Death in the Time of Corona

Ah, springtime. Sowing squash. The promise of seedlings. Everything green and flowery and full of life. Well…

We endeavored to garden to surround ourselves with life, but have come to understand that most of gardening is death.

I doubted many times whether I would post this essay. The topic feels especially tender during a pandemic and as we confront the fatal consequences of race that have plagued this continent and beyond from the conquistadors to the present day. In comparison, death on the scale of our tiny garden can feel quaint, at best.

This conflict reflects the play between the global and the local. My values, my interactions, and my life reflect the global social conditions. And with instant global communication, I am tempted to drown in the global sea.

But I can only speak for my local, the scale for which my human comprehension is suited. Nuance is only possible within the local. I can make myself of service to hurting global communities but I cannot speak for them.

In any case, global conditions emerge from the local. We learn, we grow, we observe, and we care for those in our local. Global lessons are derived from local experiences.

My local is our 9,000-square-foot plot and the life and death of all it hosts.

In my local, we wanted to build relationships with more-than-human life. We felt a “species loneliness” while living and traveling among the human monocultures of modern life. Through gardening, we have begun to stitch together that separation. We observe the wheel of tomato generations from seed to plant to flower to fruit to seed again. We are attentive to the imperceptible layering onto the trunk of a persimmon tree.

But in learning about life, we confront death.

Day one of gardening is death. To make room for what I want to grow, I must first clear the way. “Clear the way” being a euphemism for the death of everyone who built their home where I want to garden. With every nudge of my shovel, I decapitate clovers and grasses and violets from their roots, severing biotic communities of plants and fungi and microbes and earthworms from many generations of cohabitation. I pile their bodies to the side and churn through their home to yank out living roots. I cart them off to the chicken run to be shredded apart by the chicken’s scratching. Any survivors? Well, when the ducks see the shovels come out, they waddle right on over. The turned-over dirt makes for a first-class duck buffet. We have come to call their onslaught “worm armageddon.”

Now with my lifeless medium known as a “garden bed”, I carefully tuck in the chosen few: a handful of individuals whose life began in a scene out of the Matrix, in isolated cells in a controlled environment under a grow light. Except even there, maybe only half survived to be transplanted out. And more don’t survive the transplant.

From there, the battle only intensifies. I play judge, jury, and executioner in the court of who gets to live, who has to die. I hold in my hands the fate of multitudes. 

Careful inspection of the new transplants reveals colonies of colorful aphids clinging to the underside of tender leaves. The aphids will puncture the leaves and suck calories out of the plant. One or two bugs, even a vulnerable seedling can survive, but aphids reproduce at an astonishingly aggressive rate. Left unchecked, healthy green kale can become a tower of powdery white aphids in under a week. The colony will destroy the plant and then seek new territory across the garden.

And so, we spend many waking hours destroying these antagonists by knocking them off their tomato-leaf buffet into a bowl of soapy water to drown.

And then there are the “weeds.” Their crime and namesake come from my mental designation of them as “unwanted”, nothing more. The sentence for their crime is a quick death, plucked out by an executioner whose fleeting awareness of them is colored by annoyance with maybe a dash of pity.

My judgment came easier when I could decipher something as “not that thing I planted here.” But true to form, we weren’t very careful with all our sowings. A row of 6-inch-tall tomato seedlings is easy enough to segregate, but we have beds with 20-30 species (flowers, herbs, lettuces) planted by seed. At some point, the designation between what was purposeful and what is weed overlaps or becomes irrelevant.

Slowly, I have grown accustomed to what these weeds actually “are”. The triumphant spears? Pokeweed: that can go. The sprawling vine stuff? Ground ivy: keep it in check and feed it to the chickens. Those delicate greens? Chickweed: try it in a pesto! The sword-like leaves? Probably dandelion: savor their bitterness on the spot or throw it in a saute alongside the collards.

The heart-shaped leaves? Oh no, not again. Some weeds I rethink pulling. But the violets, agh. Pretty in a meadow, but dastardly when trying to grow vegetables. Their knobby tubers grip to the clay. Any attempt to pull up their roots from a prepared bed is impossible without disturbing the soil. Even with a finger around the root, I cannot pry them from the ground. In the midst of all my killing, I catch myself, and chide myself, for enjoying their extermination. Attempted extermination, I should say. Eradication is impossible, as violets seem to love nothing more than disturbed soil. After laboriously removing them one-by-one from the turned-up dirt, a week later hundreds will have sprouted again.

