The first piece here, MIDAS, was previously published on my former Homebound Bound site. HADES, the accompaniment piece, is brand new.
MIDAS
You’re surrounded by death, and the possibility of death.
It’s nice, owning plants, because you are surrounded by life, by green. But then, when you’re least wanting it to happen—when it’s the dead of winter, and cold, and the skies go dark early—your plants start dying, and then you’re surrounded by both death and cold and darkening skies, and everything goes to shit at once.
Or worse, your plants start faltering, start preparing themselves to die. And you, busy, negligent, and depressed at the dismalness of winter (and, you fear, life generally), you think about whether you ought to look up a video on how to keep them alive, maybe refresh some topsoil, maybe perform a few repottings, maybe change the watering routine, maybe move the plants where there’s a bit more light. These are all things within your power, and with perhaps no more than an hour or two of your time (and a little discomfort when you read articles that label your worst-off plants “tolerant of neglect”), you might devise ways to save not just one but most of your ailing green pals.
But instead they die. You LET THEM die. You walk around your apartment like a Midas whose touch is death. There you find skeletal monuments to your death-giving power—the crisp thin fallen strands of the spider plant, the ash-stark gray of the calathea’s withered leaves, the ebbing strength of the anemic pothos, whose once impressive vine is losing a battle to gravity.
Like fetuses in vats of some disturbed scientist, you keep cuttings in a desperate attempt to propagate plants you’ve already let die. A silver inch cutting, with a long, coiling length of stem crooked around the bottom inside circumference of a water-filled Ball jar, a few fuzzy white roots reaching out from the stem joints swaying like kelp. But the leaves, tinged with sickly purple and green, give you little faith in the possibility of a future rebirth. The tradescantia nanouk with its beautiful pink-purple color that, however, quickly looks gross and unhealthy as the inner green stripe of each leaf grows to dominate, and that’s how the leaves look now, screaming green, with wilted dried patches forming around outside edges and consuming the leaves lower down on the stem.
But you have two separate jars with the tradescantia cuttings, and one of them sprouts a bodacious coil of root from out of its bottom. Hope. The leaves remain delicate and sparse. And you don’t change the water, and there is a thick brackish green to the water’s tint where the root coil emerges thickly and hairily from the obscured stem and circles itself around, following its own unknown Giottoesque logic in pursuit of a perfect circle. And there is a strange translucent mass that also emerges from this root bundle, looking and moving like a leaf except with a fragility, translucency, and mucus-colored grossness that clearly marks it off as something that ought to remain underground, out of sight. But in spite of the whole messy bunch of it, unpleasant for the eye to look at too closely, this natural monstrosity is what hope is, it is what you can bury out of sight under some soil so it can take hold and bring fresh life to this room where seven plants have died in the past year and a half. Seven! And what, maybe 10 in total, throughout your whole apartment? You are become Death, the destroyer of plants. How come they even let you in plant stores?
Maybe some of that death toll doesn’t count if you can keep these ones alive, if you can manage to bring to life a new tradescantia and a new silver inch. But you had to buy a new tradescantia in the first place, do you remember that? Because the first one grew a long vine downwards and then, suddenly, decapitated itself! Long stem, popped right off! Your first plant suicide.
Maybe some of that death toll doesn’t count because the world sent you death. A first set, beginning of last winter, when you went out of town for a mere weekend and the pre-war radiators turned on exactly then, scorching the aluminum plant and angel wing begonia (your favorite, reminding you of an ex you're still not fully over, because you gifted her an adorable polka dot begonia, the sister to the angel wing, the week before she left you). Both resembled over-dried herbs by the time you got back. And you had lovingly installed a shelf over the radiator, expressly to give these plants a platform to show themselves off, expressly, especially, for the heartbound begonia. Then you learned, relearned: heat rises.
Because the world sent you death: the lovely fiery yellow star croton, gradually covered over by white fuzz and sticky sap from mealybugs who clustered their little gray bodies on the stems right below the leaves, at the joints of the stems. They spread to the other croton, also a goner, and they seemed not to care about the Amazonian elephant ear but that one, in turn, was attacked by spider mites. And no matter how many biweekly applications of Neem oil later, no matter how often you carried the heavy pot up to the apartment complex roof with your black KN-95 mask and blue vinyl gloves and cheap beater shorts so the Neem oil wouldn’t fly all around your hands and clothes and mouth with a sudden gust of wind, the mites would return and spin their thin webs in the triangle cut-out in the elephant ears' large and impressive leaves with their thick-veined geometry, and the mites would gradually enervate them.
