‘Life and Death’ Roundtable Reflection

I saw an image of ice frozen around an acorn seed that had crystalized into the shape of an oak tree. It made me think, while so much of the future has yet to be determined, states of being are prewritten. And as much as we may try to run from it, all life is pregnant with death. Our final Community Roundtable of 2025 invited participants to sit with the discomfort of speaking with each other on this abstract, yet personal subject.

Just about every stage of adulthood was represented at each table, from acorns like me, to beautiful elder oak trees.  One question asked, “What has profoundly changed the way you live?” As my table shared their answers – retirement, career change, moving, divorce, loss of a parent or spouse – I noticed that the answer was consistently relative to the most recent major change in that person’s life. The follow up question was, “What really matters in life, and how has that changed over time?” Though the answers varied, they were all of the universal sort, not dependent upon that last change – the importance of relationships and community, balance, truth, and purpose. States of being as prewritten into our lives as death.

We all attended this roundtable on December 11^th, right in the holiday season, when these themes of the meaning of life and death are in the icy atmosphere of our thoughts, as many of us prepare to miss those family and friends who have passed. They’re also normally reflected in the weather, but this year it was too temperate, many noted, too dry.

A retired couple noted that none of their friends would talk about these subjects, such as what a good death looks like. Elder participants spoke of issues around hospice, insurance, and retirement. For them, a good life included preparation. I was asked if my generation, those of us in our twenties and thirties, talked about this. I said yes, we talk about it all the time, but more abstractly. I thought it was interesting that the older generations generally talked about it less, but prepared more, and our generation talked more and prepared less. I suggested that we talk about it because we feel so uncertain about what the future holds, and we don’t really prepare for the same reason. Maybe that’s why other generations talked less about it, because certainty was something to be held onto rather than chased.

For both humans and oak trees, conditions are changing. The predictable shape melts and twists. At the roundtable, between different states of being we swapped visions – and I could see how the firmness of their belief in the future was built around so many experiences of the impossible, and how we will be able to build it for ourselves too, even if conditions have changed. It will be of material in a different state of being, but of the same essence, the same wise design of the acorn.

The dialogue that occurs intergenerationally and across a myriad of other experiences at these roundtables serve to merge unique perspectives into a recognition of where we actually are as a community – and where we will go from here. On the topic of death, there is no changing where we are going laterally. But through grappling with death together, we figured out some abstract roads – that we can transmute our doubt into questioning, and towards a belief in life. That we can transmute our fear into caution, and towards the courage to live.