I was young when I first witnessed death delivered as a mercy. I am no longer sure of how old I was exactly, but it was a day at the latter end of summer. My father and I were returning home from one of our many walks. It was a good day for a walk, cooler than the preceding months had been but still warm and full of sunlight. Less than a block away from our home, we came across a cicada, lying near the edge of the street.
This being the end of summer, cicada corpses were becoming a common sight. After their years of life underground as nymphs, cicadas live a mere four to six weeks after they emerge in the form we are most familiar with. They mate, and then they drop dead. I imagine this is what had happened to this cicada, but it was not dead yet, merely too weak to fly, too weak to turn over, too weak to defend itself from the ants that had come for it.
The small battalion of dark ants swarmed in a tight circle on the asphalt around the fallen cicada, crawling over it and forcing their way under its exoskeleton. The cicada's legs moved weakly, but it was helpless. I did not immediately realize what I was seeing, not until my father grimaced. “They’re eating it,” he said.
It made my stomach twist with revulsion. I liked ants. I had been sad when my ant farm’s colony died out. The many times I had succumbed to the compulsion of crushing ants that passed me on the sidewalk, I would often feel a lingering shame at my senseless killings. I liked cicadas too, an enthusiasm I inherited from my mother. I liked to collect their abandoned shells and spend time observing them flying about in the final form of their lifecycle. Even if I didn’t feel strongly toward cicadas, the idea of being eaten alive by a swarm of tiny jaws, unable to move, unable to fight back, was a deep dread that persisted with me after that day. “Is there no way to help?” I asked my father.
“I think all we can do is put it out of its misery,” he replied.
I nodded, still feeling a little sick. My father crushed both cicada and ants beneath his heel.
Almost a decade later, the death of the cicada had burrowed into the sediment of my mind and lay dormant. Again I was walking, but this time I was far from home, at the farm the Living Earth School wilderness camp was renting for that summer. I was a teenager now and one of the camp’s four counselors in training (CITs) for that week. I was with the other CITs and Zack, the CIT coordinator, as we crossed through a field to get to the woods where we could check in with our assigned groups of day campers. Crossing the field was usually a rather unpleasant experience — even though it was fairly early in the summer, it could still get swelteringly hot walking in direct sunlight — but this day it was much more tolerable. The air smelled of the hay bales stacked up on the far side of the field as we discussed what path we would take through the woods to most efficiently find every day-camp group. Once we crossed into the shade of the woods, our conversation died down quickly, as we heard a loud buzzing sound not far down the dirt path.
“Is that a bee?” One of the other CITs, Stacy asked, hesitating to keep going forward.
“That sounds too big to be a bee,” I answered as Zack went ahead a little to look.
“You guys want to see something sad?” he asked, his normally mirthful manner dimmed.
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see something sad, but it was in our way so I went to see it with the rest of the group. There, struggling on the cold earth at the edge of a dried-up riverbed, was a hummingbird. Its brilliant green color was still visible, even in the shade of the forest, but it was injured. Despite its wings beating so fast they sounded like helicopter rotors, it couldn’t get lift-off. The other CITs made some sad groans as Zack leaned down to examine it. The hummingbird stopped trying to fly away, letting out a strained call.
“I think its wing’s broken,” Zack told us. “It won’t be able to feed itself. It’ll starve in a few hours.”
At the speed a hummingbird’s metabolism has to go to keep it in flight, just five hours without food is enough for it to die of starvation. With a broken wing, this hummingbird was as good as dead.
“We shouldn’t let the campers see it. It’d make them too sad.” Desa, one of the other CITs, said.
Zack agreed. A part of me questioned the decision to hide death from children going to a nature camp, but I said nothing, instead focusing on the question of what to do with it. We agreed that we shouldn’t leave it out on the trail where some of the campers might stumble across it, and Zack suggested that we should kill it before it would die of starvation. Desa, who was working toward becoming a veterinarian, agreed with that, as did the rest of us, rather dejectedly. However, we also agreed that, on the off chance that it wasn’t as badly injured as it seemed, and just needed some time to recover from the shock of whatever accident had befallen it, we should wait a little longer before putting it down.
Zack picked it up gently. “Alright, who wants to carry it?”
I volunteered. There was nothing I needed to let my group know, so I could stay back and hide it from the campers, and I had some experience with injured birds. I had suffered from some of those earlier experiences, but I had also known birds who recovered rapidly and were able to fly off mere minutes after I found them on the ground. I was almost certain there wasn’t going to be a happy ending for the hummingbird, that I was setting myself up to get attached, and that its death would wound me, but I did it anyway.
Zack handed the hummingbird to me, and I felt its life in my hands. Its little warm body vibrated with the power of its heartbeat. Its speed was like that of a motor. I held it, my thumbs wrapped carefully over it so it couldn’t writhe out of my grasp as I held it close to my belly. We made the rounds and met with the groups that hadn’t already headed to the river. I stayed back, just out of sight of the campers, still clutching the little engine that was the hummingbird. I wished it would turn out to just be stunned, that it would suddenly find the strength to force itself out of my grasp and fly away, but it didn’t, and by the time we were heading back toward the field, I knew it wouldn’t survive. All we could do was grant it a quick death.
