Good Fruit, Bad Fruit
The conversation started in the dark.
My father woke up because he heard the screams of my anguish, my eyes were flooded. Grief has been like that lately — it doesn’t knock, it just arrives. He came to sit with me, and in the quiet that followed he told me about a dream he’d just had. In it, he was opening a gigantic Bible. The book was large, but what stopped him was that the pages were stuck together, sticky and difficult to separate. The words looked unfamiliar, almost like another language. As he struggled to open it, a woman told him she had taken the fruit out of it. He asked her if the fruit had been good. She said yes — it had been very good.
Earlier that day I had written about rotting fruit (From Where I Operate). About death. About how sometimes it feels like we are all just fruit decaying before God. Rot is not empty. When fruit breaks down, it fills with activity. Maggots arrive not as intruders but as part of the machinery of decomposition — organisms whose function is to convert stillness back into movement. Hearing my father’s dream felt like an echo answering back. We were two grieving people trying to understand why nourishment and decay seem to live inside the same story.
He told me we had to stay. We had to be here for each other until it was our time. He said I needed to be here for him, and he needed to be here for me. He reminded me of the lives braided into ours — Monkey inside the house, and the outdoor cats waiting by the door. They rely on us. They come for food, for warmth, for affection. They love being loved on.
Love, in that moment, felt less like a gift and more like ransom. I am tethered to this world because of the beings who would feel my absence. Without them, I don’t know how firmly I would grip existence. Grief has thinned my connection to everything else.
During acute grief, attachment can temporarily feel coercive rather than sustaining. When a major loss disrupts a person’s internal map of belonging, the connections that remain may register first as obligation before they are felt again as meaning. Another way to understand this tether is as gravity rather than ransom — the force that provides orientation when everything else feels unmoored.
My father is living his grief in public. After my mother passed, he came out of retirement to help support the household. He first took a strenuous job as a dishwasher just to help us catch up on bills. Later he became a greeter at a store — a role he didn’t realize would require him to perform joy while mourning. He stands at the entrance welcoming strangers, checking receipts, acting as a quiet line of security. He has to greet while grieving.
I never expected it to be so hard to greet people. I walk into that store carrying my grief with me. I lost someone I loved very much, and that pain doesn’t stay home just because I’m working. My job is to smile and make people feel welcome when they walk in and when they leave.
Sometimes I cry in between customers. I wipe my tears and hide them because I’m supposed to be cheerful. It’s difficult to greet and be grieving at the same time. I didn’t think about how hard that would be. But when people walk through those doors, I can feel what they’re carrying. Some are sad. Some are angry. Some look lost. Some are sweet and innocent. I can tell when someone is having a bad day. I feel empathy for them. I think about what they might be facing.
Sometimes it feels like I can sense when someone is evil or when they’re up to no good. I don’t always have words for it. It’s just a feeling I get when they walk through the door — a heaviness or a tension. Maybe I’m wrong sometimes, but standing there every day, watching people come and go, you start to feel patterns in them.
Some people appreciate the greeting. They smile. They say God bless you. Those little connections matter. Maybe by greeting someone kindly, I make their day a little lighter. I don’t know why God put me in this place right now, but I try to meet each person with patience. I’m still hurting. I’m still healing. And I’m doing the best I can, one greeting at a time.
To greet while grieving is an act of resistance. It is the refusal to let sorrow harden into indifference. Small rituals of kindness stabilize the nervous system and preserve connection during loss. They are not denials of pain; they are structures that allow pain to coexist with humanity.
After loss, my tolerance for broken systems shrank. Mortality clarifies priorities. I keep finding myself in situations where I collide with dysfunction or mistreatment. I don’t go looking for fights, but I don’t step around them either. I’ve joked — and my mom used to joke with me — that I’m a shit magnet. Trouble seems to find me. Not because I chase it, but because I refuse to quietly absorb it. Most people adapt to preserve peace. I interrupt it. Situations come to light. They resolve. Then life moves on until another confrontation appears.
In biological systems, decay attracts processors. Maggots gather where breakdown is already underway, not to create the rot but to metabolize it. Human systems behave similarly. Conflict accumulates where dysfunction has been ignored. Exposure follows deterioration. The presence of confrontation does not invent the decay; it reveals and accelerates the work of breaking it down.
Maggots do not attack healthy flesh. They are drawn to what is already dying. Their function is not to create decay but to process it. In medicine, sterile maggots are even used to clean wounds because they selectively consume necrotic tissue while leaving living tissue largely intact. They are processors, not destroyers. The discomfort people feel in their presence comes from being forced to look directly at decomposition — a stage of life we prefer to pretend does not exist. Yet ecosystems depend on this work. Without it, rot would accumulate and suffocate everything that tries to grow. In the same way, confrontation does not manufacture corruption or grief; it metabolizes what is already there, making renewal possible.
