There are so many new books about dying that there are now special shelves set aside for
them in bookshops , along with the health 一diet and home-repair paperbacks . Some of them are
so packed with detailed information and step-by-step instructions for performing the function,
that you ' d think this was a new sort of skill which all of us are now required to learn . The
strongest impression the casual reader gets is that proper dying has become an extraordinary，
even an exotic experience , something only the specially trained can do .
Furthermore , you could be led to believe that we are the only creatures apable of being aware
of death , and that when the rest of nature is experiencing the life cycle and dying , one generation
after another，it is a different kind of process , done automatically and trivially（琐碎的） , or more
“natural”, as we say .
An elm in our backyard caught the blight (枯萎病)this summer and dropped stone dead , leafless ,
almost overnight . One weekend it was a normal-looking elm, maybe a little bare in spots but
nothing alarming, and the next weekend it was gone, passed over, departed, taken. Taken is right ,
for the tree surgeon came by yesterday with his crew of young helpers and their cherry picker ,
and took it down branch by branch and carted it off in the back of a red truck , everyone singing.
The dying of a field mouse, at the jaws of an amiable household cat, is a spectacle I have
beheld many times. It used to make me wince 畏缩. However, early in life I gave up throwing sticks
at the cat to make him drop the mouse, because the dropped mouse regularly went ahead and died
anyway.