Death Cleaning of the Soul

We have had a major medical challenge.  My husband had a bad fall, which turned out to have been precipitated by a heart attack.  We came home after surgery and a few days in the hospital, only to have to rush back a week later.  Things are better now (which is why I can post this blog), but they are not the same.  I am buffeted between my feelings of gratitude that the love of my life has survived, and my mourning for the way our life used to be.

In the midst of all this and during long hours in the hospital, I finally read the two books on my list by Margareta Magnusson, one about Swedish death cleaning and one about old age.  Both are worth reading, and both insist on the need to peel things away as we get older – tangible things (belongings) and intangible things (beliefs and rituals).  They were good books to turn to as I strove for a way to deal with the hard realities in front of me.  Downsizing of the household is almost impossible, as we all know.  In my case, further physical downsizing is for some later time. Downsizing the soul is harder yet, but necessary in the present moment.  Parting with roles, rituals, and habits is harder than parting with Grandma’s china.  I like to think, however, that it could also be more rewarding in the long run.

We are not used to thinking of losing things as good.  I recently read a book by James Clear about how to use our habits for big gains, how to accrete knowledge and success into our lives a little at a time.  Like most self-help books, it focuses on increases and ignores the possibility that loss could be a good thing. For the latter proposition, one has to look at wisdom literature of all kinds, where renunciation is often seen as a positive thing, a necessary step toward contentment, happiness, and peace.

For example, Joko Beck said that Zen was a process of “wearing away,” or erosion rather than accretion.  We have to let go what we think we know, habits of mind we have acquired. The Tao reminds us:  “Learning consists in adding to one’s stock day by day.  The practice of Tao consists in subtracting.”  Christianity has a similar message.  Jesus told the rich man that “if you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor.”  At other points in the Gospel, he tells his followers to give up their adult ways and become like children.

The poets have much to teach us in this regard too.  Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” purports to teach us how easy it is to lose things – homes, keys, people:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

But Bishop ends up admitting that loss can also be catastrophic:

 

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

 

Philip Larkin, in “The Winter Palace” says that he is done with learning:

Most people know more as they get older:

I give all that the cold shoulder.

Larkin’s tongue is firmly in his cheek, but he bounces off a truth about the value of discarding what we have, what we know, and what we think we know:

It will be worth it, if in the end I manage

To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage.

Then there will be nothing I know.

My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.

 

Both poems are worth reading frequently – one to remind us that loss is inevitable but not easy, and the other to affirm that loss is not all bad.

In reading Magnusson, it also occurred to me that our whole culture could use a Swedish death cleaning, that the Earth might have a chance if we stripped down and lived within limits.  In a recent article (“The Cross and the Machine”) about technology and religion, the wonderful Paul Kingsnorth puts it well:

Every culture that lasts, I suspect, understands that living within limits – limits set by natural law, by cultural tradition, by ecological boundaries – is a cultural necessity and a spiritual imperative.  There seems to be only one culture in history that has held none of this to be true, and it happens to be the one that we’re living in.

We’re human beings with limits in a culture that recognizes no limits.  No wonder it is so hard.

So these are just some musings about loss from a new caregiver and a rapidly aging person, who is coming up against the limits of her situation.  I know that limits can be good, less is often more, and worrying is almost useless, but I sometimes still succumb to despair.  I have to read poetry, write in my journal, contemplate Spinoza, talk to others, and take heart.  And I do these things, but – as Elizabeth Bishop says in the end – it is not always easy.  Slowly my husband is improving, and we are getting used to our new limits.

I have written elsewhere about paring life down.  You might look at my blog, “A Diminished Thing?” from several years ago, and my short story “Nothing New.”  Needless to say, any advice is welcome.