As we crossed through the field again, a feeling came over me, that when the time came to put the hummingbird out of its misery, I should be the one to do it. I was the one who was carrying it from where it had fallen. I was the one who had felt its life in between my hands. I felt I was the one who could truly appreciate the existence we were going to be bringing to an end. It just felt right. But at the same time, what I knew I had to do felt wrong, like a betrayal of the life I was carrying with me through the field. I made an effort to steel myself. It had to be done. It was the merciful thing to do. Still, as we kept on through the field and time seemed to slow, I struggled to commit myself to it. I found myself feeling like Abraham, leading Isaac through the desert to be sacrificed, and I wished that some sacrificial lamb would come and take my place, take the heavy responsibility from between my hands.
But for all my hoping, I was already going over in my mind how I would have to do it. If it had to die, it should at least be as quick as possible. Crushing its head seemed the right way to go about it. Gruesome as it would be to see, I’d destroy the brain before it could register any pain. I knew how easy that would be, felt how fragile it was between my hands. I considered crushing it under my heel, the way my father had with that cicada all those years ago, but that felt just a little too brutal, too callused. It wouldn’t make much of a difference for the hummingbird, but to me, hitting it with a rock felt more acceptable. Lost in this arithmetic, I lagged behind the group a little and was a few yards behind them when Zack had them stop beside a large puddle we had navigated earlier. We could see the day campers on the opposite side of the wide field beyond the puddle. With a hole where my stomach usually was, I knew this was where it would have to happen before Zack said anything. I set the hummingbird down on a patch of grass beside the trail and silently began looking for a rock.
“What are you doing?” Zack asked me.
“Finding a good-sized rock,” I answered, my voice shaking a little.
Desa wrinkled her nose. “Don’t,” she whined softly. “Let me take care of it.”
Somewhere, I felt relieved, and that made me crack. I wouldn’t have to do it after all. Desa could handle it. She hadn’t been the one carrying it, she hadn’t had the opportunity to get attached to it the way I had. It would be easier for her. Besides, she was planning on being a veterinarian; this sort of thing was something she would have to do later in life, while it was something I hoped never to be near again. It would be unnecessarily masochistic of me to do it myself just because it's what ‘felt right.’ The hummingbird would be dead either way. What did it actually matter?
I acquiesced. I stepped aside so that Desa could do the deed. She was carrying a camp knife with her for carving wood, and she unsheathed it then, leaned down gently, and slit the hummingbird’s throat. I didn’t see any blood. Its beak opened as if letting out a soundless cry. Its tongue, like an insect proboscis, lashed out of its opened beak, reaching for nectar that wasn’t there. It closed its beak for a moment, then opened it again, and again. Part of me wanted to rush in, to finish it off myself after all before it would die of suffocation, but I still couldn’t bring myself to do it. It took a minute, maybe two for its silent calls to end, and it grew still.
I knew then that I had been right before. It would have been better if I had done it. I had a chance to spare it from starvation quickly and painlessly, and instead, I left it to die a sloppy death at the hands of another. Perhaps that death was better than starvation, but it had suffered all the same. In trying to avoid the emotional anguish of putting it down myself, I had left it to a far more painful death, and, in the end, knowing that was a worse pain than killing it would have been. I had failed myself, and I had failed it.
I watched as Zack picked up its still body. A part of me wanted to reach out, to hold it one last time, but I stayed still. I knew that, if I touched it again, I would find it empty. The warmth draining out, the engine that was its heart completely still. Whatever connection I had felt to it before, I wouldn’t find again. The hummingbird was gone. Zack hid what was left behind under the nearest bush.
Our group didn’t linger. We walked away, with me still trailing a little behind.
Much like the cicadas themselves, the memory of that day with my father burrowed up from its years of gestation at the back of my mind, spread its buzzing wings, and for a time perched at the crux of my thoughts, singing to me. The question I faced both those days was not one in which the value of a life could truly factor; it was too late for that. The question was of what could be done in a situation that all of us had already lost, one where death’s eventual certainty had surged forward to cloud the present. The remnants of life the hummingbird and cicada had ahead of them would be little more than pain as death slowly made its approach. The only power I had in those circumstances was to make death come faster, to cut out the agony that would proceed, to skip straight to oblivion. To give those creatures a quick death would reduce their suffering — reduce the amount of suffering in the world, perhaps — but pain would still extract a due from whoever chose to do the deed. That promise of pain made me falter when faced with the hummingbird, made me leave it to a worse end in a failed attempt to spare myself. Now, however, I know the right thing to do. Let the living shoulder the pain. We can move past it. We can grow from it. Let those who will be dead either way have their peace. Death will always be painful, but when there is no hope of survival and only suffering to come, its swift arrival should be accepted as the coming of mercy.