It’s dying. We know it. A part of us, too, more than old skin, is dying with it.

Few, if any of us, enjoy thinking about it. It stirs the stew of all our losses. The smallest, most insignificant and distant bereavement swirls with our most devastating pain, and whatever cauldron we keep it in bubbles down there in the belly of our grief. Talking out loud about the world dying all around us seems a bit uncouth to mention in polite society.

Even my neighbor’s deliciously snarky black-eyed susans are sagging, many of them with their brilliant yellow pedals now dried into brown pigtails, hanging sadly from darkened skulls. The tall, sashaying decorative grasses I love all spring and summer now wave with drooping brown fingertips, and I know that soon we’ll have to cut them down. It is not even the end of August, yet the phalanx of........

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