And a friend who babysat the plants during another trip missed one, so that one also died, and a cordyline “good luck” plant seemed to have bad luck from the get go with dried out, desiccated leaves that never really seemed in the peak of health, and the winter knocked it out swiftly, and when you saw the same plant proliferating down in Mexico the next summer, you wondered how it ever made it up to New York’s lightless winter climate.
And none of any of this would matter, but the death somehow finds a place in your breast, and nestles itself there. It’s a bird whose name is Death, who crows as you go about your day, as you run into your plants both living and dead, a bird reminding you that you are not just a human being who does the things that you do, makes the money you do, has the friends you have—but also a life trailed after by death. Responsible or not, you live in a haunted house, the life not returning quickly enough to replace the death, to obscure it, to remind you that while everything passes, the new is also eternally reborn—hope springs eternal.
But no, not right now. With life comes death, and there are those moments—there have to be—where all we see is the death, just as there are those moments where all we see is the life.
For now, in your graveyard, all you get to see is death.
It’s what you choose to see. But that kind of choice can't be so quickly unchosen.
HADES
I’ve secretly hated MIDAS since the moment I wrote it. It’s felt too melodramatic at times, too glib at others. “You’re surrounded by death, and the possibility of death”! “Fetuses in vats of some disturbed scientist”!
And I shudder every time I think of its use of the second person “you”.
But there was nothing I could change in it—nothing in it let me change it. I couldn’t give up the details of this piece, the tableaux of colors, textures, vegetality. I couldn’t give up the homages to my houseplants that have passed on; I couldn’t give up the universality that felt present in this experience—the experience of killing something, of letting something die, that everyone who has owned plants has experienced.
I hate it, this piece, but it’s the kind of hatred that means I also love it—that variety of love that’s wormed through with disappointment.
So I refused to change it. Call this lazy editing if you want, but writing well means cultivating the right instincts and trusting them, even when that instinct tells you to not try to write it better, right now. There are infinite seemingly arbitrary decisions to make when writing, not least of which is “how much longer do I keep trying to edit this?”
Only instinct can make sense of those decisions. You can learn instinct better, by recognizing that you made the wrong calls, with time and distance. But in the moment the instinct you have is all you have.
(Oh look, our Fearless Writer takes a moment to soapbox about the role of instinct in writing: look at this man, this writer, this Writer, who thinks he writes so well that he can grandiloquize about the way writing is done! How many people read this publication, writer boy? Huh?)
And so my instincts told me that I couldn’t change this piece, couldn’t make it any better. I could only publish it. It got out there in that published form. And I continued to hate it.
There’s something else that pestered me about the piece, too, annoyed me every time I thought of it. Each time I would think of it, I would remember the title as HADES, not MIDAS. It’s not called HADES. It’s called MIDAS. So my memory was playing a trick on me.
And it’s not hard to see why. MIDAS, the piece you just read, is about death, about a sort of underworld of plants, an underworld that happens to exist in a 4th floor walkup in Brooklyn. Hades, of course, is the eponymous Greek god of the underworld Hades. MIDAS and HADES both have five letters, three of which, A, D, and S, they share in common, including the two most distinctive and prominent letters, which share the same position, **D*S.
But this wordplay is all a rationalization. Of course there are rational reasons why my mind misremembered this piece’s title as HADES. But excuse me while I thrash the straw man that I just created for myself: who gives a damn about the rational reasons why I thought of it?
Something was telling me something: HADES. Listen. HADES.
This piece has a HADES in it. It is not simply MIDAS.
Lurking in it, lurking under it seeking expression, needing to be pulled out and brought to the light of day and shown, shown, shown, is this: HADES. UNDER this piece MIDAS there is a HADES.
The UNDER-WORLD beckons. It calls. Underfoot, underroot, under each of these plants that populate the depressing menagerie of MIDAS, a dimensional unfolding might reveal precisely: the dead, the dying, the undead. There is a world under our world.
What would I do with it? How would I listen to it? Well, I’d write more, of course. I’d write HADES. MIDAS is no longer MIDAS, but MIDAS / HADES. One appears above the line. One conceals itself below the line.
