In the 1920s, Scott Nearing was a professor of economics until his radical views got him fired from two universities. Even the Communist Party found him too outspoken. In 1932, denied permission to speak in public and unable to get his books published, he turned his back on academia and moved with his wife-to-be, Helen, to a run-down farm in Vermont, determined to start a new life.
For fifty years, the Nearings demonstrated an unwavering devotion not only to each other but to what they called “the Good Life” — a back-to-basics existence that included growing their own food, cutting wood for fuel, and building their home and other buildings by hand. Scott saw such intense physical work as pleasurable and healthy, not as a burden. “Work,” Scott wrote, “prevents one from growing old. My work is my life. I cannot think of one without the other.”
Scott and Helen stayed in their Vermont homestead for thirty years before the ski crowds drew too close; then they relocated to Maine to start all over. They managed to make a living producing maple syrup and growing blueberries — working an average of four hours a day — and spent the rest of the time writing, studying, and relaxing. In addition to writing about politics and economics, Scott also collaborated with Helen on a series of books about their homesteading experiences, the best-known of which is Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World (Schocken Books). Many Americans who came of age in the sixties were inspired by that book to try to emulate the Nearings. If the back-to-the-land movement produced its share of follies (my first garden failed because I didn’t know I needed to water it) it also created many viable communities, some of which have endured.
In today’s increasingly computerized and urbanized world, Scott and Helen’s experiment in rural subsistence living may seem like a throwback to another era. But the bridge to the twenty-first century sooner or later has to touch ground. In the harsh future we’re creating, the counsel of a fiercely independent thinker like Scott Nearing may yet prove more valuable than that of many technological visionaries.
Scott practiced what he preached right up until the end. (He began building a stone house when he was ninety.) According to Helen, even Scott’s death was heroic: Near his hundredth birthday, no longer able to do his share of work around the house and farm, Scott just stopped eating. Never having believed in doctors or hospitals, he was determined to avoid them at the end, too. Six weeks after he started his fast, Helen held him for the last time and said goodbye. I was so moved by Helen’s story that I recounted it in The Sun and have regularly brought it up in conversation as an example of one man’s extraordinary tenacity.
In the following essay, Ellen LaConte gives a somewhat different account of Scott’s death. Yet even if, as it now seems, the legend was less than complete, it’s still hard to imagine a more complete life.
— Sy Safransky
When she met Scott Nearing, Helen Knothe was a young girl who had just begun to see through the shimmering illusions of her spoiled, aimless, impractical life. She wanted more, wanted to be more. In her eyes, Scott — this idealistic man on a quest for perfection of self and society — was the embodiment of her desires. She would abet unceasingly his worthy work and life. She would sing accompaniment to his song. She would be his constant companion.
And so, over the course of several decades, Helen and Scott created together what they called “the Good Life,” an upward struggle away from superficial living and toward truth. They succeeded remarkably and famously.
Then, in September 1983, Scott Nearing died. He drifted off, Helen later wrote, “like a leaf on the breeze.” Happy though she was for his release, Helen felt cut in two. Fearing to fall silent, fearing she would not sing well enough on her own, she took up the task of perfecting Scott’s story — and hers — in order to render it even more beautiful and complete than it had been. It was, as Helen would later acknowledge, a step downward from the truth.
I first met the Nearings in 1980, when Scott was ninety-seven. As editor of a small farming magazine, I went to interview them about the solar-heated greenhouse they’d just finished building in back of their stone residence at Forest Farm. By then, Scott was as wrinkled as his worn-thin chinos, his spine permanently bent. But he was still irrefutably alert, condemning our consumerist society and its “bought-and-paid-for” leaders as roundly as ever, and was looking forward to his hundredth birthday as proof that the Good Life he’d led with Helen could be a long one, as well. It seemed to me the last ambition of a man who’d early on exchanged ambition for mission.
Helen, who was twenty years younger than Scott, still bounded around the house and grounds like a teenager, tending to him and me and the soup at the back of the stove all at the same time. When she left after lunch to pick up a friend at the airport, the air tingled with her presence long after she’d gone, as in the aftermath of a storm. It occurred to me then that, with Scott doing less and Helen doing more, this might be the first time in their long, legendary partnership when the difference between their ages would be difficult for them, and that the difficulty would only increase as Scott neared his end.
I heard about Scott’s death from friends. It was said that, some few weeks before his hundredth birthday, having become too frail to carry his share of wood, Scott had announced at the supper table that he would stop eating. What a heroic measure, I thought. How perfectly Scott.
