuck death away into inconsequential corners, or to just ignore it completely, is unparalleled. Culturally, we commodify dying, upselling grieving loved ones on caskets and headstones and flowers and hors d’ovoeurs.

It’s easy to not think about death, even though we’re around it always. The chicken meat I ate for dinner was once a living, breathing bird. Except, I don’t have to think about that, because I bought the chicken in a grocery store where it sat on a chilled shelf wrapped in plastic. I cooked the chicken this evening, marinating it in butter and lemon juice and tossing it into salad greens that also came wrapped in plastic. My cat stared up at me as I ate, begging for a taste. Life goes by…