What am I doing now, then? Am I Dante at his gate of Hell, «Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita», midway through life’s journey, anticipating a descent into the darkest darkness and a witnessing and recording of the same? What led Dante to his gate of Hell in the first place, anyway? What was running through Dante’s brain? What even ran through brains back then, before the romantics gave birth to the vibrant, tortured subjectivity that has metastasized into our present day emotional fabric? (Yes friends, yes, we haven’t thought the same way throughout all times and places, we haven’t felt the same way throughout all epochs and eras, we haven’t reached the end of the possibilities of our thinking and feeling!)
Well, fine friends, I will guarantee you one thing, one innovation I have on Dante, that in this descent into Hell my brain is open for you all to see, my heart is exposed so every goddamn vein and artery, blue and red, thick and throbbing and raw and vital can be seen and heard and watched and witnessed—I seek nothing more than that! As much as is possible! This is the goal, the burning star of my desire. Maybe this is why the second person tense of MIDAS, the “you”, felt like a cop-out to me: I tried to make these failures not mine, I tried to make these emotions not mine, even if unintentionally, even if through the accident of a stylistic choice.
My plants are my fucking casualties, though. My accidents are my fucking accidents.
And so I embark towards HADES. What has been said so far has just been the line, the gate between them, the lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate.
(This admonition applies to all my writing, by the way—get used to it.)
—
But first, a brief aside: On what it takes to listen well.
Listen to me here if you’ll listen to me anywhere fine folks: if there is a God (a spirit, a collective unconscious, a higher-than-us), this is one key place where God (Elohim, Brahman, She/He/They/Thou) is, or at least is witnessable: in these tricks our world plays on us, in the “HADES” that comes up when we think of “MIDAS”, on the uncanny little things and synchronicities that don’t need to have meaning but can have meaning if we decide to give them that attention. The muse, the daemon, in-tuition, in-spiration.
In-tuition: A word originally theological in origin, mid-15c, intuicioun, "insight, direct or immediate cognition, spiritual perception.” The “-tuit” shares the Latin root of “tutor”, tueri: "one who watches over, looks at,” a spiritual guardian.
In-spiration: An in-breathing of breath, a breath which is a spirit. Re-spiration: the breath. Latin spiritus: “the breath of a god.” Circa 1300, “inspiration” meant the “immediate influence of God or a god.”
We forget (as we pack off each day for our jobs that take a certain number of set hours from us and plop a certain amount of consumable exchangeable digits in our bank accounts in return) that our very words latently speak of possibilities that are no longer present to us. This is what it means to listen: to try to hear for such possibilities, that they might become possible again.
(Look at him, Fearless Writer, now thinking he can opine on the nature and possibilities of God, of language, of society! Give this boy a graduate degree in theology, in philology!)
—
Hades is not Hell, that’s worth clarifying.
Hades is more neutral, a place where everyone in the ancient Hellenistic world went after they die. Hell is where Christian sinners go, and therefore contains a moral valence: the good go to Heaven, the evil go to Hell.
I’m almost certainly simplifying this, I don’t know the exact moral-theological calculus that determines one’s admission ticket to Hell or Heaven. But you get it.
This distinction, Hell vs Hades, is also interesting, isn’t it? It’s interesting that there are different natures of different afterlives in different religious and cultural worldviews. It’s interesting that there are specifically different underworlds, bound by the commonality that they are the kind of places we imagine to be underneath us somehow, until we catch ourselves and remember that, no, that just earth’s crust and magma and fracking and stuff, no afterlives to be found down there.
But nevertheless where else is “Hell” but down below, where else is “Hades”? They may exist nowhere at all, but in our imaginations they still possess a location—we still situate them for ourselves, still feel a poetical, phenomenological presence of the place. In our imaginations, Hell is at least as real-feeling and visceral as Des Moines, Iowa, say. More so? Oh, more so.
So what’s in a Hell? What’s my Hell versus your Hell?
And are our Hadeses any different? If not for me, then for you? What’s in a Hades?
The first thing I think of when I think of Hell, of course, is the fire. Everything’s on fucking fire. I think of Hell, and it feels like I am looking at a bird’s eye representation, a painting done from some mountainous vista point, looking upon a few dozen or hundred denizens of this place and their houses, and the denizens are all kind of grotesque and demonlike, they don’t bear much resemblance to whatever human identities they might have had prior to their death and damnation, but they are also all in the midst of fire, or maybe everything’s just suddenly on fire at that moment (does Hell have “flash fires” like we have “flash floods”, everything just bursting into flame for some abbreviated period of time, horribly scorching and disfiguring and racking its victims with a sudden and unanticipatable pain?) Their houses are on fire (do they rebuild their houses every time? or do they somehow stay intact? what are they even made out of? why do Hell’s denizens even need houses? do they sleep?), their roads are on fire (what do they need roads for? do they have torture appointments they need to make? is there commerce in Hell?), fire lingers and hovers in the air, on distant mountaintops, underneath the ground, in canyons and ditches, on rivers that themselves might be rivers of fire (why even bother with the water?).