He had first traded solid food for juices and then, several weeks after rounding the century mark, had given up juice for water. Helen had been with him throughout, loving him, encouraging him, somehow managing to keep things going on her own. She’d tended to his needs, read to him at night, recorded his last words, and finally, on the morning of August 24, given him permission to go. She would be all right, she’d told him. He had done what he’d come to do. He’d made a difference. He need have no regrets.
With his last breath Scott had said, “All right,” and had simply slipped away.
The scene was as clear in my mind’s eye as if l’d been there: Scott lying on the thinly cushioned banquette that he’d said would be his coffin. Helen sitting beside him on a stool. Sunlight streaming in on them through the south-facing window. A profound silence hanging in the air between them, everything important having been said. Their profiles thrown starkly, like giants’, across the slate floor. I could see Helen’s hand, still strong and warm, resting on Scott’s narrow chest. I could hear her breath coming faster as she felt his slowing. And when it stopped, for a moment hers did, too.
Apparently the difficulties I had dreaded for them had stayed away.
Once I’d collected myself, I wrote Helen a sympathy note, saying how Scott seemed to have drifted off like a leaf in autumn (or so I pictured it). I said I regretted not having seen Scott again, and not having been there to help in some way. Helen wrote back, refusing my regret, inviting me to come, and appreciating my leaf image — which, if I didn’t mind, she’d take for her own, since that was how he’d gone.
Included with the invitation was a copy of a memorial flyer Helen had gotten printed to put the word out, helping Scott to use even his own death as an opportunity to teach. “From the ideas on death that appealed to him, I have selected some which show the direction of his thought,” Helen’s flyer read. One was from The Life of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: “Death? Why this fuss about death? Use your imagination. Try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.” I could hear Scott saying, “Exactly.”
By the end of that first visit after Scott’s death, I knew I was there for good, or at least for as long as Helen could use me. By the end of our first year together, she’d asked me to be her biographer. I went to Forest Farm regularly, so that my presence might become routine, and Helen wouldn’t have to think of me as a guest. Early on, we found that we worked well together.
While we read and reread the hundreds of sympathy cards and tributes that had come in, taping them into scrapbooks, Helen spoke of Scott. She kept coming back to how beautiful and complete their life together had been. She repeated often how much Scott had meant to so many people, how good he had been, and how glad she was for him to be out of this world, given the way it was heading. She said he’d been her anchor and that she’d been his sails, getting him out of his doldrums. She spoke extensively of Scott’s last few days, but said little about what had preceded them. I assumed she preferred not to remember that difficult time, so I didn’t ask.
What seemed to help Helen most was to talk about “the Good Death,” and how shining an example of it Scott’s had been. There was nothing maudlin in our conversations. Helen made it abundantly clear that a good death was the final proof of a good life; you could no more have the one without the other than you could have a good harvest without a good growing season.
In Helen and Scott’s understanding, a good death must include kindliness to those being left behind, gratitude for the gift of life, absolute trust in the workings of the ongoing life experiment, and the absence of fear — perhaps even a hefty dose of curiosity — regarding what lies on the other side of death’s door. And a good death would come easiest to someone who traveled light, the way Scott had: owning next to nothing, aiming to go like Gandhi, with little more than a dollar and a loincloth. Nonattachment was the key to arriving “over there” unencumbered. The more one gave away in advance — of material goods and kindliness — the better.
Finally, because death might come at any time, a good death was more likely if, once one had attained the age of self-consciousness, one remained in a state of constant preparation for and acceptance of it — “as Scott did,” Helen said. If we were unprepared or unwilling when it came time to die, she said, the passage might be rougher.
For Helen, the whole process — life, death, and life again (she believed in reincarnation) — was a journey back to “the larger life.” The manifest portion of the journey — what we call life — was our opportunity to improve our own being by improving the well-being of everyone and everything around us. That was the point of a good life. By her reckoning and that of thousands of admirers, Scott had proved this to be so.
And so, before passing out of this life, Scott had lightened himself materially and physically, prepared himself spiritually, and looked Death square in the eye, ready to take up such work on “the other side” as might be assigned him.
Like nearly everyone else who heard Helen’s story of Scott’s death, I was captivated, and inspired to follow his example.
In those first weeks together, Helen and I embraced Scott’s loss while also avoiding it. We talked of death as if it were some bloodless, fleshless, impersonal, allegorical figure — not the very real and personal event that had just upended Helen’s life. I think Helen was making, or trying to make, the Shaker-plain truth of death into something more elaborately beautiful.
