"Mort"

A cricket has moved into the walk-out basement. Each time I ventured downstairs to the laundry or pantry, he chirped away. Leaving the door to the outside open a bit didn't encourage him to leave, only to have a party with some of his bigger friends. I managed to shoo them out, but he slipped into a small crack to hide, continuing to serenade me while I did the laundry.

After a few nights of that, I wanted to find ways to get rid of him. (Would using a silencer on a cricket be illegal or apropos?)

I did a little checking online---apparently, the life span of the average field cricket is just a couple of months. Already an adult, he likely had only a few weeks to live, if that.

The poor little guy wouldn’t even make it to Halloween, but each night he sang as if he would live forever. I didn't have the heart to capture him and move him outside. He could stay safe in my basement as my pet cricket. I named him "Mort." 

Think about it. As a society, we now live decades longer than our ancestors. I remember reading the book Alaska, by James Michener. In the opening chapter, in the dawn of time, they speak of"the Ancient One," a woman who was a great healer and spiritual leader. She was in her thirties. Oh great, I thought as I read it, first the big three-oh, now I'm ancient. These days, most of us can expect to live well into our seventies and eighties, some even into their hundreds. Yet some creatures live only months or even days.

Consider the hummingbird: such a small creature with such a high metabolism, yet it has a life span much greater than you'd think, with some living more than a decade. I watch them from the feeders in summer, warring for the liquid nectar found within, fending off others that wish to take it; watching, guarding, always wanting more of life's sweetness. Not much different than the rest of us.

I think of lives cut short that achieved so much for their brief time here, like my favorite poet John Keats, who threw over medicine to write some of the most sublime odes in the English language and died at 25 from tuberculosis; Percy Shelly; M.F. Xavier Bichat, French army surgeon turned pathologist; Évariste Galois, mathematician and inventor of group theory who died at 20; and Robert Fergusson, Scottish Poet.  Their words, their teachings still follow me where I go, whispering to me in unexplored depths or darkest of nights---such great thoughts tinged with wonder and mystery, those whispers of slain genius.

Fortunately, our human life span is much longer than most creatures’---if we are blessed and take care of ourselves. But even the most significant expanses of time seem so short in recollection. Walking through the little village where I live, the sidewalk glinted with little bits of mica. Not the prophet Micah, who told us our human task is to do justly, but the geological kind. As a kid, the sidewalk would glitter like broken glass upon the tide flats from the small glints of mica within it. My brother said it was made of broken starships, and I believed him. For though there are limits to what we may accept as children, there is no limit to what we can believe, nourished as we are by the embrace of the incredible that is found right beneath our feet.

Into the warm days of fall that is childhood's longest hour, in those weeks of summer vacation, we believed we'd live forever. We weren't content just to ride our bikes on these glittering trails of star-stuff; we'd get big pieces of chalk and draw on them, hopscotch, tic-tac-toe, and our names. We'd play well into the dark, coming in only when we were hungry, the front doors unlocked to our comings and goings---time for us was something we could pick up and put in our pocket.

When I look at a shelf of old family pictures, the laughter of those days is silent, but there is no weather of distance between that time and now. It seems like yesterday. But I have realized that the saying is true: man does carry his life in his hand. My dad's siblings, though blessed with a hardy disposition, also possessed an intrepidity of spirit and courage that might have been called reckless in others; but in them it was a natural trait when tempered with a soundness of choice. They honored their bodies as vessels of God and didn't abuse them with drugs or an excess of alcohol or even food. In the pictures I have of them together, I see only lean, honed strength and purpose of duty. 

I look at a collection of bones on a table, beautiful to me in their pristine immobility. I look at a glass box my aunt left me that sits on my desk. In it is Urania ripheus, more commonly known as the sunset moth, hovering on lifeless wings that glow in the light as if lit aflame. The sunset moth is found in the shaded areas of river banks in Madagascar. The essence of life floats elusive, half-submerged in the waters of science, buoyed by God. I've spent the last twenty-five years studying the many tragic ways life ends, and still, I draw great comfort from the way it maintains that faith to remain.

I remember Dad’s last days, after he celebrated his 101^st birthday. He’d outlived two wives, two of his children, and the senior Dalmatian he adopted from rescue in his 90s after he swore he’d never get another dog.  The day was hot, but he had the window to his assisted-living apartment open, enjoying the sun against his form while he watched the light fade from the sky.  It was uncomfortably hot to me, but I knew his days were few, and fussing about closing the window and turning the AC on was discord in the quiet he didn't need.  So I sat and just kept him company, fanning myself with a magazine, contriving some sense of comfort from what was merely motion. If he didn't seem aware of how quickly those days were passing, I certainly was and appreciated each moment.

So we'd sit, Dad in his recliner reading the old family Bible, the book for all the days remaining.  Dad never knew his destiny would be to live to such an age, to love deeply, and outlive those he loved greatly. The love that entranced him and made him its own to the most secret of thoughts, to the disquiet of blood, to his last exhalation. He did not know when his path would come to an end, but he followed it with unfaltering footsteps. The Bible was gently laid in his lap as he nodded off to sleep. The window would fade, and then glow---a living spark there among the shadowed embers as at his feet lay an empty dog bed. - Brigid