None of these questions are serious theological questions. They are nothing but questions of the impression that I have, which is a child’s impression, a thought of Hell derived primarily from cartoons and inflected perhaps by a handful of Hieronymus Bosch paintings. I have a notion of Hell that’s like a second generation adult’s grasp of the native tongue their grandparents would use at family gatherings.
But it is precisely my experience of Hell, what Hell topographically feels like to me. I imagine it as something like a camping ground gone horribly wrong, hikers in their pitched tents and stony outcroppings looking monstrous in the night light and garish tints of the sudden combustions that have overwhelmed the whole place. I forget that if Hell is to be Hell, it must be far, far larger than this paltry little campground of my imagination. It’s got to be many times bigger than our whole world, right? Billions upon billions of people.
I just Googled this to confirm: “How many people have died, ever?” 109 billion, it says. 109 billion humans have died. So 6.8% of the world’s humans are alive today. Let’s say that 50% of people go to Hell (Conservative? Cynical? I don’t know? Get a moral statistician on this one). That makes Hell over 7 times more populated than our entire world. Sprawl and overcrowding’s gotta be a bitch, but what are you going to do? It’s Hell. Don’t like it, move to Des Moines.
And so it seems like Hell’s capaciousness absolutely dwarfs my impression of Hell’s capaciousness. But I suppose this is just a byproduct of how spatial memory works, generally. I have been to Washington DC maybe six or seven times in my life, but I still only have a handful of places that I’ve captured in my topographical memory: a friend’s old place that I believe was on 18th Street (but won’t bother to verify), one living room I visited once in another friend’s girlfriend’s place that maybe was near Adams Morgan (a neighborhood that’s a pure abstraction to me, a void with vague hints of hipster coffee shops), a handful of downtown coffee shops and restaurants, and the Capitol Mall, my individual, personal impressions of which are more than crowded out by the iconically domineering bird’s-eye view of the mall, with the Capitol building at its head, that you see associated with every march, protest, or ordinary photographic representation of the city.
(How many of our memories are photographic representations of views we’ve never ourselves seen?)
Alright, enough about Hell, what about Hades? Well, Hades is just Hell without the fire, right? Take that impression of the catastrophically combustible campground that formed my mental image of Hell, remove the fire, and what do you have left? Grayness, darkness, rockiness, shitty tents, bad food. It’s just a campground you never leave, no hiking, no traveling, no campfire songs, just hanging out in your tent in one spot eating dehydrated food packets forever. That’s Hades.
And this is indeed my impression. I have the topographical representation of Hell that I already conveyed, that painter’s picture of Hell, and it’s the exact same topography as my representation of Hades, the only difference is that the former is orangeishly full of fire and the latter is just gray, gray, gray.
—
But what does any of this have to do with my plants, my damned plants?
I thought about this connection between my plant piece MIDAS and HADES all morning, about what else this connection was telling me. Not just what made me think of the word HADES (death, the MIDAS similarity) but also what this connection says, what makes it interesting.
I’ve been talking about the spatiality of Hell, of Hades, but I don’t think that’s where the connection is. And it’s also not what’s really interesting about either place, is it? What’s interesting is not the spatiality but the temporality of both.
They are both after-life.
They are both eternal.
They both lay claim to us forever, once they have us.
What does this temporal quality mean in practice, if one were to actually experience Hell, or Hades?
It means the same damned thing would happen day in, day out, every single day, for the rest of eternity.
It might be endless torment and torture, or it might be the relentless grind of a gray, colorless life. The fundamental temporal outlook, however, remains equally bleak: nothing will ever change, there is no ray of hope about a possible future redemption, there is not even a simple momentary break in the basic monotonous fabric of it all.
It’s a cycle, without end, without end, a tight and endless cycle.