But as the weeks of sorrow stretched into months, and the finality of Scott’s absence sank in, Helen missed him more than she would allow herself to say openly, more than she’d thought she would — and more than she deemed seemly, given her embrace of the idea that the dead live on in altered form and need not be missed, that to miss them is to cling to illusion. She confessed this to me in a state of painful embarrassment one day while we lay after lunch on that banquette Scott had called his coffin. We were lying on our backs on the narrow cushion, holding hands. Helen’s free arm was thrown over her face, hiding it from my view.
And then, one afternoon, she read me one of Scott’s favorite Gandhi quotes — one that, she was convinced, identified her “spiritual incompetence.” It came from Gandhi’s Letters to a Disciple, which Scott had read often and avidly: “The more I observe and study things, the more convinced I become that sorrow over separation and death is perhaps the greatest delusion. To realize that it is a delusion is to become free. There is no death, no separation of the substance.” Helen believed this in every fiber of her being — always had — but at that time of raw emotion she didn’t feel it.
Neither Gandhi nor Scott, it seemed, cut her any slack for missing the corporeal presence, for experiencing simple, unadulterated misery at the loss of it. In his spiritual evolution, Scott had apparently surpassed Helen. Now who would teach her? Who would show her the way? Who would draw her out of the doldrums?
Until then, Helen had seemed to me completely confident, competent, and capable of tackling anything. I had even imagined her to be the stronger of the two. But now, when she told me how she suffered, when I saw it in her eyes and in her manner, I began to understand that, whether others perceived it or not, Helen had always perceived herself — had groomed herself — to be Scott’s second fiddle. And so she spent her time packaging, preserving, embalming the idea of Scott. In the public’s sight and her own, she refurbished and polished Scott’s legend so that it could withstand time and she could continue to stand beside it, playing second fiddle. When she spoke publicly in those first months, she actually stood slightly to the side of the podium, as if to leave room for Scott — or rather for the image she was crafting of him, and of their life together.
Although from the very beginning I noticed occasional inconsistencies in Helen’s account of Scott’s death, I assumed they were simply the internal equivalent of the way different witnesses remember different versions of an accident. Only, in Helen’s case, the versions differed over time, rather than from witness to witness.
It eventually became clear to me, however — especially after the 1992 publication of Loving and Leaving the Good Life, Helen’s memoir about Scott’s death — that there was more to the inconsistencies than I’d imagined. The story Helen was presenting publicly was different from the one I’d heard privately. Perhaps because the way Helen told the story of Scott’s death in those first few months was widely publicized, she felt obligated to tell it that way forever, or else admit falsehood. Helen also knew it was unwise to mess with the details of a myth if the myth was working — especially if it was working for good. And she was well aware that contemporary America delights in spotting clay feet; that, though we love our heroes, we feel better about ourselves if we can prove they were at least a little fallible, too.
Ultimately, though, the truth about Scott’s death became inescapable, even for Helen, who realized there were consequences to her partial account. When a story offers itself as a model for others to follow, arousing in them the hope and expectation that they can duplicate it in their own lives, it is important that they know the truth about what they’re trying to duplicate. Because the Nearings were (and are) well-known, and because Helen spoke and wrote of it so poignantly, Scott’s dignified death at home, independent of medical intervention, eased by Helen’s stalwart caretaking and companionship, had become a model of the Good Death just as the Nearings’ way of living had become a model of the Good Life.
For most of us, death is fraught with dashed hopes, physical and emotional pain, loss of control, ignominy, and fear. Any method of leaving life that offers itself as an improvement ought not add deception to this list. After all, in matters of life and death, it’s not the beautiful myth we need — it’s the truth.
As Helen knew, a good death has only a little to do with means and a lot to do with ends (literally). But in her early accounts, the means by which Scott had died seemed to figure as prominently as the spirit in which he’d died. And those means were misreported.
Over a period of time, Helen told me the rest of the story, and left me her private papers to fill in what she could not bring herself to tell. And she left life (she died in an automobile accident in 1995) knowing that Nancy Berkowitz, a central figure in the true story of Scott’s death, was still around to fill in the rest. The fact that she did not cover her trail, but rather pointed the way to it, indicates that Helen wanted Scott’s Good Death to be complete in its details.
