Unfinished Funeral

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Today I travel half-way across the country to a family funeral at a village I haven’t visited since childhood.  Endless copper-yellow fields of desiccated country scrubland zoom by the bus window as a murderous July assassinates the landscape to silence.  It will all grow back in October, but right now it almost feels like it all died on purpose to coincide with this family loss.

Death is everywhere around us, always, yet we condition ourselves to only pay attention to life. It is good to be hopeful about things, but the failure to acknowledge loss is a failure to prevent even more loss from taking place.  This landscape does grow back, but less and less so each year, because no one has ever grieved it.  The problem with the loss of nature is that it leaves no evidence behind.  People forget what was lost, as it all disappears into the time vortex like a lost language.

The church is dark, but full of murals and carvings: on the walls, the ceilings, on the tiniest square centimetre available.  There is no space for the eye to rest, to get lost in the terrifying emptiness of the cold, grey concrete wall underneath. We never bravely stare into the endless vacuum of death.  Instead, we must always distract ourselves with religious fairy tales and retail compulsions.  The murals, the priest’s fancy clothes, the psalms that are supposed to help the body ascend into heaven, are nothing but a big gaslighting exercise to distract us from loss.   

The complimentary meal after the funeral was really good. I caught up with some people I hadn’t seen in over 35 years.  Some of them, like me, had done a complete 180 turn in their life. The reality is that, given how sparse human contact is becoming these days, next time I probably see most of these people again will be either at their funeral or mine. 

If at all.

It is hard to grieve nature when no one around you is doing the same.  You are made to feel like you are grieving an imaginary friend that never existed.  I carry this grief with me always, as I think of all the nature my ancestors and their ancestors destroyed over thousands of years. I want to have a normal life, and a happy life to be enjoyed in the present, but the more this civilisation refuses to acknowledge its crimes, the more stubborn I become in my grief.  This planet is a murder scene.  And as long as I’m still here, I find it my gruesome duty to send the perpetrators regular reminders.  I know who you are and what you did, what we all did collectively.  This civilisation has been so busy destroying that it never found the time to pause and at least hold a funeral.

The return bus took a very different route.  It skirted along the edge of the mountain range, meandering through a million shades of green: pine, oak, beech, chestnut, fig, cedar, olive, acacia.  What still remains is a precious living memory of all that was lost.

This newsletter is my main income. It is FREE to subscribe to, but made possible by the generosity of paid members. If you’d like my work to continue please consider a paid subscription