Learning from Chickens

It had been an unseasonably hot day in July. The news said—improbably, I felt—that it didn't break a record. The fifteen chickens in the coop next to me panted through their open beaks, spread their wings to create shade, or moved within the stingy shadows, one pecking the neck of another to get a place to scratch down to cooler earth.

They didn't seem to pay attention to the corpse of their sixteenth member. But the little boy did. His parents were boxing it up before taking it to the woods. There, the carrion birds and earthy creatures would dine, performing their life-culling moves on the dead.

The little boy mostly paid attention to the box. It was his first sentient encounter with death; they were still fairly new to the little farm. He seemed to take it in like the many other big parameters of life he was learning. “Why?” he'd ask, and he'd get an answer. So, he'd think: That is what it is. There's a bird who is sweet and funny and lays eggs. Then a limp body. It goes to the woods in a box. It gets eaten. I wonder where she is for a while; there's an empty feeling; she comes to mind at story time. After a bit, another one arrives—a fluffy baby bird. She gets a name too.

Lucky boy, I thought. He'll need that experience for all the years of his life.

My mind turns to talking with a colleague the week before; we had chatted about what maturity is. The ability to feel deeply without being unmoored, we agreed. I ponder again something not orthodox: children can be so much more mature than adults. Especially when it comes to death. And I don't think it's simply a lack of understanding.

Letting old lines of thought drop, I re-explored the idea. Maybe maturity is not so much related to chronological development. Or to experience. Or age. Or even proximity to death. Maybe it's more related to our “internal objects” (those we carry around inside us, the people who formed us, living or deceased). Maybe it's also a little related to our “external objec