Some people interpret recurring conflict as destiny or calling. Psychologically, it can also be understood as a byproduct of low tolerance for injustice combined with high willingness to confront discomfort. Conflict becomes visible around the person who refuses to normalize it. The challenge is to use confrontation as a tool without letting it harden into identity.
There is a difference between witnessing decay and becoming it. Broken systems are a social form of rot. Confronting them can preserve integrity, but obsession with fighting them can hollow a person out. The discipline is learning to act without letting the action define the self.
That discipline became physical during the freeze.
We knew the cold was coming. We built a makeshift heated shelter for the outdoor cats who already called our porch home. The morning before the freeze, Little Paw appeared stunned and sick, blood and saliva at his mouth. I called the vet and spent money I couldn’t afford. Medication. Shots. A heated enclosure. I placed him inside, and when Shadow passed close enough to touch, I put him in too. They cried at first. They didn’t understand why they were being confined. We held the line anyway.
When the storm passed, life returned to its usual rhythm. Shadow and Little Paw had already been part of this place before the freeze, and they remained what they had always been — residents of the porch, coming and going on their own terms. The difference was subtle. Shadow, who once stayed at a distance, began stepping forward for affection. The shelter hadn’t created their belonging. It had simply protected what was already there.
Little Paw carries a memory with him. Years ago there was another cat, Pawpaw — a gentle animal my mother and I meant to rescue. We had already decided we were going to take him in. We were one day away from acting when he disappeared. We missed him by a day. We carried that regret together. Pawpaw had been Monkey’s friend from a distance — the only cat he regularly watched and interacted with through the enclosure and the window. When Pawpaw vanished, Monkey noticed. His absence left a quiet change in the room. When Little Paw appeared nearly a decade later, small and in need of protection, he looked strikingly similar to Pawpaw and carried a familiar temperament — cautious, gentle, with his own small quirks. Naming him was not accidental. It was recognition. Saving him felt like answering a memory I shared with her. It was continuation, not replacement.
Grief sharpens awareness of vulnerability. In protecting fragile life, people reclaim a sense of agency that death temporarily strips away. Acts of preservation do not cancel loss; they counterbalance it. They assert that care still has visible effects.
Inside the house, separate from the porch and its visitors, Monkey is my indoor companion. He never roams outside. He moves through all of this like a multilingual witness to the emotional weather inside the home. He knows the sounds of affection in English, Russian, and French. When I call him "Миленький Котка" or milinky kotka, he softens into the word. He also responds to the French Le Chat Noir — the black cat — a phrase that echoes a poster on the wall of a cat he seems to recognize as kin. He sometimes sits and poses in a way that mirrors the figure in the image, as if aligning himself with it. Animals read emotional tone more than vocabulary. When I speak Pawpaw’s name, Monkey grows quiet. He mirrors the weight in my voice. In a home altered by grief, conversation with an animal becomes a form of continuity. We keep speaking love in multiple tongues, and he answers by staying close.
All of these moments — the dream of fruit, greeting strangers, confronting dysfunction, sheltering cats, remembering Pawpaw, calling to Monkey — orbit the same question: how do we stand in the presence of decay without surrendering our humanity?
Death insists on its reality. Systems break. Bodies fail. Relationships end. In every ecosystem, rot is followed by organisms that feed on it, transform it, and return it to circulation. The temptation for humans is to harden or withdraw in the face of that cycle. Yet scattered through the days are counterforces: a father wiping his tears to welcome a stranger, small animals waiting by a door, a cat stepping onto a chest to offer wordless comfort.
At the end of this day, what remains clearest to me is simple. My father sat at my bedside. We talked about his work, his dream, and the strange ways grief threads itself through ordinary life. He hugged me and told me he loved me. Earlier, Monkey ran to me, climbed into my lap, and refused to leave. He looked directly into my eyes the way he always does, but this time there was a depth to it that felt unmistakable. He placed his paw on my chest and left it there, resting over my heart, and in that moment I knew he was telling me he loved me. In that quiet gesture was a language older than words — a reminder that connection is not abstract. It is physical. It is immediate.
To witness decay without becoming it is to choose preservation where we can. It is to build warmth against winter, to speak gently in multiple languages, to interrupt cruelty without making cruelty our identity. Even the mechanisms that process rot participate in renewal. Love may sometimes feel like a tether, but that tether is also evidence that meaning remains concentrated in specific, breathing forms.
We stay because someone would notice if we were gone. And in staying, we participate in the quiet work of keeping sweetness alive inside a world that continues, inevitably, to rot.
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