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When I was 22, I moved from Massachusetts to Oregon.
Less than a month earlier, I lost someone in a way I didn’t understand—someone I deeply loved.
I was grieving. She was gone, I was shattered, and I didn’t know how to move forward. What had always been sure and constant was suddenly unpredictable and perilous. Moving so far away left me even more vulnerable, and I was completely without an anchor. I had never grieved before—not in this way. Not in a way where the loss felt so unfair. She was supposed to be here longer; it wasn’t her time. The grief for the loss and the injustice of it was all-encompassing.
I didn’t have spirituality to guide me. I grew up with agnostic parents who enjoyed showering us with Christmas presents, lighting the menorah, leaving wine out for Elijah, and setting up Easter scavenger hunts in our Eastern Massachusetts house. Despite the traditionally religious nature of these celebrations, “God” played no part in our version of them. When it came to God, they said they just didn’t know, but that I should explore and decide for myself.
My parents admitting that they didn’t know the truth about the mystery of existence and mortality was both a blessing and a curse—in the truest sense of the phrase. Many times, I’ve thanked my folks for keeping life and death mysterious; for not indoctrinating me with a rigid yet unproven belief system. I saw religion badly damage my loved ones, leading them to believe that their natural and true selves were somehow shameful and sinful.
That being said, I can’t help but acknowledge how much easier life might be without the burdensome weight of the fear of death. Would it not be utterly lovely not to worry about the dissolution of my identity, my memories, me? Hell, if I really believed I could live in eternal splendor simply by being a good person most of the time and giving the priest a heads-up when I behaved otherwise, I’d be thrilled. My ego would be protected. I could never really die, and neither could anyone I love. Those who wrong me would surely be condemned to the depths of hell! What a cool thing that would be. But without the pressure of conforming to a religious community, I was never quite able to believe.
I was around five years old when I first experienced existential terror. It was late summer, and my family was visiting my grandfather at his home in rural Maine. I’ll never forget the Pepto-pink tiled bathroom, the glow of the rotund black-and-white TV, and the saccharine smell of the Kool-Aid we drank too much of. I had opened a drawer of the small bureau in the narrow room my sister and I slept in. I can’t remember what I was looking for, but what happened next, I remember like it was yesterday. Out of nowhere, it hit me. I would die someday, and Abby would disappear. Abby would be gone, forever.
It felt like the time I had fallen off the monkey bars, flat onto my back—like my breath was sucked out instead of in. I deflated like a popped balloon after a birthday party. It was petrifying. This experience has influenced my relationship with the mystery of life and death ever since. So, when I lost her all those years later, there was no comfort in the idea of heaven. There was no comfort anywhere. She was gone forever, and I felt like I wanted to die too, just to be without the pain. I guess sometimes it feels like nothing-ness is better than something-ness, after all.
Out in Oregon, I had made a few friends who invited me to go mushroom hunting up north, in Cape Disappointment. I went, hungry for distraction from my grief. I rode the bumpy three hours in the covered bed of the truck. We parked near the beach and started the search. It was a lovely, warm, and sunny late summer day, free from the humidity I loathed back home. The breeze was cool and delicious, and for a moment I was content, not thinking of her.
Some time passed without luck, until one of my friends called us over from some 20 yards away. I joined the group that had gathered in a haphazard circle. They made room for me, and I followed their gazes into the center. There, I saw the exquisitely-intact skeleton of a fox, flesh dissolved completely, leaving pure white, untouched bones. It was perfectly encircled by plump, young, mustard colored mushrooms, formed immaculately and in their prime.
I felt deep understanding wash over me—just as suddenly as my terror had gripped me in my youth. Belief in the incorporeal afterlife may have been beyond my reach, but this irrefutable and tangible expression of truth was there, right in front of my eyes. Lore calls it a fairy circle, and indeed, it appears magical. But it’s not magic, it’s nature—the fabric of our bodies, planet, and universe. Though we build walls around ourselves and our hearts, it’s still there, everywhere around us. It is energy, transferring from one vessel to another. It is the cycle that connects all things that live and die.
At that moment, I knew I could find peace again. This understanding didn’t take all my pain away, and I still weather the waves of grief to this day. The fear of ego-loss and the unknown flow of life into death and back still rattles me. However, it helps to deeply feel that she isn’t actually gone; she was simply transformed. Like the fox’s flesh into mushrooms, her essence was not lost but returning, nourishing new life as part of nature’s perfect design.
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