Scott Nearing began taking to his bed not in July 1983, as was reported, but eight months earlier. One morning in November 1982, Scott, who typically arose with the first light to write, bring in the wood, and kick up the fires, did not wake up. At Helen’s invitation, their young friend Nancy Berkowitz had come to live with them the previous spring in order to lend a hand around the house. Through the summer months Nancy had helped Scott in the garden and been a familiar, supportive companion to him while Helen fulfilled faraway speaking obligations. On that November morning, it was Nancy who brought the wood in and kicked up the fires. At first she and Helen thought Scott was just sleeping in — perhaps a new symptom of his advancing age.
The two women did the usual chores, moving around the room where Scott slept, making no effort at silence, but still he didn’t wake. By late morning they were deeply concerned, to the extent that they wondered if he might be dying. They sat by him for some time watching anxiously for signs, holding hands.
When Scott awoke, quite suddenly, he was disoriented and had difficulty standing on his own. From then on, he was never quite himself. A physician suggested he’d suffered a small stroke. Throughout the winter months, he slept a great deal and ate smaller meals. Though neither ill nor senile, Scott was obviously failing. Nancy slept on a cot next to him, downstairs in the living room. She helped him to the bathroom, and kept the fires going so that the slate floor and stone walls would not become too cold. If he was awake a lot during the night (which, as the months progressed, was often the case), she talked with him. Scott spoke of things real and not, of times present and past, and of timeless matters. Nancy listened to him ramble, mutter, and recall — and tried to prepare herself, as Helen was doing, to lose him.
In the early morning, Helen would come down from her fitful and anxious sleep to start the day and be available to Scott. Nancy would sleep for several hours then, if she could. Because it was winter, there were no garden chores and few visitors. Feeding the wood stoves, tending to Scott’s few needs, answering mail, and filling book orders occupied most of their time.
In the evenings, they read Scott passages from favorite books that honored his and Helen’s lifelong understanding of dying and death as among life’s greatest adventures. Like midwives, Helen and Nancy sat by Scott in the dimly lit room, ready to assist, watching for signs that this now-tiny man was about to be born out of the womb of this life and into the much-anticipated “larger life.”
Day after day, sometimes late, sometimes early, Scott woke into this life physically more diminished, but still capable of startling clarity, insight, and humor. Death, when it does not arrive on the arm of accident or trauma, can be almost leisurely. And if you can see it coming, you are granted the extraordinary gift of urgency, which prompts all manner of precious conversation and a profound appreciation of last things. When it is not set apart from the natural course of events, when it does not occur in a place far removed from home, when it is not something one does part time, death becomes one with life: that is how it loses its sting.
“Here we are, hibernating,” Helen wrote in January 1983.
Scott still abed. He eats well, sleeps well, and feels well — no pains — only legs wobbly; I can just get him to the bathroom and kitchen to eat, then back to the couch in the living room. I don’t get much sleep or rest or anything consecutive done. We’re keeping snug and warm by the wood he cut so assiduously, and which I now carry in — he watching wistfully. He won’t get up and out again. He’s on the way otherwhere. He may last long or he may go sooner, but these are his last days and we both know it.
Nancy was not mentioned.
Scott’s methodical, stoic nature made those months easier for Helen and Nancy than they might have been. Not everyone has Scott’s patience. He made no demands, never complained. He simply — it should be so simple — relaxed into his fate, having chosen it and found it to agree with his purposes. Few among us are so complete in ourselves, so certain of having lived as we intended and how we ought, that we can let go of life merely because it is finished. Few of us are so unselfish. But then, few of us die without pain. And fewer still are a hundred when we die.
Anyone who talked to or read about the Nearings in those years knew that Scott had planned where and how he would die: at home, preferably outside. There was to be no physician’s intervention if he became ill, no medications, nothing to forestall death’s approach or prevent him from facing it with open eyes and whatever degree of consciousness he could muster. He intended to be in full possession of his death, as he had been of his life.
But, as Helen had observed in January, she and Scott could not know when death would come, or whether it would be sudden or slow. Not knowing was hard for this exceedingly decisive woman, now faced with the pain of waiting — and watching. (I sometimes wonder if it’s harder to watch someone die than to be dying yourself.)
“How can he lie prone four months running?” Helen wondered by March.
No hope held out for recovery; just keep him going. He may go on to 102, with his strong constitution. I want him to live as long as he wants to. But how he can stand it I don’t know. I’d cut my wrists or fast to death if I couldn’t read or listen to music. There’d be nothing in life for me.
