Tag: August 25

Retirement, Death, and The Land of Cockaigne

Younger people dream of retirement – of that rosy day when they have reached the right age for social security or pension payments.  Or banked enough money in retirement accounts to cover their living expenses for the rest of their days.  Middle-agers discuss retirement with others in the office; they fantasize about where they will live and where they will travel; they try to imagine not having to wake up to an alarm every morning or having to turn out the light earlier than they would like.  I had such fantasies, but that was many, many years ago.  Now, I can’t imagine how I ever worked nine- or ten-hour days, put up with the constant aggravation of an office, or made a commute in rush hour traffic.  I don’t miss it, never missed it much.

Here is what I sometimes miss though – the hope for an event which is going to make life easier.  I sabotaged this wish lately by moving to be closer to family and taking on the logistics of a move (will I ever be able to get through the red tape at the DMV or find a primary care doctor?).  In the middle of the move, one of the family members that I was moving to be close to unexpectedly passed away.  He died while the movers were emptying my house in North Carolina, and his funeral was the day the movers arrived with our stuff in New England. 

And then there are the minor losses – routines, habits, a sense of where things are.  Finding further problems with an already imperfect new/old house.  Major and minor problems and aggravations are constant.   Locating a cooking utensil is suddenly a big deal.  Bills have to be carefully monitored during the address change so that payments are not missed.  New telephone numbers and wireless passwords must be noted and memorized.  The view out the windows has changed.  Being close to family means being physically and blessedly closer to their lives – which unfortunately also include their problems.

So, if we can no longer look forward to retirement, what does the elderly one look forward to?  Assisted living, the nursing home?  We decided when we moved that we were not ready for communal living of any kind, and – while it may be necessary someday – it is far from our ideal.  It is not something to hope for.

In medieval Europe, there was the peasant concept of Cockaigne, or pais de cocaigne, which translates to “the land of plenty.”  It was pictured as a kind of heaven with enough to eat, time to rest, the abolition of work, and – of course – free sex.  It was something for poor men and women to dream about, a heaven more to their taste than the Christian one.  As I was going through the trials of the last few weeks, I wondered what my equivalent was.  If I believe in any kind of afterlife, it surely is not the “pie in the sky when you die” sort.  And, yet, I found in the midst of seemingly irresolvable problems, that I was reminding myself over and over again, that I would soon find myself (or more accurately others would find me) dead and all my worries would go with me to the crematorium.  So, is this what old people look forward to – leaving their problems and their bodies (which often are one source of their problems) behind them?  Interesting thought.

Death as something to look forward to?  An alien concept in our culture but not without its believers.  The wonderful poet Stevie Smith wrote “I have a friend/At the end/Of the world.  /His name is a breath/Of fresh air.”  His name, of course, is death.  The poem is “Black March.”

I do not wish myself dead.  I just wish to get settled in and live a more routine existence.  But Jorge Borges found some comfort in imagining his own death – he even wrote a story about it, “August 25, 1983“, in which Borges conjures up an older version of himself on his deathbed.  I once made an exercise of doing the same for myself (see my blog entry “Fantasies to Reject in Old Age” from last May).  It was informative and scary.

I will get used to my new location.  I will unpack my ladle and find a dermatologist and get a new driver’s license.  But none of that happens quickly and all of it is harder than it used to be.  But there is really no alternative, no Cockaigne, without going through it.  I try to tell myself that it is useful to challenge myself in my old age, but it is not easy.  It is worse than I thought it would be; I hope that, when I come to it, I will be able to say the opposite about death.  At least that transition will not require a trip to the DMV.

Death as a Divine Messenger

A good slice of great literature (and even greater percentage of myth) concerns our relationship with death.  How can we cope with the inevitability of it?  Or, how can we trivialize it? Or, better yet, avoid it?

Sometimes, this literary grappling with death takes the form of a trip to the underworld, the land of the dead.  Some such ventures are heroic – Heracles goes as part of one of his labors, Orpheus visits  to rescue Persephone.  Some seek information  – Odysseus wants to know how to get back home, back to Ithaca; Aeneas wants to know his destiny.  Some represent a pilgrimage for wisdom – like Dante in the “middle of life’s journey.”  Virgil both gets to write about the underworld in the Aeneid and to accompany Dante on his perambulations through heaven and hell.  More recently we have Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo.  Each story is trying to make sense of life and death, trying to come to terms with mortality.

Many of such stories begin when a young person is scared by an encounter with death.  The Buddha was frightened into leaving his royal palace at the sight of a corpse.  For the young Siddhartha death was a “divine messenger.” Gilgamesh was completely undone by the death of his friend Enkidu, and ventures out to find the secret to immortality.  And, in the Katha Upanishad, the teenage Nachiketa is sent by his father to find out “the secret of life and death.”  In Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale, a trio of young men set out to find Death in a spirit of revenge after the demise of one of their companions.

Poetry too deals with how to conquer death in a metaphoric fashion.  Shakespeare’s Sonnet 146 is an admonition to elevate the soul above the body, and ends: “So shall thou feed on Death, that feeds on men, /And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.”  John Donne also vanquishes death at the end of one of his Holy Sonnets: “Death, thou shalt die.”  Oh, that it were so easy.

