How Easy it is to Die

Mrs. Curren is absolutely obsessed with her mortality and her terminal state. I found the passage about William and the chicken farm to have an interesting undertone. First she describes in detail the workings of the chicken farm and the slaughtering of the chickens. She realizes that "some of the bodies I had stuffed with bread crumbs and egg yolk and sage and rubbed with oil and garlic had been held, at the last, between the legs of this man, the father of Florence's children" (42). The whole couple of pages are really beautifully written, but I found this sentence to just pop out at me. We never really associate our food with the living animal source. We never really think about the great control we have over the lives of these animals, constantly monitoring them from the moment the chicks hatch all the way past death, until they are shrink wrapped and placed in the supermarket fridge.

Mrs. Curren is just as fascinated by the concept, she exclaims "So hard and yet so easy, killing, dying" (42). It takes careful planning to raise and kill chickens, there is technique involved. But ultimately it's easy, humans have so much control. In one motion the chicken is dead, and it's over. I think She considers her own mortality for a moment here. All of her life has been done in careful planning, raising her daughter, keeping the house orderly, adhering to her own list of societal standards. While in the end, it's just death waiting. She realizes how easy it is to die, to kill, be killed. It's hard to comprehend the idea of the dead as once living. We never realize how much control nature has over our own lives,