Cycles fascinate and disturb me. This concept of cyclicality shows up explicitly in Hinduism and Buddhism: samsara is both the word for “the world” and the cyclical change that defines the world—life, death, rebirth, endless rebirth, endless reincarnation. The “afterlife”, therefore, is just the next life, the next turn of the cycle. And the highest aim is not to reach this afterlife (and the next one, and the next one) but instead to break this cycle, ending our chain of births and deaths, entering a state of nirvana, or emptiness.
Cyclicality, of course, also shows up in simple day-to-day experience. It shows up, for instance, in my need to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner each day. It shows up in my need to exercise, to take a shower, to walk around the neighborhood to get some sunshine, to go to work. It shows up in my need to water my plants, to take care of them, to keep them from dying, to watch them die when they inevitably do.
Cyclicality is the texture of our time. It’s what it is to have days and nights, to have times of the day, to have life. And yet, it’s also related to what Hell is—a cycle with an amplitude of zero, a cycle that has collapsed into a vanishing point and has thereby become a singular eternity. Hell is the apotheosis of time’s cyclicality. The same, the same, the same, the same, the same, the same, the same, the same, the same.
And this is my own personal experience: when we’re at our most miserable, we see the cyclicality of the world most clearly. Sadness and anxiety reiterate the same woes ever more frequently. Depression is a jackhammer of woe.
When we are having a good time, riding high, trying new things, having rich interactions with people, or simply just staying happy and motivated by the work we are doing daily, we don’t notice the way that time churns through us, restarts us and restarts us again and again, each day. We don’t dread the many more tomorrows, the many moons that we’ll have to live through for the remainder of our mortal coil. We say, “time flies when you’re having fun,” and a flying feels nothing like a cycling.
When we’re at our absolute lowest, on the other hand, we see nothing but the cyclicality. The bleakest thought of suicide is always: “this will never end”. Every suicide has that thought in common, I think. Every moment I’ve wrapped a belt around my neck and jammed it into the top of a closet door and slowly slid my feet down until the belt tightened around my neck and cut off my oxygen and began to make me lightheaded, I would be thinking, “this will never end”. And then I would give up the game, recognize how much trauma this action would cause others in my life, how much it would tighten the oscillations of cyclicality for them, recognize how I never have even a fraction of real intent to actually do it because my life is truly not all that miserable after all, open the closet door, stumble away from it, and reassure myself, “it will, it will end.”
(There aren’t so many of these moments, friends, but I did tell you I’d be Big Exposed Beating Heart fucking honest here.)
The thing is, both thoughts are right: “this will never end” and “it will, it will”. It will end, but it also won’t stop ending. It will end, and begin again, and end, and begin again. We are revisited by the same ghosts over and over again, the same miseries over and over again.
The question then becomes, simply, how can we push out those oscillations? How can we keep those ghosts from visiting us quite so often?
How can we apprehend these ghosts as they are passing through the threshold of our house, greet them as warmly as we can muster, and send them apologetically back on their way—we’ve already got too many guests over for dinner tonight, sorry pal, try some other time?
—
My plants had become part of my cyclical awareness. I was a proud plant parent for over a year. Moving to New York was the first time I had more than 2-3 plants at any given point, and I went all the way, filling up my place with 18 plants at its peak. I kept most of them alive, for a time.
And then they died, and I didn’t often know how they died, but as the death started building up I started losing faith in my ability to keep any of them alive, or at least thriving.
I wrote MIDAS with this keen awareness of the cyclicality of my environment, the sad entropy that my plants had fallen into at this stage of winter, and also the cyclicality of my own general life. (New York winters, man, am I right?)
And this all came with a keen awareness of neglect. Because it feels like neglect has been everywhere at this present moment, not just in my neglect of my plants. It feels like it shows up in my relationships, in my friend circles, in my family. It feels like it shows up in the way people treat each other, the amount of attention that they pay to each other, the fleetingness of their commitments to each other. I don’t know if I am the or a source of this neglect in my own life, or a victim of it, or both. I don’t know if this is something that is happening throughout our society at this present moment, if we’re all in a collective sort of crisis. I don’t know if I’m feeling all this simply because I am not a winner, and I am now reaching that phase of my life where this means I need to start bowing out of the whole game—society has other people to run its race, other people who will get to self-actualize and radiate with happiness while the rest of the world grows steadily more miserable.
(Don’t be so melodramatic, you’re not a loser either. Top 20%, maybe? Yeah, ok, I guess that’s still pretty loser-y.)