And the maples, agh. The neighbor’s maple tree must have had a bumper crop this spring, sending those twirly little helicopters to every corner of our garden. They were cute when falling from the sky. “No way can all those sprout,” I thought. But a month later and Lauren and I have serious debates about whether we have more or less than 10,000 baby maple trees coming up in the garden. (It’s more, I assure you.) No matter how heavily we mulch in an attempt to cut off the life before it begins, still groves of baby maples pop through. 

Something about maple trees makes me pause before ripping them out. It’s a tree! A majestic tree! Or, at least, it has the potential to be. This cute little baby tree with its cute little baby maple leaves could outlive me if I let—nope, it’s gone, tossed aside to die.

Where does this leave me? Admittedly, I fall on the sappy side of the spectrum. When Lauren and I first met 11 years ago, we bonded over our mutual “bugatarianism.” As in, we will catch and escort indoor bugs back outside rather than kill them. A few more examples of how I have a harder time “letting go” than most:

1. We walk past a fig tree on the UVA campus and I notice a recently-broken branch. After a brief moment of sadness, I remember how easy it is to propagate figs from cuttings. I snag it and we finish the last two miles of our walk with our lone water bottle sacrificed to carry our new little friend. I’d give it a 5% chance of success, but hey, that’s higher than zero.
2. Our friends cut down a young mulberry tree, maybe eight feet tall, because it was growing into their fence. We witnessed the extirpation, and well, now we have a severed 8-foot mulberry tree sitting in a bucket of compost water in our dining room as we watch its leaves slowly die. I’d give it a 1% chance of resprouting enough roots to survive, but hey, that’s higher than zero.
3. Heck, no one can cut into a butternut squash from the grocery store without me rushing over to save the seeds from getting thrown away. (We grew some bomb squash last year from those seeds, I’ll have you know.)

More burdensome are the deaths of those whose care is our direct responsibility.

Many of our seedlings, we have tended to since January. We applauded their sprouting. We watched as their first leaves unfurled. For weeks, we carried them outside in the morning and back inside in the evening. We scrutinized their stems for aphids and watered their soil when dry. When the time came to transplant them out, we anxiously checked the weather for signs of frost in the forecast, as frost will kill many warm-weather vegetable plants.

The average last frost in Charlottesville is April 7. The “90% chance of last frost”, the date on which “you are almost guaranteed not to get frost after” is April 16. By then, we hadn’t seen frost since February. So we carefully separated tomato roots intertwined with the bottom of their outgrown pots and patted them into their beds.

But then, the second week of May, disaster loomed on the forecast: low of 33 on May 11. I would anxiously refresh weather.com every hour. One day, the forecasted low would be 34. The next, 35. The next, 31!? The dreaded night came, and that evening, we emptied our cabinets and closets of any pot, blanket, tarp, trash bags—anything that looked remotely like it could insulate a plant—and set to work covering everything. I even dug out some recently transplanted guys to bring back inside.

The next morning, we woke to a blanket of white crystals covering everything. Some plants escaped relatively unscathed. For others, mostly tomatoes and basils, their blackened leaves rotted away to nothing. The deaths of our plant babies left us feeling even more discouraged and hopeless after what had happened a few days before…

It’s about Rosko.

Our baby boy duck. Over the course of our 3-month relationship, the question at the forefront of our thoughts was, “Do we clip their wings?” From day one, Peppa would run to the highest point in the yard and flap her wings for all she was worth. As her flying progressed from small jumps to crossing the yard to perching on our fence to perching on our roof to flying to the neighbor’s roof to sleeping on the telephone pole to flying to neighboring streets and back, we looked at each other and asked, “Do we clip her wing?”

To most, this seems like a silly question. Of course you clip them! We read story after story on online forums of ducks flying away, unable to find their way back, their human friends knowing their domestication had bred out the survival skills necessary for the wild. But what is a bird that can’t fly? Friends told us they can adapt to a life on land and that they’re safer not flying, but… it felt like the ultimate symbol of control over another’s life. As we joked after someone complimented our “pet duck”, “She’s not our pet. She’s our friend!”

Beyond the romanticism of having a flying duck, we projected some practicalities as well. Exceedingly slow and awkward on their feet, a duck’s flight seems to be its main defense against predators. And against overeager males.

