Daily Archives: April 21, 2010

They say Thoreau mumbled the words “moose” and “Indian” just before he died. Maybe he had a vision of his beloved Concord woods and their former inhabitants beckoning him to join them in a risen world. When someone asked him a week earler how he stood in his relations with God, he said a snowstorm meant more to him than God. With his trademark clarity intact, he had surrounded himself with what was vividly real to him, entering into Nature on his own terms.

When I visit my dying friend, though I see him surrounded by family, his smile and quiet humor still intact, I also see him beginning weeks of brutal radiation treatments to his brain that offer him only the illusion of control and borrowed time. I can’t help but wonder if the woods of so-called modern medicine many of us wander in at the end of our days contain anything as redemptive as Thoreau’s risen Garden.