What does it look like to break this cyclicality? Is it to break the cycles of neglect? Is it to make a new thing, give birth to a new lifestyle, a new look? Think a new thought, write a new thing? Make a new friend, strengthen an existing friendship, text back the friend you forgot to respond to? Buy a new plant? Let go of those plants that haven’t grown, find new ways to care for the plants that remain?
I can buy a whole apartment full of new plants. I can revamp my whole wardrobe. I can fairly well start a new life. I have every goddamned advantage. I’m well educated, I can make money.
But something about it all never feels like it’s enough. Somehow each of these actions just become their own part of the cyclicality.
Hell, and Hades, are so convincing and compelling for us because we all know what it feels like to see the past and future through the lens of a seemingly eternal, emotionally intractable present. Hell merely hypostatizes the belief we have at our worst moments: it will never get any better. Hades merely hypostatizes the colorless middle: this monotony is forever.
As long as we’re stuck in this cyclicality, the cyclicality will keep eating things up. We don’t even need to touch anything, as Midas did. We only need to look at it, and it turns to shit.
—
Here’s where I’ll get really weird. Right here, at the end.
Maybe Hades is actually a sort of paradise.
Think of it. You are a shade that lacks anything good at all, anything of value. But you also lack the very basis for valuing anything. You lack meaning. And you thereby lack expectation.
What is there to feel neglected about when you lack any expectations in the first place? What can possibly bother you about the relentless cyclicality of existence, when there’s no meaning to make that cyclicality feel empty? How can you even see this cyclicality, when there’s nothing else you’re expecting outside of the cycle?
Only our expectations of what could be different make us think something is currently lacking.
So maybe the dearest desiderata is meaninglessness, is expectationlessness, is hopelessness.
I’m sure this conclusion will disappoint you, readers. I hope it does. It teaches you to have any expectations of me.
Abandon all hope, I warned you so earlier: lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate. It’s your problem if you didn’t Google the Italian, not mine.
And yet, can’t you feel at least a little of the comfort I feel, in this abandonment? In our abnegation of hope?
Doesn’t the air feel somehow—clearer? Calmer? Bracingly cold, yet refreshing?
Remember how many woes the world had to endure for the iota of hope that flew out of Pandora’s Box. Maybe if we forswear hope, all the rest of it will disappear, too.
(I wouldn’t hope on it.)
—
Or maybe, it’s precisely the contrast with Hell and Hades that we’ve lost.
In the current halting revival of a la carte spirituality we are seeing among the cultural cutting-edge, concepts of the afterlife are not the first ones to get resuscitated.
And yet, maybe they ought to be. Maybe it’s precisely the awareness—the threat—of a pure cyclicality that might help make us more aware of its opposite.
Aware that right now there’s a bird chirping outside of my window, the sun is streaming in and catching the broad surface of my monstera’s front leaf, my monstera propagated for me by a friend.
Its surface glows with a bright yellow-green, illuminating every outline of its thick healthy veins.
I hear the distant noises of the city behind me, rumbling on, and I feel glad for them, too.
The repose only lasts a moment—this space, my living room, is soon filled with the sounds of a screaming kid from some neighboring house, and my brow knits with irritation.
But what do I expect?
It’s time for me to start another morning, anyway.
I love this, JG. I loved MIDAS and then HADES, and I really love them together. Strangely, I felt the same mirage...after reading MIDAS, I mis-remembered the title as HADES. How wonderfully odd.
I was talking with a friend this week. He shared that his life of ever-increasing expectation had indeed made life a veritable Hell. Following years of life -- really, of work -- as grayness and dullness and boredom, a veritable Hades. I asked which one he would choose, if he had to choose. He said "Both" and I sensed a faint desire for Hell and Hades to repeat as cycles throughout the remainder of his life. Until retirement, of course, which seemed in his talking eerily reflective of your writing about the death of plants. Some bad luck (younger people push us out, politely or not; the luck coming from whether or not we kinda get to choose aspects of our being set aside). Some simple facts of existence (we're human, we slow down, we age, we can't take the burdens of our younger life; the plant can't help that the radiator gets turned on and you're out of town). And some neglect, perhaps by not having the imagination that other ways, even other cycles, besides Hell and Hades might possibly exist in some way, shape or form on our third-stone satellite.
There are always stars in the skies for those who carry the stars in their eyes. Indeed, even the plants continually strive for the sun. And even in the grayness of their death, the sun brings forth new life. A new cycle. Maybe not a bad ending of a life.