Male muscovies are much less keen to fly. Their larger bodies and smaller wings resign them to a land-bound life. Rosko could heave himself onto our fence but had to waddle his way anywhere else. In late April, seemingly overnight, he “matured”, becoming frisky with our little girl. And by frisky I mean we were concerned she might drown when they were in their pond or that her eyes might get nipped out. The eyes, Rosko, why the eyes?

Online perusing confirmed: a 1-to-1 male-to-female ratio for muscovy ducks is a dangerous game. We couldn’t stomach the idea of forcing her into the coop with that boy for ten hours. Instead, we let her continue her fly-aways and she would perch on her telephone pole at night.

The boy was obsessed with Peppa, as any teenage male duck would be. When she would fly to the neighboring streets, he would stand on his perch and look wistfully after her until she returned. When she would fly up to her telephone pole, he would try to find a spot where he could keep an eye on her.

Our routine wasn’t normal, but it was us.

Until one day when Rosko was suddenly able to fly. The question of clipping his wings became much more urgent when he flew up to our roof for the night. I wasn’t about to risk my life trying to get the boy down from the roof, so we left him up there and wished him goodnight.

The next morning, they were gone. Both of them. They were known to go off on adventures around the neighborhood together, so we thought it could be ok. I donned my rain jacket and boots and headed out to wander the neighborhood.

A few minutes later, I saw the lump in the neighbor’s yard. And I knew. How would I tell Lauren? I walked back to get my gloves and a bucket, tears in my eyes, wondering only if it was Rosko or Peppa. Crossing the street, I didn’t realize Lauren had stepped outside. She saw me with the gloves and bucket and cried out.

It was a dramatic day. The head was gone, body inside the rib cage eaten. Wings and legs intact. Our guess is a fox. I dug a hole in our backyard. We ID’d Rosko and laid him to rest. We planted our friend’s mulberry tree over him.

These ducks were the first animals I’ve had under my exclusive care and protection. One day, he’s an awkward little guy tripping over his webbed feet and then suddenly, he’s gone. One mistake. No second chances. Every time I try to explain the feeling, I run into well-trodden lines. Like “life is fragile” or “he died so young” or “he’s just… gone” or “looking for answers that don’t exist.” Having found him eaten strikes a heavy-handed finality to the whole thing.

We knew the risks. We had seen a fox in the neighborhood. We knew the story couldn’t end well. Gardening is mostly death.

I grew up in a tradition that holds an individual’s life to be sacred. Death is something abhorrent, the “worst thing.” We ignore its inevitability or rebrand it as a “rebirth” or a “transition to the after-life.”

Just as our lives are removed from their animal fate with our box houses, our box cars, and our combustion-fueled energy, the human body is separated in death from its organic fate by a box or by fire. Beyond human death, our consumption of the dead is limited to sterile packages of faceless meat and processed corn products while their death (and life) takes place behind many opaque walls.

We treat death as almost unnatural. Our tradition is full of triumphant stories of “lives saved” (rather than “deaths delayed”). But our few stories of death are either horrors (the Titanic, Sophie’s Choice), or contextualized as grand sacrifices (Saving Private Ryan, The Iron Giant) followed by a rebirth (the resurrection, war memorials). Far afield are examples of accepting death as the inevitable end of an individual ego. (Bicentennial Man comes to mind). Serious meanderings about death are further suppressed by the social pressure levied against the topic.

In The Songs of Trees, David Haskell notes our “attraction to sturdiness and longevity… the application of human inventions to the land—concrete, steel girders, plate glass—enforces the illusion of a changeless world. Instability unsettles us: fallen monuments, crumbling homes, and leveled forests are sites of pathos. Places that suggest permanence or durability—the thousand-year-old stone temples or ancient redwood tree—lift our spirits.”

I carry this tradition forward into my garden. It only feels natural to extend the sentiments to more-than-human life. Though the magnitude of feeling may differ between a human life and a tomato seedling, the axis is the same. I pause with a heavy sadness before killing a maple and feel remorse for pulling up our carrots for supper. (They just looked so happy there!)

But why? Sometimes I wonder if I project my anthro-centric views onto these plants. But no, if there is a definition of life, it is that it wants to live more than anything. Hundreds of 5-foot-tall spruce trees clamor for the one sunlit hole in the canopy. A fig tree resprouts from its roots over and over after being chopped down to the ground.

