Gone to Feed the Roses

 I suppose there are basically two attitudes to death (and really just about everything else)—both of which are true, so far as they go. William James called them the healthy-minded and the sick. (And he made no secret of his greater affinity for the sick-souled way of seeing the matter.)

The healthy-minded say: "I accept the universe." They say: "death is a part of life." They say: "What death? Does not death bring forth new life? Does not the corpse of one being provide food and nutriment for the sprigs and branches of new life?"

Walt Whitman held the healthy-minded view of the matter: "The smallest sprout shows there is really no death," he wrote.  

And indeed, I suppose this is true, up to a point. Each of us is part of a larger "Tree of Life," as Samuel Butler also insisted. One leaf or branch may whither and die, but the tree as a whole goes on. In this sense, death is an illusion. 

This was my dad's own attitude to death, by the way. He was the most healthy-minded spiritual person I've ever met. And so, in mourning his passing, I feel I ought to do justice to the truth that is in the healthy-minded view. 

I ought to agree with Whitman and just stop there: 

What do you think has become of the young and old men?

  And what do you think has become of the women and children?

  They are alive and well somewhere [...]

But there is a part of me too that sees the countervailing truth that Edna St. Vincent Millay gave voice too: namely, that a sprout only goes so far. 

Even if it's true that the passing of one generation will make may for the next; even if my dad will die, but his body may feed the new twigs and leaves—I'd still rather have him. 

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—

They are gone.  They are gone to feed the roses.  Elegant and curled

Is the blossom.  Fragrant is the blossom.  I know.  But I do not approve.

More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world, Millay wrote. Or sprouts, for that matter. Or trees. 

William James, too, while trying to acknowledge the value in the healthy-minded worldview, felt that it couldn't fully justify the universe as we find it. 

"Some evils, indeed, are ministerial to higher forms of good; but it may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever," James wrote. 

And in truth, I agree with him. Not every loss is compensated by a gain. Not every evil seems justified by some ultimate good. 

And too many times, what poor compensation there is just seems inadequate. A rose, sprout, or bush is not worth one father. 

But if there is any truth to the health-minded view of death, where might we find it? I guess I know that in order for dad's life to have had a beginning, it must also finally have an end. 

And if there were never an end, as D.H. Lawrence pointed out, how terrible it would be to have a beginning at all. 

I know all that. I know. But that doesn't mean it's good enough. "I know," Millay wrote. "But I do not approve. And I am not resigned."