He seems sweetly content, with now and then an expression of wonder as to what he’s doing here. I’m getting used to the routine of it. Of course, it’s changed my life in that we have no life together anymore. He’s someone to feed, wash, get up and down, see he doesn’t fall, etc. And I do what work I can of my own in between. I never get out.
That sense of imprisonment was to worsen before it improved. There came a time in early spring when Nancy had to go away for a couple of weeks, leaving all the work of both the Good Life and Scott’s Good Death to Helen. Within days of Nancy’s departure, Helen fell with Scott trying to help him to the bathroom. At that darkest moment, she was forced to accept that, alone, she could not both care for Scott and keep up with all the work their way of life required; more than that, she could not physically manage Scott by herself.
Bereft, abashed, and hopeful that Scott was sufficiently detached not to notice where he was or condemn her for the decision, Helen signed him into a local nursing home. She spent as much time as possible with him, sleeping there when she could. He was patient, of course, and the nurses were very good to him, but Helen was devastated. This was not the way he’d wanted to go, not the way she’d wanted him to go — away from home, at the mercy of strangers, even kind ones.
And they’d been so close to getting it perfect.
In a fit of disappointment and self-recrimination, Helen brought Scott home again without the slightest idea of how she would manage. She was spared further crises by Nancy’s timely return. In April, Helen “escaped” for several days to attend a conference and visit friends in New York. Though there were no “incidents” in her absence, Scott was ill with something like the flu while she was away, and so, in her turn, Nancy was hard pressed to manage alone. At that point, Helen was forced to acknowledge inwardly — though still not publicly — their dependence. From then on, hospice workers and visiting nurses came to Forest Farm weekly, and neighbors checked in or lent a hand. Though these respites typically lasted no more than a few hours, they did relieve Helen and Nancy and provide time for some of the hands-on tasks. More than the visits themselves, the knowledge that additional help was available alleviated some of the unremitting, overwhelming sense of responsibility.
In late spring, activity around the farm commenced again, irrespective of Scott’s slow passing out of life. Journalists and photographers came to pay witness to Scott’s life and death. The garden needed to be planted and tended. There were talks to give and books to sell. In her vocation, Helen found courage and a way to keep the imminence of Scott’s passing a little at bay. Nancy took up more and more of the work of caring for Scott. The pair were a perfect team, each able and willing to do what needed to be done. A hospital bed and then a wheelchair were brought in. Scott spent nearly all his time asleep. And, night after night, Helen and Nancy read aloud words that placed all they did into the context of ancient sacred patterns, making it both worthy and survivable.
When she could, Nancy spent weekends with friends to recharge. These were particularly hard times for Helen. On July 2 she wrote,
Scott’s still weakening gradually, with no pain. His legs have little strength. It’s a hard job to get him up and out, but I do every good day. He lies on a chaise longue I got him. My life, of course, has changed and circles around him. (Always did, more or less, but now more than ever. ) I manage to get a swim in every morning, usually before he wakes up. The nights are restless; I don’t get much sleep.
By July 11, the circles Helen’s life made around Scott had tightened even further: “Scott is on the homestretch now. Too weak to stand or walk. He eats only like a bird — a small bird. I get him out into the sun, with help. . . . His birthday is August 6. Will he reach it? God knows — maybe.”
“With help,” Helen wrote, but still no mention of Nancy, who slept by his side.
Scott did not experience explicit organ collapse. He was not visited with the episodes of incontinence, kidney or bowel failure, pneumonia, broken bones, seizures, cardiac arrest, pain, or coma that so often unnerve both exhausted care-givers and the dying at the end. Rather, all of Scott’s systems ran down simultaneously until they ceased, also simultaneously. This is terribly rare.
By the time Scott asked to go on juices — by the time the book opens on the public version of the Good Death — he had already been dying for nearly nine months, and was attached to life by only the thinnest of threads. By then, he had no more interest in food than in world affairs, and about the same ability to chew and swallow as to influence global politics. Had he not chosen to fast deliberately, he would soon have been unable to eat, in any case.
Fasting was Scott’s method of meeting death. When he stopped eating, it was because he realized the time had come. He was both acknowledging and abetting his imminent end. Scott did not bring about his death, but rather yielded to it. That is what is truly remarkable about his death: knowing that it was upon him, he waited patiently and let it overtake him.
