A Harvest of Death

My header photograph is a cropped version of one of a series taken by Timothy O'Sullivan on the Gettysburg battlefield on July 5th, 1863. Beginning in the early afternoon of Independence Day, the day after the battle at last came to an end, a steady rain drenched the fields. A long wagon train-- a "vast procession of misery"-- some seventeen miles long and carrying 8,00 Confederate wounded, made its exodus from that crossroads town in Pennsylvania. In their wake came the photographers--Alexander Gardner, Timothy O'Sullivan, and James F. Gibson--and for the next several days they composed their images of the dead.

Gettysburg was not the first American battlefield to be covered by cameramen. In October of 1862 a series of photographs were exhibited in a New York gallery owned by Mathew Brady. "The Dead of Antietam" was a unprecedented success.  The photographs had an uncanny ability to "bring home" the war. As a result of confronting these images of bodies left on the field of battle, northern citizens could finally get a glimpse of what so many of them had been reading about: the horrors of warfare. A New York Times reporter wrote: If Brady "has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it."

In his accompanying commentary to O'Sullivan's photograph in Gardner's Photographic Sketchbook of the War, Gardner writes:

Slowly, over the misty fields of Gettysburg--as all reluctant to expose their ghastly horrors to the light--came the sunless morn, after the retreat by Lee's broken army. Through the shadowy vapors, it was, indeed, a "harvest of death" that was presented; hundreds and thousands of torn Union and rebel soldiers--although many of the former were already interred--strewed the now quiet fighting ground, soaked by the rain, which for two days had drenched the country with its fitful showers.

In This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, Drew Gilpin Faust has said that the "work of death" was the most fundamental and demanding undertaking of the American Civil War. "Americans North and South would be compelled to confront--and resist--the war's assault on their conceptions of how life should end, an assault that challenged their most fundamental assumptions about life's value and meaning. As they faced horrors that forced them to question their ability to cope, their commitment to the war, even their faith in a righteous God, soldiers and civilians alike struggled to retain their most cherished beliefs, to make them work in the dramatically altered world that war had introduced."

Drew suggests that this struggle for meaning in the face of the mass slaughter of modern warfare that the Civil War instigated is an ongoing process: "We still struggle to understand how to preserve our humanity and our selves within such a world. We still seek to use our deaths to create meaning where we are not sure any exists."

To a great extent, this blog is intended to be an ongoing investigation of that struggle for understanding and meaning.

One World At a Time

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and to see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give true account of it in my next excursion. (Walden)

If I were to imagine a patron saint or presiding spirit of this blog, it would be Henry David Thoreau. Fully embracing life, he did not fear death. As Robert D. Richardson, Jr. has noted in Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, Thoreau had been unable to cope emotionally with the sudden death of his brother John in 1842. Days later, Emerson's five-year-old son Waldo died, further plunging Thoreau into a sea of unexpressed grief. But when Thoreau himself knew that he had only months to live, he fully accepted his own approaching death. The autumn leaves "teach us how to die," he wrote.

Richardson writes: "Away from home, the Civil War deepened. A new general named Grant was emerging in the Western Campaign. On April 6 and 7 one of the bloodiest battles of the war was fought at Pittsburgh landing near Shiloh church. On May 1 New Orleans fell to the Union...Thoreau's last days were spent at home, in peace, surrounded by family and friends. His bed was brought downstairs. No longer able to write, he dictated to [his sister] Sophia. By early April his voice had been only a faint whisper for many weeks. But his mind, wit, and spirits held."

Days before his death, Thoreau's Aunt Louisa came by the house. When Louisa asked him if he had made his peace with God, he replied: " I did not know that we had ever quarrelled, Aunt." His friend, the former minister and abolitionist Parker Pillsbury, visited and inquired about what near-death visions Thoreau might be having. "You seem so near the brink of the dark river, that I almost wonder how the opposite shore may appear to you." Suggestive of how wide-awake he had lived, Thoreau responded "One world at a time."

Richardson concludes: "Henry Thoreau died at nine in the morning on May 6, 1862. Outdoors, where he could no longer see them, the earliest apple trees began to leaf and show green, just as they do every year on this day."

He was forty-four years old.

(Photo from Google Image)

Death Close-walking Beside Me

So, why a blog whose sole purpose is to reflect upon death? To paraphrase the Book of Common Prayer as it refers to the sacraments, it is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual conversation that I have been having more or less continually as long as I can remember. Why not make that inner dialogue public, explore it more fully, and plumb the depths of what lessons death is seeking to impart?

Is this a morbid obsession, as my blog name suggests? In some sense it is. Undeniably, I have a dark fascination with death. But there's more. For me, as I suspect for many of us, death's mystery is intimately engaging and has an allure that is all but irresistible. It may even be that death impacts how I live my life now. Maybe.

In a recent interview, president of Harvard University and historian Drew Gilpin Faust, in speaking of mid-nineteenth century Americans' acute consciousness of death, noted: 'They believed that you focused your life more, you made its good qualities sharper, by always keeping in mind the fact that it would have an end. And so it was the anticipation of its limits that made the existence of your life all the more valuable."

As a clergyman and now, as a hospice chaplain, I encounter death often. I confess that this long exposure to death has not necessarily made me any the wiser. But neither do I deny death. With Walt Whitman in When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, I imagine death as a companion along the way:

Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of 

      me,

And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,

And I in the middle, as with companions, and as holding the

      hands of companions...

I cordially invite you to accompany me on this journey of exploration and discovery.

(Photo Credit: from James Smillie's Mount Auburn Illustrated in Finely Drawn Line Engravings)