Joseph L. Kagle, Jr. Peace Essays

“As much as life is inevitable; death is inevitable. It is only through experiencing death up close and personal can true peace be found. In the summer of 1963 and spring of 1964, I worked on a book/painting called Death is All the Time. No one can stay in that mindset so the following fall, I did In Summer When Butterflies Don’t Even Die, a work that celebrates life and living. Each year since that attitude is the dominate one that leads me to peace but now, since the first book, I can also live with  the recognition of death as a path toward peace. This is one of those moments in the early 1990s.”

     Death does not come on the 10 o’clock news.  Death comes and sits unceremoniously at the foot of the easy chair.

     A phone call from a neighbor announced the news.  A treasured neighbor had dies.  Cause of death?  “He shot himself.”

     Images of the outside world were lost in a moment of remembrance.

      I never called him by his first name.  It was always “Mister” and his last name.  He cut the grass and kept the lawns lush for many of us in our comfortable Waco neighborhood.

     He was not young but he was youthful.  Maybe that is why when unexpected Death sat at my feet, I was moved and stunned.

     There is a difference between stunned and shocked.  Stunned does not last as long as shocked.  Thought processes are not short-circuited.  A few ideas relax upon the inner throne of the mind, like the word “Mister.”

     Why call him “Mister? It was not his age.  He was old not much older than me or many of my neighbors. Mister.  It felt just right and proper.

     I had built a mental picture of his passing away with the seasons.  You know, one day he just would not come to cut the grass.  My mind image was a matter of nature.  Shooting yourself is somehow outside of nature.

     We knew he was having physical problems but they were always secondary to his work.  He was the man for all our seasons.  He came when the grass grew, and not come when the cold held the growing to a minimum.  He was a symbol of the life in Life.

  Therefore, I was stunned when he consciously ended his existence.  For our neighborhood he did more that cut the grass.  He brought vegetables from his garden and schooled us on how to grow them.  The lessons were lost is you look to what came from the ground, but the lessons took hold if you examined how he forced us to see the growing cycle of living.

For some, Death is not a stranger.  Death is never unexpected if we reflect, even for a moment, on the cycle of life.  But for others, like myself, I tend to ignore that spring is followed and juxtaposed by winter.

     I have a built-in and schooled naiveté about seeing each thing as if for the first time.  I remember Captain Kirk of Star Trek fame saying in The Wrath of Khan, “I never came up against Death.  I cheat Death, I never think of Death as an alternative.”

     With Death sitting in my living room,. I did not dwell on the “how” of Mister’s dying. I sat and remembered how Mister brought life to our neighborhood.  When spring comes again and the grass grows, I will celebrate knowing this special "Mister” who was not perfect but brought an understanding of Nature to our nature (which I sometimes overlook).

     Maybe Death is the messenger of Life.  Death is the rude, crude relative, showing up unannounced.  Death reminds each of us of our own time limit, our own mortality.  And when Death fades (because a total exit is never accomplished), all the memories of Life rush in to fill the living room of our spirit.

     The man I called “Mister” is dead.  He stopped his living.  An obituary column verified the phone call from my neighbor.  Death is still squatting in the resting place of my mind.

      Tonight, though, my family will eat the last potatoes and green beans that “Mister” left on our doorstep last week. It is our continuation of the ritual of Life.  The grass will continue to grow and we will find someone else to help us shorten its height.  No one is indispensable, but each of us is certainly irreplaceable.  Death came to our house and gave me this proclamation.