Asher and I were walking in the backyard the other day and he said, “It’s amazing how many bunnies we have in our yard this summer since Tashi isn’t here.”

It’s been about a year since we lost our beloved cat, and not a day passes when a wave of grief doesn’t surge through our hearts. Asher and I seem to know when the other is feeling a wave, and we will reach out a hand or lock eyes with a compassionate knowing that we’re in this grief together. It helps in the way only human connection can help soften the ache of loving and losing that is woven into this life.

I say, “Yes, from death comes life. It’s a law of nature.”

This short phrase is the foundation of everything that has fascinated me since I was a teenager and first learned about the rites of passages that are supposed to accompany life transitions. I say “supposed to”  because we live in a culture that has tragically erased rites of passages from transitions.

Where once an adolescent girl was ushered across the threshold of womanhood at the onset of her first blood, now she’s left to make sense of it alone.

Where once a young boy was sent into the forest to transfer his primary allegiance to his mother into the wisdom of the natural world, now teenage boys are set adrift, reaching for guidance amidst the wild west of the internet.

I teach my sons as best I can about the things they should have learned from a wider and wiser community.

But animals help fill in the gaps, and often teach us things with a bit more gentleness than humans can. When we first got Tashi, Everest was eight and Asher was four, and it became clear from the beginning that Tashi was here to teach our boys about death and life. They were both vegetarians and had come to that decision on their own: Everest when he was five after reading Charlotte‘s Web and Asher following in the footsteps of his big brother.

For them, the thought that an innocent life would be taken for human consumption or need was unbearable. As is often the case with sensitive kids, this also extended to all life forms, from the branch of a tree to the ants in the road to pulling weeds. As much as we tried to honor their respect for all life – we would always take spiders and other insects out of the house instead of killing them – there were times when death was unavoidable. It is part of our burden as humans that we will take life even if it’s while walking on a trail and inadvertently stepping on ants. How to teach  young boys this part of being human – that we are all inextricably woven into the cycles of death and life?

Tashi was up to the task.

When she outgrew her kitten stage we let her outside, where she instinctually embodied her animal nature and started to hunt. I’m happy to say that Tashi was not much of a bird hunter and preferred the mice and voles that live at the edges of our property. Expert huntress that she was, it wasn’t long before she brought a dead mouse into the house and presented it as a gift, as cats are want to do.

We didn’t know how our kids would respond to this blatant presentation of death right at their feet. But, to our surprise, Everest laughed. He understood that Tashi was just doing what was in her code, just like Everest was already following what had been encoded into his soul from the time he was born: to be an aviator. Just as he’s meant to fly, so she was meant to hunt.

It was a moment of acceptance that helped ease some of his resistance to the life-death-life cycle.

 

From Death Comes Life

As much as we fight and rail against it, death is part of life. Whatever we eat, from animal to vegetable, is a life that has been taken to sustain our own. (There was a time when I was worried that our boys would stop eating the vegetables that we harvested from our garden because the harvesting required pulling them from the earth.) In an ideal world, perhaps we would never take an animal life for our own consumption. But this is not a post about the ethics of food. 

It is a post about what happens when we accept the cycles of life instead of resisting them.

It is a reminder that even in our times of deepest darkness and loss, the laws of nature tell us that renewal will always arrive.

For whether we are in the depths of a personal loss, suffering through a dark night of the soul, or enduring this time of global crumbling that we are all experiencing, when we remember that death and life, darkness and light are working in tandem with one another, it can ease the despair that can ensue when we’re in a harder season.

Just as spring always follows winter and autumn, so the light always returns. Here’s a beautiful exchange between Marion Woodman and Andrew Harvey in the documentary about Woodman, Dancing with the Flames:

Andrew Harvey: This has been the deep journey of your life to become the dancer, to become the person who can hold the opposites, the person who can say yes to creation but also yes to destruction, yes to pain and yes to joy, yes to the shadow and yes to the light.

 

Marion Woodman: And recognizing that they belong to each other in that if something doesn’t die there’s no nurturing of the new.

 

Andrew Harvey: And something alive is always dying, and when it dies it provides the fecund soil for new life.

We grieve Tashi’s loss and we delight in the bunnies that feel safe now to live in our yard. The heartbreak of losing the sweetest cat we’ve ever known was unparalleled and the gift of experiencing the deepest connection possible with an animal will remain with us forever. She is buried under the apple tree, the tree she loved to climb, the one where she and I sat together in sweet harmony observing the world. And now she provides nourishment for the tree.

From love comes loss and then more love. From death comes life, and then death, and then life again.