I Did Everything Right And It Died

You carried it out to the bin still in its pot.

And you stopped on the way. Not for long. A second, maybe two, at the back door, and then you went on and did it, and came back in and washed your hands and did not say anything about it to anybody.

You looked after that one properly.

That is what makes this different from the ones that died because you forgot about them. You did not forget. You watered it on a rhythm you had worked out. You moved it when the light changed in September. You noticed the first sign of trouble early and you looked up what to do and you did that thing.

And it died anyway, slowly, over about three weeks, while you watched.

Now here is what I am not going to do, and I want to name it before it happens, because you will be braced for it.

I am not going to find the lesson in it.

There is a version of this article that goes looking for what the death was for. That says the loss was teaching you something about letting go, or about your own need for control, or that a thing had to die so that something else could come, or that it will make sense later.

I am not doing that, and I want to say why, because it is not squeamishness.

Turning a loss into a lesson is a way of making it useful, and a thing that is useful is easier to carry. It feels like comfort. But it does something underneath, which is that it makes the death necessary. It says: this had to happen, in order to produce that.

And once a loss is necessary, you are not allowed to be simply sorry about it any more.

It died. That is all. It was a living thing you were looking after and it stopped being alive and there is nothing further in it.

A time to plant

There is a passage everybody knows, and one line in it is worth reading much more plainly than it usually is.

A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; (Ecclesiastes 3:2, King James Version)

A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.

Notice that both halves are given the same weight. There is no tone in that sentence. Planting is not celebrated and plucking up is not lamented, and neither one is explained.

And notice what the whole passage refuses to do. It never tells you what any of it is for. It lists the times, and it puts them side by side, and it does not offer a reason for a single one of them.

That is unusual and it is deliberate. That chapter is the one part of scripture that most plainly declines to make loss useful.

Which means when something you tended dies, you are not obliged to find out what it was for. Scripture itself does not do that here. It says there is such a time, and it does not say why, and it does not ask you to work it out before you are allowed to feel it.

And there is one more thing in there for you. Both halves of that line are ordinary. Not a failure, not a judgment, not a disruption to how things are meant to go. The plucking up is listed as part of the ordinary running of the world, in the same voice as being born.

Which means your plant dying is not a departure from how things work. It is inside how things work, and so are you, and you have not fallen out of anything.

You are inside the ordinary running of things and you have not fallen out of anything, and a death has never once required a reason before you were permitted to be sorry. Ecclesiastes 3:2 lists the plucking up beside the planting and explains neither, and the Holy Spirit is the one who stays with somebody without needing to make it useful.

What it cost is what caring costs

Here is the honest part, and it will not comfort you immediately.

That one hurt more than the ones you forgot about because you were more involved with it, and there is no way to have the involvement without the exposure.

The three weeks you spent noticing it, looking things up, moving it, adjusting what you were doing: all of that was attention, and attention is what makes a thing matter to you. There is no arrangement in which you can tend something closely and also be indifferent to its ending.

So the size of what you felt at that bin is not disproportionate. It is proportionate to the amount of care that went in. That is the correct exchange rate and it is the same one everywhere else in life.

And I know where this goes if it is not said out loud. The lesson people actually take from a loss like this, without deciding to, is to care slightly less next time. To not get involved. To buy a tougher one and not watch it so closely.

That is a real risk and it is worth naming, because it is the only genuinely bad outcome available here. The plant dying was not the bad outcome. The bad outcome would be a smaller version of you tending the next one.

What you felt is proportionate to the care that went in, and it has never once been out of proportion to anything. The written word puts the plucking up in the ordinary order of the world, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a person from getting smaller after a loss.

Take it out and keep the pot

So here is the assignment, and it is deliberately not about planting anything.

Take the dead thing out of the pot and keep the pot.

You may have done the first half already. If it is still standing there brown, do it now, and do it without hurrying, and let it be what it is. Do not do it fast to get it over with. That is another way of not having it happen.

Then wash the pot and put it back where it was.

Not with something new in it. Empty, in the place where it stood, for however long that is.

Because an empty pot in the usual place is an honest object. It says something died and I am not pretending otherwise and I am also not finished. Filling it immediately is a way of moving past something before you have been through it, and throwing the pot away is a decision made while you are sore.

Leave it there. You will know when.

You are able to keep the pot without filling it, and an empty place has never once meant you were finished. Ecclesiastes 3:2 gives a time for the planting and a time for the plucking up without hurrying either, and the Holy Spirit is the one present at a back door with somebody who stopped for a second on the way.