Funeral For Our Dead Beliefs

By Harriet Witt, Haiku, Hawaii, U.S.

The job I lost on Friday the 13th of March was with the Pacific Whale Foundation on Maui. Since then, I’ve been isolated in the tropical garden that’s my quarter-acre suburban lot. As I’ve tended my fruits and vegetables, I’ve struggled with a survivor’s guilt for being among the “lockdown lucky.” Meanwhile, my plants guiltlessly flourish. They view guilt as a noxious weed; it uses up soil nutrients that could go to food crops. I ponder this while weeding, taking care to weed out unhealthy thoughts and compost them into fertilizer for a better future.

You could say that nature is now my full-time teacher, and I her devoted student. When down on my knees with my trowel, loosening stones, I listen to my bones. The calcium molecules in our bones have been recycled through myriads of plant and animal bodies during our planet’s long experiment with life. And so it is that our bones hold the wisdom of deep time.

In April, my bones began telling me that the COVID-19 crisis isn’t something we can hope to put behind us; it’s something we must deepen into. This demands that we mourn the loss of beliefs killed by the crisis. Those beliefs served us for a long time, so they’ll haunt us like hungry ghosts if they’re not honored with a proper funeral and burial. When given a natural interment, they’ll compost into fertilizer– and the fertilizer will draw the roots of our humanity down deeper.

My choice of a funeral site was easy, as I still cry over the little mound of soil where I buried my cat Alice in January. I’m a widow with no children, and Alice was my constant companion for almost 16 years. Her decomposing body is fertilizing a taro plant. On May 5th, as the moon came full, I dedicated “the Alice mound” as the site of my funeral for our dead beliefs. Then I faced the fact that I had no idea how to conduct this service.

Admitting my ignorance felt healthy, and like the place to pause this story. So I saved this doc and went into the kitchen to make dinner. There I discovered that my refrigerator had died, and all of my emergency preparedness food was a mushy mess. The next morning, I built a compost pile in my garden for the corpses of my lost food.

A compost pile needs scaffolding to let oxygen circulate. As I gathered dead branches for scaffolding, I noticed the horizontal skeleton of my neighbors’ Christmas tree at the back of our lots. I built the pile on it, interspersing each layer of rotten food with a layer of weeds. While doing this, I saw that the loss of my emergency preparedness food is piddling, compared to the losses being suffered in the many parts of the world where people’s immune systems are mortally compromised by industry’s rape of nature for personal profit.

With this realization, my new compost mound– not the Alice mound– became the site of my funeral for our dead beliefs. Now, as I pray over my “COVID-19 Mound,” I appreciate the rich soil it’s generating. I envision this soil fertilizing ways for us to live sustainably on the only planet in the known universe that supports our kind of life. As I sob over our collective tragedy, my tears moisten and soften the ground, enabling the roots of our humanity to reach down deeper.