Late August
I’d just arrived home after being on the road for several hours. As I climbed out of the car, slinging my radio strap over my shoulder and conducting a mental inventory of the fresh veggies I’d purchased at roadside stands on the wandering drive home, a movement at the front tire of my car caught my eye.
A butterfly had fallen to the gravel and was fluttering feebly, unable to right herself or to fly away. Her wings were horribly mangled, the upper wings immobile and the lower flapping wildly. I’ve seen this before; she had been caught up in the grill of the car at some point on the drive home, unable to break free.
I stooped and lifted her gently. Her upper wings, outstretched in my palm, drooped. Iridescent glitter brushed from her wings onto my skin, leaving blue-black bruises that caught the late afternoon light.
I watched, for a little while. She had no movement in the upper wings, but paced across the mountains of my palm in agitation.
I had to make a decision.
She would not fly again. This much I knew. She would die, and sooner than later, and she would struggle to the end.
My heart broke over this tiny winged creature, this little fingerprint of God, who’d been the victim of my clumsy human actions, caught up in the mess of my world.
She should have been flying in a meadow somewhere, flitting from flower to flower. But the world is not always safe.
I had, now, a choice.
I could leave her where I’d found her, where the hot sun would burn until dusk, where the tires would move around her.
I could set her in the garden where she would stagger about in the leaves until an animal or another insect or a careless movement or the slow march of time ended the fight.
I wished for a gentle end for this poor injured creature.
But I was a farm girl once and I know that sometimes, the kindest thing is not the gentlest thing.
I made my decision. I set her on the ground, raised my boot, and the world stopped spinning.
To do all things with love and kindness is not easy. For that butterfly, as little as butterflies feel, the kindest thing was to release her from the struggle. The gentle thing – for me, anyway – may have been to leave her in the garden, surrounded by flowers, knowing that the inevitable would happen, but taking no responsibility for it and having no hand in her death. This would have been permissible, but would it have been right?
This is not a decision I have to make often, for which I am thankful.
My first instinct is always to heal. I am the girl with bandaids and waterbottles, the one with a dab of honey on my hand for the frost-nipped bees in late September. I am the girl who made friends with the feral cats and gave them spaces to call home.
What do you do when healing is no longer possible? When suffering is all that remains?
And who gets to make that decision?
I felt a stab of guilt as I looked down at the crumpled butterfly. I had done that. I had taken action and caused irreparable harm and certain death to one of God’s creatures.
I felt the same grief staring at a bowl of chicken soup made from chickens my friends raised, the fluffy and friendly hens I’d made friends with and handfed vegetable scraps from the garden.
What an awful thing to be a human, to be a steward of this world. And what a wonderful thing, too, to have the space in my heart to care.
Years ago, I held a bee for the last hour of her life. She, too, had been injured. But with her, there wasn’t a struggle like this. She was not dragging broken wings, fighting to fly away. She rested in my hand until the end.
Neither the bee nor the butterfly were wrong, and I think I was not wrong in how I handled each. The bee asked for comfort, for warmth. And the butterfly was fighting a battle that was already long lost.
We have an obsession with life, sparked by a deep fear and misunderstanding of death.
But death is also a part of life. Sometimes there is nothing that can be done to save someone. We do the best we can, and that is all that we can be asked to do.
If we wish to live in a world full of kindness and love, we need to let go of that fear.
Fear has no place in the garden of kindness we are growing here.
I lifted the crushed dead butterfly and carefully buried her in the garden where she will become a million tiny atoms which will then become something new.
And I lifted my face to the sunshine.
When the end of my time on this world comes, however that journey ends, just like the butterfly my body will become a million tiny atoms and then become something new here in the mountains that made me. And my soul will go home to the place I have longed for: to a cabin in the woods at the foot of the mountains, with the sun setting over the lake, with Somebody good. I hope that the journey is long – but I am not afraid of the journey or of the end.
Love you. Mean it.
– A
💛
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