CW: Death
Walking through a cemetery in rural Kansas, I looked down and saw a fuzzy, yellow inchworm. Pale, captivating yellow. I had never seen anything like it. It moved startlingly fast, climbing up and down the blades of grass to some unknown destination. When I looked closer, I noticed it wasn’t just yellow, but also green and black and white. Crouching down in the grass, I absorbed its vitality and strangeness. It didn’t mind me watching, just kept wiggling and racing its way across the vast and daunting lawn. I felt my breath catch and my chest fill up with awe.
I didn’t want to watch it too closely and seem like a child, but I was much more interested in this miraculous tiny living thing than the endless gray tombstones and bones beneath our feet. We had been driving across the Midwest for days, educating me on all the family history I missed in our home on the coast. I knew I should be interested in my history and my relatives, but I was honestly so tired of looking at tombstones and finding names none of us knew just to cross them off some mental list. I liked the cemeteries, especially the old ones, with their bumpy ground and big, shady trees and old stones with writing almost too worn to decipher. But I liked them for their life, and the feeling of standing somewhere so full of memory, not because some distant relative of mine was decomposing there.
As he talked and talked and talked with my relatives, my dad walked dangerously close to the small wonder in the grass. I didn’t say anything. I thought, “I’ll wait. If he steps closer, then I’ll say something.” It seemed silly to interrupt his contemplation of long dead loved ones to interject for this insignificant worm.
He stepped to the right. I started to say, “Wait —”
But by the time he heard me, the inchworm had disappeared beneath his large, black boot. A panic rose in my throat. “What?” he asked. Stumbling over my words, I explained that it was “just a caterpillar.” He lifted his foot, and my mom said, “Look, there it is. It’s fine.” She turned away, satisfied. I knew better. Maybe she did, too.
The pale fuzz didn’t move. Its body was deflated. Its tiny legs, moving with such purpose a few minutes before, were still. A needless death, taken without malice or care. The collateral.
In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer describes how the words ‘collateral damage’ “ask us to turn our faces away, as if man- made destruction were an inescapable fact of nature.” The words ‘collateral damage’ ask us to agree that our human race is marching forward, and that the loss of lives along the way is a sad but necessary side effect. But Kimmerer doesn’t accept this avoidance of the pain we cause. She describes a summer night when she and her daughters drove out to the road by Labrador Pond, a seasonal mating ground for salamanders. The slow, soft salamanders had to crawl across the road to reach their destination, but many weren’t fast enough to avoid the speeding cars. Kimmerer and her daughters spent the night searching for salamanders on the pavement and ferrying them across. Kimmerer writes,
“Tonight the salamanders’ biggest threat is the cars that go speeding by, their occupants unaware of the spectacle that is taking place beneath their tires. From inside the car, listening to late-night radio, you just don’t know. But standing on the roadside, you can hear the pop of the body, hear the moment when a glistening being following magnetic trails toward love is reduced to red pulp on the pavement. We try to work faster, but there are so many and we are so few.”
Maybe it is easier to stay inside our cars. Maybe it would have been easier if I never crouched down in the grass, if I stayed standing and staring at tombstones. But I would rather notice—, stand by the roadside, and bear witness to the suffering—, than remain comfortably oblivious.
Before we go on, I should probably tell you that I may not be qualified to write this review. I haven’t spent much time in cemeteries beyond this one road trip (which, admittedly, did contain a lot of cemetery visits) and I’ve never lost anyone truly close to me. Other than the deaths of my grandparents when I was too young to really remember, grief has been something I watch others go through and wonder how to help with from a distance. I haven’t visited the gravestone of someone I deeply miss.
But I did mourn the loss of that small caterpillar. I grieved as we drove away, holding the tightness in my chest to keep it from leaking out. I was supposed to care about my dead family, not a dead worm. CaringIt would seemed so silly. Childish. I must have killed so many worms of my own, walking carelessly across the ground with my big feet.
This anecdote is so metaphorically resonant, it's almost comical:. I promise I didn’t make it up.
Ironically, On this day, by contemplating death, we caused more of it. Humanity crushes so much beneath its feet, never noticing, or choosing not to notice. TLike me, those of us who notice often wait too long to speak up. Instead of wondering at the life all around us, we move on to the more important business of human corpses long gone. We are all responsible. Wonder and curiosity and awe seem like weaknesses to hide, when in fact they are the only way forward. Feeling, and noticing, and falling into wonder, and being hit with the ache of sudden loss, has to be better than never seeing the life at all.
But, as all metaphors do, this one eventually fails at a point. Humanity hasdoes caused much death without knowing about it, but much of it is purposeful:. As we havewould squashed many an ant.
As my dad’s elderly cousin showed us his farm, we came across a strip of land by the river. “This was Indian land,” he said. He explained that it was never homesteaded — until the government lied again and pushed its native keepers further west. A white man gobbled it up, and now my family owns it.
As if you could truly own the universe contained inside that land, the millions of lives sustained by that soil. I was raised on thievery and lies. This land is part of my family’s identity, home to stories of settlers and wagons and heroic homesteaders. And our bones rest on stolen land.
Reading back through this story makes my throat choke up. Sometimes it feels as iflike I’m swimming in a world of unfathomable loss, reported daily in death tolls and painfully blunt headlines. The dark water looms, the loss of this small life and the injustices of the past, still bleeding into the present, only a small segment of the vast sea. But there is no way forward if I remain only in the darkness of the past.
When speaking about the salamanders, Kimmerer writes, “If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.” Cemeteries, as places of remembrance and love and grief, have a crucial significance. But we, the living, go to them for a visit, not to stay the night. Along with the buried bones, our earth contains a miraculous teeming mess of life, of which humanity is just one part. For every caterpillar we squash with our big boots (the caterpillar and the “we” representing many things, of course) there are thousands more going along their merry way, clambering up and down the blades of grass nearby. The next time I see a caterpillar in the grass, I want to speak up. I don’t just want to watch the salamanders crawl across the road— - I want to pick them up, one by one. There is so much life left in this crumbling world.
I give cemeteries 3.5 stars.
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