Beautiful Death

As a member of the LDS faith I believe in an afterlife that is good and happy and productive. I would not say that I am afraid of death. However, I'm not sure that I'd ever thought of it as beautiful before this Arch trip. We worked in a dead forest with dead trees, looking for the cultural remains of dead people who belong to a dead culture. We found such remains as well as the skeletons of dead animals. In other words, there was quite a bit of death around. And it was beautiful. I don't know how many pictures of dead trees I took, their red streaked trunks scratching the sky. The skeleton of the moose with the ferns I think was my favorite though.

So when I continued on that thread I started thinking about what made death beautiful or not (including that sad kind of beauty that I talked about in "Sadness and Beauty" from January of this year). I think it has something to do with being natural, and mature. When death is natural and mature so it doesn't feel unjust, and the pain isn't raw, nor the skeletons gory then it can become a beautiful, natural, even fuller part of life. 

I'm reading A Tale of Two Cities at the moment. Dickens writes "In the moonlight which is always sad, as the light of the sun itself is--as the light called human life is--as its coming and its going." I had to read it a few times to comprehend it, but again I come to the conclusion just because it is sad it does not mean it is ugly.