. . . I go for a walk. The lure of mid-afternoon autumn light – even more gold and crisp through the filter of magnificent white clouds – is all I need.  Or so it would seem.

I settle my eyes on the clouds, anything but diminished by the sweep of cliché  (cotton the queen of them all). Magnificent suggests something magnified.

At a funeral we tend to magnify a life no longer held by a body.

Gone.

We choose words carefully to encompass what it was – is – about this person no longer with us.  One granddaughter speaks with so much heart (not to mention composure through tears) about the phone calls and the shopping, the family meals and confidences she shared with my aunt, her grandmother. Two sons-in-law sing of a different kind of love and praise and respect. That this is the last of my remaining aunts is not lost on me. And yet there’s much more to what sends me out walking after the funeral.

Autumn (the season between the playfulness of summer and the introspection of winter) demands a warrior’s courage in the midst of grief and sadness, according to the Taoists.  There’s no easing in, suggests Keats, to this “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.”  All of which translates, to me, as the season that energizes me while gripping me by the throat with a melancholy.

And maybe that’s the point – nothing is every really one thing or the other.  “Man Woman Birth Death Infinity” were the opening words to a popular TV show (“Ben Casey”) I watched when I was young. The implication of cycles did very little to persuade away the life/death duality ingrained in me.

Not that I don’t try to overcome (or do I mean overcompensate for?) the discomfort with death. Two movies I saw last week – one profound, one silly – touched on the very question of our place in the wheel of life, our relationship with the sacred and the profane. Samsara, recently released, is a gorgeous film, shot in 70 mm, a collage of images that spans the globe.  From a monastery in India and a temple in Myanmar, to a prison in the Philippines and the Ninth Ward, New Orleans, and a coffin shop in Ghana – all told 25 different locations – the documentary becomes a meditation on the places where time slows down and the ways in which it speeds up, ultimately a reflection on life and death and interconnectedness.  There is not a whit of dialogue, a strategy that speaks to the power of image. There is music, and it is used purposefully.

A Thousand Words, in contrast, is pure Hollywood, Eddie Murphy as fast-talking literary agent  Jack McCall (why do I torture myself?), who gets his comeuppance when he  makes a promise to a guru whose book he wants to represent. Here’s what happens: the Bodhi tree at the ashram he visits to seal the deal magically transports itself to McCall’s backyard, and, with each word he now utters, a leaf drops, the assumption being that when they’re all gone, so is McCall. Of course, this being a predictable film, what would seem to be a doleful denouement turns to one of enlightenment.  I said it was silly. But you gotta love that Eddie Murphy smile.  And the suggestion that all we need is a Bodhi tree to make us think before we speak.

Here’s my sense of it all: at my most melancholy, I’m filled with a longing for something gone, the past refusing to slough itself off my back; at my most anxious, I’m riddled with uncertainty, the future relentless in reminding me that I am, indeed, “chained to a dying animal.”

I tear up when I hug a cousin, filled with both affection and the bond we share, daughters now without mothers. I can’t say whether it’s death or the act of dying that fills me with more dread. But I can say this:  each year, as September slips into October, I never fail to marvel at the display Mother Nature makes of dying, the leaves  boasting — here I am glowing yellow, here I am spilling over in orange, here I am a burst of red — as their glorious bouquet takes shape . Oak and maple, hickory and elm in a  patchwork only visible from a distance, as if to remind me, before they fall, that the whole is so much greater than the sum of its parts.  

Photo copyright © Christine Boyka Kluge