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Man’s fascination with Death began right around the moment of life. Early man could see the obvious. Death is inevitable. Death plays no favorites – young and old, rich and poor, the well-appointed and the merely shlubby, Death visits us all.
To understand Death, early man thought, is to understand life. Why are we here? What is a good life? Is this berry poisonous? You try it. Early man became a student of Death. He held skulls in his hand and asked hard questions: Whence Death?
Death was everywhere. It spared no species. Animal. Vegetable. Mineral. Well, Death skipped the minerals but only because so too did life.
To live was to die. For one and all.
Since man could neither outrun nor sidestep Death, he renamed it. Dying was now: Passing on; Transcending the physical form; Departing this mortal coil. Death became: The Great Beyond; Eternal Sleep; The Pearly Gates.
There are many euphemisms for Death. I will submit one more. Fall.
This year twenty-six percent of Americans will take a trip to watch leaves die. Some folks call them leaf peepers. But you don’t hear about anyone taking trips to watch the leaves when they’re alive and thriving. It’s only the bitter end of the leaf ’s life that people’s morbid curiosity is peaked. So maybe a better name for them would be end of life leaf peepers.
The science of a leaf changing color is too boring to get into, involving big words like chlorophyll and photosynthesis, but basically as the days get shorter, trees get less light and the leaves stop getting nutrients. The green fades and the other colors – that were there all along – become visible.
In other words, Fall is Death (of the leaf).
Naturally, poets and painters go to town on this sort of thing. WH Auden’s delivers Autumn Song. Robert Frost gives us October. And that Shakespeare bard delivers a more esoterically titled, Sonnet 73. Painters love it, too. Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Rousseau have all delivered canvasses bursting with dead and dying leaves.
More recently, filmmakers from Ingmar Bergman to Woody Allen put Death on the silver screen. The lead character(s) in every third movie by Tim Burton is dying or dead. In Pirates of the Caribbean and The Sixth Sense, Death might slow you down but it’s not the end of the line.
The different colors – red, yellow, purple – are, for the leaf, just different stages of Death. So, staring, gawking, ogling, or yes, even peeping at the changing colors is like watching someone starved of oxygen and then observing them turn different shades of blue.
It’s not a question of if these leaves will die but when. Fall is like a bullfight where the outcome is not in doubt. Anything from a stiff breeze to gravity will fell these leaves. But make no mistake about it: the leaf will go down. And that last blaze of color will turn once more. It is known, simply, as Stick Around Brown. But no one goes out of their way for a brown leaf.
Like bloodthirsty spectators at the Roman Colosseum, the crowd lusts after purple, yellow, and most of all red. And they want a fight. While it’s pleasant to see a vibrant, newly felled leaf on the ground beneath your feet and it’s agreeable to observe leaves on the trees, swaying precariously in the wind, but the absolute ideal place to see the leaf, the image that brings the throngs to their feet and takes their breath away, is in the air. The leaf in its final descent.
The Peepers are a macabre bunch. But so too is man. Our fascination with Death is as old as man. John Keats calls Fall, “The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” I call Fall Death.
Inevitable. Ephemeral. Red.
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