I had to think a lot about death recently when my older brother, a missionary in Japan, came home. I went down to Oregon for a visit with him and the rest of my family, who all live there. It was a good visit to the farm where I grew up, which borders the South Santiam River for a mile or so. And though the woods were fragrant with the scent of spring—particularly the smell of cottonwood buds, which are like a sweet, sticky perfume—there was still a deep awareness of death in the visit.

There was the fact that Sue, my younger brother's wife, had died last summer, leaving four teenage children, and my brother's family is still in deep grief. Also, my wife, Mary Ruth, wasn't with me on this trip as she had gone to Illinois to be with her mother who was recovering from a stroke. At the same time, Mary Ruth's nine-year old nephew was in the hospital fighting a staph infection that could take his leg, and quite possibly, his life.

The farm itself was a reminder of death. It has been in steady decline since my father died over 20 years ago. But more than that was the immediate reason for the visit, the need for my brothers and sister and me to talk about the future of this piece of land. After my father's death, my mother gave it to her four children. My younger brother, who lives there, owns the cleared land. My sister, older brother, and I own the rest of the land: 150 acres of forest along the river, that same forest that in green leaves and fragrant buds and the chorus of a million frogs was coming to life while I was visiting.

But though spring and new life returns every year to that place of my childhood in Oregon—as it does so dramatically everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere—we are all older. Nature ...