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Garvey: Meeting at the crossroads

By Georgia Garvey - | Oct 4, 2022

Autumn, like all good art, is about death.

That’s what I found myself thinking as I read the comments on Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s “Tha Crossroads” video on YouTube.

Bone Thugs-N-Harmony is a rap group from the 1990s, though I’m mostly familiar with their oeuvre based on what I could pick up through the walls separating my teenage room from that of my little brother. He blasted the group’s “Thuggish Ruggish Bone” so loudly and so many times in a row that it seemed at the time to be punitive, or maybe an exotic torture method.

But the other day, I tripped and fell into an internet black hole and wound up watching ’90s music videos for almost an hour.

In the one for “Tha Crossroads,” an Angel of Death-type figure gathers up the souls of the departed, including a baby and a young man mourned by his mother. It’s a sad song, depressing even, talking of meeting lost loved ones at the crossroads and at one point offering a plaintive “I don’t wanna die.”

It touches a nerve, and reading the comments were like peeking into the thoughts of funeral mourners. There were lamentations for beloved family members and even a post from someone dying of bone cancer.

“I will miss the loved ones I will leave behind but look forward to being reunited with the ones I have lost,” he wrote.

I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately, as fall finds its foothold and the weather changes. For there’s beauty in the season, but that beauty is rooted in endings, in the passing away of what was once sweet. There’s Halloween and fallen leaves and the promise of winter’s cold embrace — they remind us of one of the few experiences that all human beings will share.

Far smarter people than me have spoken far more eloquently about the links between death and fall, but what struck me was the way so many of us love the season of autumn, perhaps because it reminds us of dying.

For me, this fall has particular meaning as I enter the second half of my life, my autumn season. My birthday approaches and once it’s here, I can no longer pretend to be in my summer prime.

My hair is graying and my neck is sagging, and if I ever forget my age, my knees are happy to remind me.

Maybe I think about death too much, focusing on the coming winter, instead of living in the now — when there are still leaves on trees and days when the sun is shining so brightly you could forget there ever was a February at all.

But somehow it makes the now sweeter, for me and maybe for others, to know we only have a short time to absorb fall’s beauty.

I remember an autumn years ago, when my husband and I were in the nadir of our struggle to have children, when I was driving in my car after one of my miscarriages. Hormones surging through me, I looked at the trees, as empty and barren as I felt inside, and I could not help but cry. There was death on the trees and death inside me and it felt inescapable. It was inescapable.

Then, from some strange well of hope, a tiny voice reminded me:

They’ll be back. The leaves will come back.

And somehow, that cheered me, then and now.

For, yes, autumn is temporary, but so is winter.

Death is there, always threatening, but like all things, death ends. We’re not to know what comes next, whether it’s heaven or reincarnation or an absorption into the universe’s energy, but if it’s anything like life, it will be beautiful, as beautiful as a perfect autumn day.

And there we’ll all meet, together, at the crossroads.

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

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