Living Backwards

How 15 minutes changed my perspective on living through dying.

Odell Lake 10/12/23

On a warm-for-October afternoon, my daughter, niece and I kayaked out to a little cove on Odell Lake in the Cascade Mountains of central Oregon. The water below us was shallow, still and crystal clear, revealing the detritus, smooth rocks, grainy sand, and lichen covered branches sunk beneath us. The kids decided to bank their boats and explore the forest land that the lake had curved out millenia ago. Towering Douglas fir trees and Ponderosa pines seemed to rest into the clear sky from the view from my little boat. The deciduous trees were turning their beautiful maroon, goldenrod, and pumpkin colors and beginning to shed their leaves on the land, in the water, dangling from their branches.

I paddled to the middle of the cove and leaned back. One of my assignments in death doula school this week was to be out in nature for 15 minutes and spend time looking at things that were dying. What things around you will be dying in the next year, month, week, day, hour, minute? What is already dead? So, I did. Scanning the forest and memorizing some of the trees: the leaves falling, some branches broken off, trees with browning needles or even naked branches (some kind of blight or just a natural process?). Branches like bones exposed, becoming a wooden skeleton. Some would fill out again come the spring and summer but for now, they were dying. Parts of them falling away. Some were taking the long road to death that trees take: the way they remain firmly rooted in the Earth but also grow brittle and ragged after the xylem and phloem have stopped moving through their arboreal veins.

At the banks, were shrubs beginning to wither next to their abundant neighbors. There were lichen growing on broken branches sticking out of the water, rooted on their own now in the loamy sand of the lake. Some day, the soft white-green of these delicate, sturdy petals would also brown and crisp and crack and fall. I watched and waited to see a leaf fall, to see the process in real time.

Below me in the water were rocks of various sizes that would all, one day, become sand. Be worn down and away, transformed to something new, made of the same stuff. There were mushy, muddy clumps of dead leaves swirled into piles by the lake tide, becoming home and food to minuscule lake creatures I could only imagine. Creatures that would also die one day and their exoskeletons floating to the bottom and becoming nourishement and shelter for other more creatures.

I had never before focused on this, on the dying all around me. And suddenly it was all I could see. All these different timelines, all these stages of decay. I noticed how I never saw the beauty of brown stemmed reed with the scaffolding of its seed pod intact, the wispy white of the pod walls and the scattered seeds long gone and buried in the ground to maybe grow next year. I began to see a fuller picture of the world around me. Like focusing on what was dying amplified and enhanced the green of the pine needles, the blue of the sky.

Reed in winter

My eyes kept coming to one tall fir tree. It towered over all the rest and become the center of the scope of my view. Every time I came back to it, I scanned it for signs of death. Every time, I found none: Strong, tall, thick, deep green, in the prime of its life.

But also, I realized in a flush felt throughout my body, dying. That tree was dying as much as it was living. Even though there was nothing broken or brown about it, it was still in the process of dying. It was aging. The flow of it fluids were slowing wearing down the tubes through which they flow. The bud base of each needle, feeling the weight of its protrusion just a little more each day. Even as its trunk expanded both in height and width, the elements around it, wind, water, animal and bird, were beginning to wear it away.

Like us. We are born dying. As much as we are born living. These are simultaneous processes. These ebb and flow within us.

I wondered: What if we lived like this? Like there was an end. What if we noticed the dying process, the shedding, the endings all around us? In our own lives, in our own bodies? How would that change the way we lived? How would that change what we did with our time? How would that hone our values into daily actions? How would our relationships become more honest, deeper? What would we let go of that we were unnecessarily holding onto?

What if we lived our lives backwards? Found our way into our lives by knowing, truly acknowledging and embracing, what is all around us: Death and dying. Living and growing. The full view, the whole experience. The reality of our existence. What if that can bring us to being truly alive?

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