The inexorable effects of aging confront me more each month. I find now that I reach for my reading glasses more and more. Whereas until recently I would frequently ask Judy to lower the volume on the TV, now I ask her to turn it up. It takes more effort now to distribute the remaining hair on my head so that all bare spots are covered. These are all minor inconveniences but each one is a reminder that I will not live forever. Jokingly I have often said that I run marathons to deny my mortality; now I take comfort in research that seems to indicate that “running is associated with longer telomeres, the little protein caps on the end of our chromosomes that protect our DNA, and whose length is widely seen as a marker for healthy aging.”
Not only do our bodies fall apart with the passing of time, so do the things we build. For some reason, I am intrigued by abandoned buildings and the remains of human habitations. When I visited Joshua Tree National Park in California in January, I hiked through the desert to explore two abandoned mine sites. At the one, the former Golden Bell mine, I observed a river of rusted food cans flowing downhill from the site of the miners’ camp. On the same trip, I spent part of an afternoon exploring empty, derelict homesteader cabins in Wonder Valley. Last week, I discovered a vacant, unsecured house on a development site on the outskirts of London and wandered through its debris-filled rooms. The floor was littered with drywall, cabinet doors had been ripped from their hinges, electrical wires dangled from the ceiling—but behind the rotting building materials and the layers of debris was evidence that love and care had been bestowed on this dwelling by its previous inhabitants. What stories could they tell about this house, soon to disappear to make way for a commercial development—special occasions celebrated around the dining room table, late night vigils for a sick child, the vision for the future articulated by the birches planted in front of the house?
What melancholy spirit attracts me and so many others to the rusting ruins of abandoned mines and the crumbling bricks and mortar of empty houses? Is it an unspoken fascination with death? Jenny Morber thinks so. In her opinion piece for The Globe and Mail (“Why I seek out abandoned places”), she writes, “We are, of course, thinking of death. Not necessarily our own, but the inevitable death of all things. It is impossible to ignore time’s flow in an abandoned space. Like a yellowing snapshot, decay represents both past and future. You see what was. You see what is becoming.” The inevitable death of all things. Abandoned spaces and my diminishing senses are pointing in the same direction.
There’s a peculiar relationship between death and beauty. Morber describes the beauty of abandoned places as the beauty of negative space—the beauty of all that is not present. It’s easy for us to see beauty in the fallen leaves that cover a pathway, even though the leaves had to be cut off from their life-source to develop the colours we find so attractive. In fact, as John Wood writes, “Death is a pervasive phenomenon in ecological relationships. The ecological services of living systems are animated at every level by mortality, cessation, and bodily or physical endings.” As an example, Dr. Wood points to the vascular systems of plants, which are comprised primarily of nonliving tissues—dead cells which conduct water and nutrients to the heights of redwood trees. Or, as the theologian Paul Santmire says, “the final word of evolutionary biology always seems to come to this: death is the engine of nature.” So much to which we ascribe beauty in the natural world is contingent on death.
“Life matters. Death matters. Both rely on one another.” ∼ Scott Peck
Strikingly, in the teachings of Jesus there is no life without death. He used an ecological metaphor when explaining the necessity of his death: “…unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” Regarding those who might wish to follow his example, he said “Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” There must be an ending for there to be a beginning. This weekend, Christians commemorate the death and resurrection of Jesus, and his followers believe these events express the pattern and contain the power for a changed way of life. In The Heart of Christianity Marcus Borg wrote, “…the path of personal transformation is the path of death and resurrection.” And for Christians, their hope and expectation is that this process of transformation will continue beyond the here and now.
The Quaker author Parker Palmer says that nature testifies that “dying itself—as devastating as we know it can be—contains the hope of a certain beauty.” There is nothing appealing about watching a building decay or noticing the deterioration of my body with age. Death is ugly. Death is rude. But death is short. Life is forever. Give nature time, and it will reclaim an abandoned building. Jenny Morber writes, “There is perhaps nowhere better than a deserted building to understand life’s resilience. The forest overtakes our work, always.” When I’m finished with the shell I’m living in now, I’ll give it up for something better. Life has a power we should never underestimate. It makes all things new.
On Easter morning, when Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” arrived at the tomb where Jesus had been buried, they found it abandoned. “He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said,” the angel said. Death comes, but life wins.
Unless otherwise noted, all text and photos © 2019 Edwin Wilson
