Grief, death and positivity

In spite of everything I’ve been saying, I think I am struggling with grief at the moment. And part of grief I suppose is the way it brings death to your attention. In my case, that’s not just the death of my mother, but the future deaths of Ellie the dog, Frog and me.

Who will go first and how will I cope? How will I cope if Frog goes first and I’m left here on earth on my own? How will I cope if I go first and have to travel through the realms of death (whatever they are) without Frog to hold my hand?

And it’s not only those three deaths. What about the current rapid decline and possible future death of the natural world, which is a constant grief for me, exacerbated both by bereavement and by three books I’ve been reading.

In the novel Brendon Chase, probably set around the time of the First World War when the author was a boy, three boys run away from home and live wild in the forest for nine months.

The Peregrine details sightings of this bird and other wildlife around an Essex estuary in the 1950s and ’60s.

Common Ground, published in 2015 (and which I haven’t yet finished reading), describes the author’s intense relationship with a patch of forgotten countryside on the edge of the town where he lives.

Although I didn’t plan it that way, reading these three books – in date order – shows up the decline in the natural world with excruciating clarity.

In the novel, the boys hunt, shoot and trap wild animals without a qualm: they joke for example that they can’t eat duck any more because they’ve killed all the birds which used to live on the pool nearby. Could you even live in a forest any more for that long without seeing anyone else (except in their case a charcoal-burner)? Do forests that size still exist and would they be people-free?

At the time of the writing of The Peregrine the bird was threatened with extinction and the author writes of the landscape, ‘It is a dying world, like Mars, but glowing still.’ That still holds true, even though peregrine numbers are recovering with the banning of certain chemicals, and he describes a host of other wildlife which I never see or hear any more (partridges, cuckoos, thrushes).

Common Ground brings us up to date. The countryside described is anything but pristine. It contains litter, discarded barbed-wire (which kills a fox), a derelict railway, electricity pylons, traffic noise and a rough sleeper. Even so, the author loves it (because of the way it is, not in spite of). He discovers that it is earmarked for development – 900 houses. But what can he do?

What can any of us do? How can we stay close to nature when nature is vanishing? How can we live in a way that is not destructive to nature? How can we help stop the decline? And am I even asking the right questions?

I think I feel another list coming on. A list of answers, I hope, as well as a list of ways to stay positive, of antidotes to grief and death.

But that could take some time and now I must walk the dog.