Wendell Berry and a Good Death

When I heard of Wendell Berry’s passing, I was of course saddened. But a part of me was glad, too: for Berry has finally and fully done what he wrote of and practiced many times throughout his life. He has worked well and, having finished his work, has gone home to rest. He has descended into a darkness that has already and still will give way to fuller light.

Berry was the first writer I encountered who made me seriously consider death: what constitutes a good death, as well as the good of death.

For Berry, death is an integral part of life. It is, like membership, a reality that defines all creation. In his well-known “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” Berry commends us not to “Be afraid / to know your neighbors and to die,” for fearing death and trying to escape it will render us unable to “Practice resurrection.” Death is not a thing to flee from but a thing to be welcomed, not for its own sake but for what it brings.

He who works the land, as one of Berry’s poems pronounces, “enters into death / yearly, and comes back rejoicing.” Being a farmer, Berry knew that, as he wrote in his essay “Two Economies,” “in a time when death is looked upon with almost universal enmity, it is hard to believe that the land we live on and the lives we live are the gifts of death. Yet that is so and it is the topsoil that makes it so.” In The Unsettling of America Berry wrote that beings in an ecosystem are “indissolubly linked in complex patterns of energy exchange. They die into each other’s life, live into each other’s death.”

For Berry, all that is agricultural is a mirror and symbol and counterpart to human culture. So, too, with death: as the many necessary deaths of the natural world allow for further life, so death is the means by which we live in a spiritual sense. Darkness is the means by which we see and love the light. It is the way we know the world: as Jeff referenced in his reflection on Berry, when Berry’s character Hannah Coulter reflects on her husband Nathan’s death, she contends that “Death is a sort of lens, though I used to think of it as a wall or a shut door. It changes things and makes them clear. Maybe it is the truest way of knowing this dream, this brief and timeless life.”

In his Sabbath poem “The Farm,” (1991, IX), Berry commends the farmer to live—and die—like a tree:

More time, more light, more rain

Will make it grow again

Till it has realized

All that it can become

And then it dies into

More life, deserving more

By not desiring more.

Like trees, we die—or we ought to die—into more life. “Past life / Lives in the living,” another Sabbath poem pronounces. Or, as yet another poem names this truth, “Where the tree falls, the forest rises.” Evidently this is a truth of biology, but for Berry it is more than that, too. Before that ultimate and final waking into new life, we die into more life many times, and we live lives composed of many deaths:

More and more you have become

those lives and deaths

that have belonged to you.

You have become a sort of grave

containing much that was

and is no more in time, beloved

then, now, and always…

Every day you have less reason

not to give yourself away.

The lessons of death are manifold in Berry’s work. Many of Berry’s characters, most notably Jayber Crow and Andy Catlett, undergo a sort of deathly dark night of the soul through which they learn humility and grace and because of which their love for home grows. The last lines of the above Sabbath poem compresses those characters’ lessons into an implied imperative: give yourself away. Willingly and joyfully yield. Accept your lot with love. “Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you.”

Berry’s poem “The Wish to Be Generous” likewise represents these lessons well. “All that I serve will die, all my delights / the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field,” the poem begins. The world and its “silent lilies” and other beauties will pass away. To this Berry submits, writing:

Let the world bring on me

the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know

my little light taken from me into the seed

of the beginning and the end, so I may bow

to mystery, and take my stand on the earth

like a tree in a field, passing without haste

or regret toward what will be, my life

a patient willing descent into the grass.

Wendell Berry has taken his stand on the earth and finally, patiently, willingly descended into the earth that he loved and tended so well. We who remain, those who read and love his work, those who knew him and those who did not, would do well to follow his example.