I, too, want to live. And as a species with an overactive faculty for reasoning—or, rather, for rationalizing—I’m sure to arrive at some explanation for why it is acceptable for me to decimate life in order to grow food to my liking, if I churn at it for long enough. I feel remorse for the death. And I feel compassion for the dying plants. But I feel a stronger conviction to feed myself to keep my ego persisting.

I pull a carrot from the Earth. Our understanding is that its life ends there. But it doesn’t disappear. I eat its greens and munch on its root. I integrate its sugar into my cells. Its fiber cleans me out. Its vitamins buttress my perceptive faculties for the next time I look to pick carrots. What I consider as my body is now shared with the carrot. Only by my narrow perception of the imagined-to-be-stable “identity” of the carrot, does the carrot seem to be destroyed. Without my mental segregation of a distinct “carrot”, this is nothing but one unremarkable event in the timeline of organic molecules.

Rosko the duck is gone. But the fox carries the duck in him. The mulberry tree will thrive off the nutrients stored in the duck’s body.

Life begets death. Death begets life.

We think of life as a conglomerate of distinct individuals duking it out. But the paradigm is shifting. Today, ecologists think of life as instead a network of relationships. Life is the network, the relationships. As the network cannot exist without its parts, I cannot exist without the carrot’s sustenance and the carrot cannot exist without me loosening the compact clay and clearing a spot for its seed.

Form and narrative emerge from relationship. Selves are ephemeral aggregations.

David Haskell

Really, this view is a corollary of how we understand our bodies. The heart and the intestines only make sense in their context within the larger body. The body only comes into being through the relationship of its parts.

It takes the whole of life to learn how to die.

Seneca

I have gotten no closer to accepting death by ignoring it, by surrounding myself in lifeless plaster and paint, by pretending to subsist off commoditized ground beef. If death is the one certainty for all life, I would rather confront it and accept my responsibility in the life-and-death of ecosystems, in the balance of the network of life. I do not grow callous to death, but rather become more aware of my role within the network of relationships. I begin to wonder, who am I to demand the lives of so many (man, animals, plants) for the convenience of $1.29 / lb chicken breast? For the convenience of cooling my egregiously oversized house at the touch of a button? For the convenience of maintaining the illusion of independence from other life? 

How can I ignore the destruction caused by my extreme demand on the network of life now that I see the depth within a seemingly unremarkable urban plot?

I forge ahead, trying to nurture the lives I can while killing others I see as threatening. But in a network of relationships, cutting one branch can collapse others. Without humility, patience, and careful observation, I risk perpetuating harm far beyond my purview. Is killing the aphids the right thing to do? Or am I removing the ladybug’s main food source? Am I upending the balance of insects, leading to worse infestations later in the season? In the network of life, if I am but one of the legs, I will spite myself if I kick out the other legs or twist the body to conform to my desires.

Today, I hacked away a brushy weed growing out the front of a bush. Nearing the end of the job, I caught sight of its bark. I paused. Was this—? Twenty minutes of investigation later, I confirmed my initial impression. It was a black cherry tree resprouting from a severed trunk. The fallen leaves decorated the path in a deep green. The cut bark smelled deeply of almonds. And I felt bitter remorse.

I reversed course. One thin stalk of the black cherry remained. I crawled to its base and carefully nipped away some stalks of the bush to give the cherry some breathing room. I built a small enclosure to protect it from deer.

If twenty minutes of attention to and relationship with this tree could so drastically reverse my approach to its well-being, what could an hour or two with strangers in my neighborhood accomplish? With those outside my neighborhood?

In our lessons to our children, our tradition also elevates the virtues of cooperation and sharing, of equal treatment, and of not taking more than you give. Navigating adulthood, my disillusionment is not so much that we fall short of our stated virtues, but that we lose sight of them completely. If we are to rediscover these lost virtues on a global scale, they must be found first in our local relationships.

Now, even the violets I let be.

Everything, whether or not I care for it, will die. And someday I will die. The only internally consistent responses are continuous grieving or apathetic nihilism. Both feel wrong. Not every question has an answer. I will love what is alive and remember what is not. I will honor the carrots I pull by returning every part of it to live again in my body and in the garden.

The morning Rosko died, we couldn’t find Peppa but assumed the worst. We ventured on a half-hearted bike ride to her favorite spots around the neighborhood but found no trace. Around mid-day, Lauren decided to put up a NextDoor “Lost Duck” post, but before she could, she saw:

And gardening is life.