LITMIR.BIZ

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I both have blonde ponytails.

      DJ offered, “I give you a two point two,” and pointed to our trail. He picked out deer tracks of different sizes, trying to count how many different deer had left their mark. A raccoon’s front paw left an impression that resembled a small human hand with long, pointy nails. We shoved and jostled, competing for the lead spot on the trail, which was too narrow to allow us to walk abreast.

      He loves to push and pull almost as much as he used to like to cuddle with me. His latest thing is to catch me standing near the bed, which he perceives as stunt mattress. He assumes his lineman position, runs, and tackles me, knocking me onto the bed. The same adolescence that’s sprouting hair all over his body has lengthened him so that his aunt and grandmother look up to his face. Where there used to be baby fat, firm muscles now define his flesh. He’s private about his body now. We have video of him, my last child, dashing down the hall naked and slapping his own butt. That playful freedom has been replaced with pride in his increasing strength. So, I played and let him knock into me and pull and push me on the trail.

      I took a wide step in front of him, cutting him off with my leg, and ran ahead. Low to the ground, I spotted two triangles of reddish tan fur. Oh, ears, I thought, and a head. But the body flattened, so the whole thing looked like a red fox rug lying askew on the forest floor and assuming the entire width of the trail. For a second I was fascinated, but then repulsed by busy maggot eyes and black carrion beetles feverishly animating the fur with their group undulations. Flies formed a buzzing helmet-like force field around the death. I realized I hadn’t breathed and couldn’t inhale. I ran back on the trail; maneuvering around DJ, I said, “Euww, I don’t want to be near it.” I didn’t want to smell the rotten pungency either. A few yards behind my son, I turned around.

      DJ stepped toward the carcass, closer than I’d been, and he stood transfixed at the consummation of this body. “Dad and I found a deer in here last year, but it was just bones. It wasn’t gross like this fox.” He’d saved the deer skull in a shoebox. He’d taken it to school where the teacher allowed his classmates crowd around the cleaned-up death.

      I’d acted like a girl, and he knew it was his job to be my antonym. He calmly walked back to join me in the place I’d found my breath. “Mom, how do you think he died?”

      “Don’t know, but foxes in the wild only live about five years. Usually, they crawl back into their dens to die.” I told him what I knew, but not what he asked.

      We pushed aside the thick brush beneath a canopy of maples and bur oak trees. The brush was replaced by sparse grass, and then the forest floor was cleared of all small vegetation. Light diminished where a few immense gnarled trees created a room with a ceiling of dense leaves and a floor of compact gray dirt with hundreds of underground roots surfacing just enough to create a shallow labyrinth that could only hint at the enormity of the tree-life below the soil. DJ touched the furrowed bark of the largest tree and asked what it was.

      “Looks like a big old elm tree,” I answered while searching the backpack for my Trees of Wisconsin guide. “I don’t think it’s an America elm. Most of those were wiped out by Dutch elm disease.” I explained that I’d only heard of the elm-lined streets of the Midwest and Northeast that provided elegant shade to my grandparents’ generation. While I babbled on and searched through the tree book, DJ interrupted me.

      “Look down here.” He nodded to a series of diminutive chalky batons scattered near the base of the tree, four bones from limbs and one rib. “Too big for a squirrel. Maybe a groundhog.” We both bent down forming a silent huddle while we inspected the bones.

      DJ spoke. “Everything dies.”

      Right here is the place where I’m supposed to have the answers, I thought. I should give him the wisdom that will offer comfort at my death and insight that he’ll pass on to his children on a summer walk in decades to come.

      As a nurse and daughter, I’d seen death. Two years earlier, my stepfather—the man I called “Pop”—died from prostate cancer. Anomalous cells grew in his body. The aberrant proliferation killed him, and only then, by their own rampant quest to take over his body, did the cancer itself die.

      Pop lived at our home most of the last six weeks before his death. DJ had passed his report card over the bars of the hospital bed to him and played Christmas songs on his keyboard to cheer him up. Pop closed his eyes to listen and name the tunes:

      “‘O, Holy Night.’ That’s so beautiful.

      ‘We Three Kings.’ I haven’t heard that in years.

      ‘Silent Night.’ That’s tremendous, DJ, tremendous.”

      Like many cancer patients, Pop died in pieces: couldn’t walk, couldn’t stand, couldn’t turn in bed, then nothing. In those last twenty-four hours, I’d given him a bed bath, and he moaned when I repositioned his gaunt body as gingerly as I knew how.

      “Oh, Pop. I’m sorry.”

      “It’s not you, it’s me,” he comforted me. “Just do what you need to do.”

      Later that day when I ran an errand to the store, Mom locked herself out of the house when she stepped outside to speak to a neighbor. She called me from the neighbor’s house, crying as she explained that Pop was alone. I raced back, entered through the garage door, and rushed to check on Pop, who lay on a hospital bed in the living room.

      “You okay, Pop?”

      “Yes.”

      “Did you know you were alone? Mom locked herself out.”

      “Go let her in.”

      When I opened the front door, a December chill and my crying mother entered.

      Pop strained to yell, “Did you find her?”

      “Yes. She’s fine.”

      “Thank you.”

      Pop died in his sleep that night, never losing the kindness and essence of who he was through the process. I gave a eulogy at Pop’s funeral. I didn’t then—nor later in the presence of that great tree—have anything momentous to say about the meaning of death. I could only tell the truth of how his love for life seemed to grow and mingle with his impending death.

      A few hundred yards away from the tree and old bones, in the space I’d run away from, carrion beetles feasted on maggots born in the flesh of the fox. The entire forest is a composition of bits of organic matter that come from life feeding on death. Remnants of foxes, tadpoles, wild geraniums, and trout lilies had perhaps cycled through the people who lived near this place. Liberace, Spencer Tracy, and Golda Meir had lived near our home. Perhaps some elements, molecules, and bits from their bodies had been reused in DJ’s stiff brown hair. The body recycles its elements at different rates, but about every decade, each atom of a body that is a part of living tissue is new. Calcium from native Potawatomi Indians might have been reused in the bones that DJ poked at with his tattered basketball shoe.

      Every element that passed out of my body in the form of my son is now in use elsewhere. He follows the patterns of his own DNA blended from his parents, but the organs, cells, and atoms have all formed anew from reclaimed oddments of life and death.

      As soon as that fox died, E. coli and other organisms already present in its gut proliferated in the hypoxic and acidic environment. The gut burst and spread the feeding organisms to the rest of the corpse. Bacterial and fungal parents engendered hundreds of generations of offspring in a few days. Yellow jackets, flies, and earthworms shared the bounty of the life-giving putrefaction and began new families. Soil mites, nematodes, and nitrogen-fixing bacteria moved into the fox’s rich neighborhood. As many as a trillion live cells reside in one cubic centimeter of soil near decomposing remains. “Everything dies,” he’d said, but I hadn’t responded and couldn’t even determine if it was the life or death at the site of the dead fox that had repelled me.

      All I’d discovered was that the tree wasn’t an American elm. The living tree was an easier subject to discern. Its location near water and the reddish tint in the furrows of

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