Page 54 - NyghtVision Magazine Volume 3 #4
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them beauty. The plastic rose denied the reality dust.
of death. The second stanza in Joyce Kilmer’s short
Standing on the trail in the Joyce Kilmer Me- poem proclaims,
morial Forest, Dr. Dixon’s lecture came back to
me. The forest is a memorial to death. It is a “A tree whose hungry mouth is
cemetery. Yet, in the midst of this cemetery, prest
there is life. The will to be born, to live, is pow- Against the sweet earth’s flow-
erful. Yet, we know, but presumably the plants ing breast.”
and animals do not, that we will die. However,
we want to live. We are interconnected. Our roots are in the
As a result, many people deny death. We earth (11).
seek eternal life based on religious beliefs and Allow me to make one final observation. I am
our fear of death. As opposed to the tree that always amazed when I hear of the long waiting
falls in the forest, we often bury our dead in lists for heart, liver, lung, kidney, etc., organ do-
wooden caskets and place them inside concrete nations. If we would see our deaths as an op-
vaults. We seem to believe that we are preserv- portunity for others to live, we would have no
ing our dead for some future reincarnation, ei- waiting lists.
ther earthly or heavenly. We don’t see death as What greater good could there be?
a part of life. We are all trees.
All around us, nature shows the way. We all
come from the ground. Ashes to ashes, dust to
54 | Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest
