I have heard it said that a man who lives fully is prepared to die fully, and at any time. Today, I saw the gray hen, who I believe to be dying, sitting out in the middle of the grass yard near the pasture gate.

She had been sitting there for hours in the warm sun, observing,  the other hens were busy pecking for bugs. She looked so peaceful and so beautiful out there. Chickens never sit alone out there like that, she has moved into her own zone.

She is very calm these  days, not like a chicken. She is sometimes on the porch, sometimes in hiding.  She laid an egg the other day. The other hens have nothing to do with her, they don’t come near her. She sleeps up in the trees or hiding in the bushes, she has abandoned the roots and we can’t find her after dark.

Something is going on with the gray hen these days, she is mysterious. She comes and goes, vanishes for hours, even days, has become fearless, as if she is ready to die and accepting of it.

I came within two or three feet of her with my camera, and normally, she would have been long gone by then, but today, she just sat on the grass and looked at me, I even reached over to touch the side of her neck, and she didn’t run. She seemed to want me to be there. Maybe she wanted to talk.

Are you dying?

Do you have anything to teach me about death, I wondered? She tilted her head at me, you could swear she was listening. Or  maybe addled, to let me get that close.

When it’s time, I told her, I am the one that has got to die when its time for me to die. So I will live my life the way I wish.

I think Jimi Hendrix said that, she said.

Okay, I said, did you know that the fear of death follows from the fear of life?, I countered.  Do you know who said that? I asked.

Mark Twain, she said.

Are you afraid of dying? I asked.

No, she said, not really. We don’t know fear in that way. We don’t understand death. We mostly worry about things eating us.

But death must be so beautiful. To life in the soft brown earth, and the meadow grass waving back and forth over me, and to sink into the silence, no yesterday, no – tomorrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace.

Beautiful, I said. Sounds like Oscar Wilde.

I took my photos – the Gray Hen is very happy to pose for me these days – and then I went into the house. I looked out the window, and she was gone.