His Own Grave
A man is digging his own grave a little while before he expects to die. He wishes to provide himself with the necessary place where his body may be buried. He prefers doing the digging himself. After all, it will be his last residence and he has always built his own before this, or even when it was bought ready-made, he knew he had bought, moved in and occupied the house of his own initiative, and so he intends to carry on in this manner since he considers death but a change of venue, so to speak.
Nor does he want to be carried in a coffin, he will walk to the grave as he senses himself dying, and he will climb into it and stretch out, with people looking on, relatives, friends, debtors and those indebted to him. He will have forgiven them their debts, again to show his self always free, since to die does not mean absolutely to become potentially a tree root nor simply food for the mice. Death was a stage in living we must come to, as one comes to an end of friendship or a love affair when either lover must leave the country or move elsewhere. His relationship will be with the mice and the tree roots. It will be the same in depth that he experienced above ground with his own kind. There will be the same principle of interaction, the same ambience between them, the same change within the person and character, and if he can no longer detect these changes in himself in the grave, it will be change anyway, and change was what he always knew above ground.
Did he always recognize himself in those changes, as when he found himself growing aged before the mirror and could not connect that with his once youthful full face, but he was aware, and now he is aware of the changes that will come without his consciousness of them, but he knows of these changes now; he is informed. He is not yet a thing. He will become a thing but that too is in the nature of living. Do we not make chairs and tables of living trees, and so the process is perfectly okay with him. His identity will be carried forward in the mouths and bellies of the mice and in the roots of new trees and grasses. He continues to dig his own grave.
1977.
Page(s) 5-6
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