If I Were a Hoarder

The Death of a Pumpkin

My mom, a voracious reader of this blog, recently wrote, “I was thinking that the pumpkin lady certainly falls into the category of denial-of-death hoarding.”

I responded, perhaps condescendingly, “I suppose, in that she denies that she could die from eating contaminated food, and in that she imagines that she’ll live for long enough to eat all the food she hoards.”

My mom wrote back, pointing out the most obvious of deaths, to which I had been strangely blind: “I was thinking about the fact that she couldn’t accept that a pumpkin dies.”