It is, finally, the element of control and the total absence of fear that set Scott Nearing’s experience apart, not the specific fact of fasting. And, apart from their own willingness and ability, one reason the Nearings were able to maintain control and to confront death in a deliberate manner is that they had competent and affordable (in truth, free) help. For all those nine months before Scott stopped eating, and for the next two until he died, Helen had Nancy Berkowitz’s nearly constant support and assistance, and the Tri-Town Nursing Association available at a moment’s notice.
If you read everything written about Scott Nearing’s Good Death, or heard every talk Helen gave on the subject, you would never hear Nancy’s name mentioned, nor any reference to the hospice workers. You would have no reason to believe that Helen had had any but the most sporadic and transient assistance. And you would never know how frustratingly long it can take to die of old age, or that even such a mindful, premeditated death is prey to surprises like dangerous falls and side trips to nursing homes. These were conscious omissions — ones that, I have to believe, Helen ultimately regretted.
She was, in part, protecting her private life. (I am only now beginning to comprehend the degree to which the conflict between private and public complicated what was to have been a simple life.) There was also the fact that the edited version helped Helen forget some of the harsher realities of Scott’s lingering demise, perfecting it not just for the public but for herself. It was terribly painful for Helen to watch Scott — her hero, after all — decline; to see him lying passively in bed week after week, like an infant. I think she may have been embarrassed for him, that he did not leave this world in the fullness of life. I think she was surprised that dying comes between life and death, and takes its own time.
I also think Helen stripped down the account because some of the details conflicted with her idea of how things might have been had she been a perfectly selfless and capable care-giver. Her life, too, had been directed toward self-perfection.
Finally, I think Helen tidied up the story of Scott’s death to make it better fit the model of the Good Life. Nearly everyone reinvents the past at least a little in order to make it more agreeable and themselves more lovable. I and others close to Helen had accepted early on that she had been reinventing the past ever since she’d begun to conceive of the Good Life as an ideal. I’d even tacitly approved her improvements, for the cause had seemed so worthy. (How much more generous — and also more honorable — was Nancy to allow Helen poetic license in her Good Death story. In the remaining twelve years of Helen’s life, Nancy never corrected or challenged her, never tried to step into the light when Helen made her invisible.)
The story of Scott Nearing’s death is, of course, every bit as noble with all the facts known, though it is less consistent with the ruggedly independent character of the Nearing tradition, and with the heroic struggle central to their chosen life.
The reality of Scott’s Good Death, however, is thoroughly consistent with Scott’s own first principle: interconnectedness — the importance to a healthy society of cooperation and collaboration.
Scott set forth this principle in Man’s Search for the Good Life:
(1) All human beings are members of one family — the human family. They are cousins under the skin. Treat them accordingly. (2) Associate with fellow humans in terms of mutual aid on the principle of live and help live. . . . (3) Throughout the many ramifications of human association let one simple formula prevail: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
Those invisible others who were involved with Scott’s dying worked according to these precepts. With the invaluable help of Nancy, the nurses, and the neighbors, Helen and Scott practiced cooperation and collaboration, even though Helen, clinging misguidedly to the myth of heroic individualism, did not admit it.
In order for dying at home to become common, as Helen hoped it would, it must be practical. Most people are not capable of facing — would not choose to face — their own or a loved one’s death alone. Even the most solitary among us crave connection. Helen herself, who flaunted her independence, took consolation from a large company of journalists and admirers around the world, and from the correspondence of hundreds of friends and acquaintances. And she had the intimate, unfailing support of Nancy, an incredibly good friend. Like birth and marriage, those other communal rites of passage, death is enriched, as well as eased, by being shared.
Scott’s death was undeniably good exactly as it was, because it was true to his life, to his highest personal ambition, and to human experience. There is more to be learned from an accurate account of it than from a bloodless, fleshless, tidied-up version, however beautiful. Above all, the story of Scott’s death is a story about a love so true it saw its bearers through one of the most challenging events life has to offer, and allowed them to find in it the opportunity for yet more love.
Scott so loved life that he trusted the wisdom and beneficence of all its methods. He grasped the necessity of physical mortality, and accepted it without complaint. He trusted in the immortality and continuity of that intangible property we call soul or spirit or life force. To his mind, life was all to the good and death but an opening onto another kind of life. This sort of open-eyed acceptance is the key. Possessing it, one can find the good in almost any death.
“Like a Leaf in Autumn” is excerpted from Ellen LaConte’s Free Radical: A Reconsideration of the Good Death of Scott Nearing. © 1997 by Loose Leaf Press, P.O. Box 509, Stockton Springs, Maine 04981.
— Ed.