Sometimes, the initial fear of death prompts the protagonist to explore methods of immortality.  This is where Gilgamesh starts, in search of the magic plant that will allow him to stay both young and immortal.  In legend (if not in fact), Ponce de León searched high and low for the fount of immortality.  In the 16th century, Cranach painted a wonderful representation of it – old naked bodies going into the fountain and young bodies coming out.  Silicon Valley is obsessed with immortality projects.  But most of literature and myth (with notable exceptions) does not ultimately deal with death by denying it will happen.  Most – like even the saga of Gilgamesh – end with a reconciliation with death rather than the annihilation of it.  Thomas Merton’s goal was “to face the real limitations of one’s own existence and knowledge and not try to manipulate or disguise them.”  And yet, the 21st century slogan seems to be “no limits.”

When we were waiting for the News Hour last night on PBS, our local channel was advertising two shows about aging – one was called “Aging Backwards” and the other was “The Longevity Paradox,” both apparently how-to shows about avoiding aging and prolonging life.   Those PBS folks know their News Hour audience.  Is there such a thing as reverse aging?  I admire those who try to keep us old folk limber with yoga, functional through diet, and positive with mindset suggestions, but where is the show on coming to grips with the fact that all is not going to end well?

I cannot remember when I first recognized the fact of death.  I vaguely remember when my great-grandmother (whom I hardly knew) died – the same year I found our canary Billy (whom I was very fond of) belly up in the bottom of the cage.  We lost pets, I heard adults discuss the demise of others, and I guess I slowly realized the animals and people die.  But when did I realize that this applied to me?  Freud would say that I probably never did.  There have been moments – just before surgery, just after having a close call in a car accident – when death has seemed real, when the fragility of life realigned my thinking, but these moments did not endure.

Jorge Borges wrote a story, “August 25, 1983,” in which he imagines his own death.  Using his format, I did something similar and found it an interesting exercise.  I highly recommend it.  What do you think you will have to say at the end of your life?  What was important, transformational, disappointing?  Borges drafted his story just a few years before he died, and it is amazing what we learn about him in just a few pages.

And what would it mean to you if you knew you were dying, that there was a determined date for your termination?  Of course, we are all headed toward death, but what difference would it make if you could actually see the end coming?  There is a wonderful book by Stephen Levine, “A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last.”  It inspired this week’s story, “Encore.”

Becoming and De-becoming

As I mentioned in my last post, I have been hobbled with a broken foot. I was carrying on quite well (perhaps too well) until I went to what I thought would be my last appointment with the orthopedist – looking forward to leaving the office with my cumbersome boot under my arm and destined for the trash bin. Instead, I was told that my foot hadn’t healed; we would have to give it at least another month and see what was happening. I did not take it well.

It is true that I have osteoporosis. I take calcium, eat a ton of yogurt, and exercise regularly, but my genes and my age have caught up with me. My body is breaking down and taking longer to repair itself. Eventually, of course, it will be beyond repair (some might say that it has already gotten to that point). In the course of my daily meditation, I repeat the five recollections (Upajjhatthana Sutta), the second of which is “I have a body which is subject to aging and decay; I am not beyond aging and decay.” I have been repeating these words for years, but somehow I don’t seem to want to believe them. None of us does. And yet, none of us is beyond aging and decay.

I have referenced Hermann Hesse’s Hymn to Old Age before, and I recommend it heartily. There was a critical article about Hesse in a recent New Yorker – even the title was negative: “Herman Hesse’s Arrested Development.” Hesse did try to catch the soul of the young, and this review emphasizes such works as Demian and Siddhartha, but neglects The Glass Bead Game – or, more accurately, points to it only in that it includes young men living celibate lives in perpetual school. Unfair, I think. Hesse wrote prose and poetry into his old age; The Glass Bead Game (particularly cited when Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize) was published when he was in his sixties and has much to say about being old and being young. The compendium of his words in and about old age which I reference above is a treasure.

In any case, Hesse has this to say about the process of “de-becoming” – a term I have come to appreciate:

For the task, desire and duty of youth is to become, and the task of the old man is to surrender himself or, as German mystics used to call it, ‘to de-become.’ One must first be a full person, a real personality, and one must have undergone the sufferings of this individualization before one can make the sacrifice of his personality.

And this, again, reminds me of Buddhism, where “becoming” is not always a good thing, while Nibbana or “extinction” of desire is indeed to be wished for. Bhikkhu Bodhi, a great Buddhist scholar and translator puts it like this:

In the end he must choose between the way that leads back into the world, to the round of becoming, and the way that leads out of the world, to Nibbana. And though this last course is extremely difficult and demanding, the voice of the Buddha speaks words of assurance confirming that it can be done, that it lies within man’s power to overcome all barriers and to triumph even over death itself.

Like it or not, as we age we are “de-becoming” what we used to be – body and mind. It is a sacrifice that we make whether we do so willingly or not. But perhaps the measure of a Hesse’s “full person” is that one can surrender willingly, even joyfully. I have not gotten there yet, but the forces of nature are working on me.

This week’s piece of fiction (“May 12, 2036”) is an exercise based on Jorge Borges’ short story “August 25, 1983,” wherein the great Argentinian writer imagines meeting himself in the future on his own deathbed. (He died in 1986, so was off by three years.) It is an intriguing story and a good model. Read my story if you like, but please do read the Borges. And try the exercise yourself.