Goodbye Friend.

A friend of mine was diagnosed with melanoma a few years back. He fought valiantly, was free of cancer for a year, then over the summer brain tumors were found and we learned his condition was terminal. Two days ago, I brought he and his wife a meal of hot soup, homemade bread and apple crisp. It was to be his last meal. Today, he died.

Jeff Bickart was quirky, intelligent, occasionally broody and a writer of great talent. He left behind his loving family and a community of grieving friends. Below, is an essay he wrote and submitted to the NPR program This I Believe, before he had learned of his terminal diagnoses. It's one that is a favorite of mine and I wanted to share it.


Married to This Land

I am an agrarian. My life is grounded, literally, in the soil. I am sustained by it and by all that grows from it, that gives life to me and to my family. The vegetables from our gardens, the fruit from our orchard, the sweet sap from our trees; the milk, the eggs, the wool we get from our neighbors.

Sustained physically by the fields and forests of our farm and our neighbors' farms, I am also sustained spiritually by that rampant life that rises yearly and forever from the soil, the creatures both domestic and wild that with astonishing exuberance live and flourish and die in this place. The trout lilies that push up through the dead maple leaves before anything else has greened. The peepers and wood frogs and toads that in the earliest spring announce with their voices their determination to keep on with it all. The young foxes exploring around their den in May. The peas performing flawlessly their annual act of germinating in the cool soil of April, and the bees visiting the blossoms on our apple trees.

So I believe that the health of the land comes first: that as all lives, including my own and those of my family, depend ultimately and completely on the beneficence, the goodness, the life-giving drive of the earth, I must take care. I must go out to my garden with reverence to plant my beans; I must enter the forest with humility to cut my firewood; I must stalk the deer with respect and awe. I must do no harm in my use of the land. I must cherish, though barely understood, the life of the soil. I must be grateful for the tireless work of the unseen earthworms and sowbugs and mites, for the endless digestion of the dead by fungal mold and bacteria. All other life begins down there.

I believe in the hard work of the body that helps bring forth food from the earth. I believe in the cool waters of the river that wash the sweat and grime from my skin, the exhaustion from my arms and legs and back.

I believe in the good work of devoting myself for decades to one place, to one piece of ground. Here in northern Vermont, I have given myself to these 87 acres, to trying to understand what goes on here, to trying to understand how to best make a good human life here for my family and for those I hope will follow. I have, indeed, become married to this land along the Wild Branch River: I have made a vow to care for it, to treat it with respect, to learn from it and be taught by it, to love it until I die, until I myself fall to the ground, pass into the soil, and rise up again from it, singing in the voice of the leaves in the wind, with the spirit of the chickadee in the branches.

by K. Jefferey Bickart of Craftsbury, Vermont