Tag: bible

The Nearings, the Yaloms, and Two Great Poets – When Death Comes to Good Marriages

Over the past month or so, I have read three memoirs about long, happy marriages which were visited by the death of one of the partners.  Close couples often joke about hoping that they will both expire at the same moment, but the partners know that this will not happen; one of them will watch and one will die.  How to cope? 

These narratives of death’s visitation are similar in format, while different in tone. All three books alternate the descriptions of the last days of the marriage with memories from earlier times, with tales of falling in love and creating a life.  The rituals of each marriage are carefully documented – rituals which mean so much and are so important and, at the same time, are so hard to cling to when illness and tragedy intercedes.

In A Matter of Death and Life, Irvin Yalom (The Schopenhauer Cure, When Nietzsche Wept) and Marilyn Yalom alternate chapters as they tell of the end of her cancer treatment, and her death surrounded by family and friends.  It is the relationships that are important to the Yaloms.  During her last days, Marilyn stopped treatment and chose death (and it seems like a good choice) – and while she can accept death, she has more trouble about leaving her loved ones:

Still, if I am not afraid of death itself, I feel the continued sadness of departing from my loved ones.  For all the philosophical treatises and for all the assurances of the medical profession, there is no cure for the simple fact that we must leave each other. 

It is these loved ones and their memories that Irvin thinks will be the “afterlife” of himself and Marilynne, but he knows that this too is ephemeral:

I know that I will exist in ethereal form in the minds of those who have known me or read my work but, in a generation or two, anyone who has ever known the flesh-and-blood me will have vanished.

Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon are also separated by cancer.  Donald had just recovered from his own grappling with this disease when his much younger wife is diagnosed with leukemia. For years, the couple assumed Donald would predecease Jane and planned accordingly, but such are the plans of men and women.   The couple follow up on every possible chance of recovery, including spending some miserable months in Seatle for a bone marrow transplant.  Nothing works.  The most moving moment in the book is when Donald and Jane finally are convinced that they must “give up” and accept.  There is a strange joyfulness as they throw out all the noxious medicines and look for a brief respite from treatment before the end comes.  They have only eleven days left.

But like Marilyn Yalom, it is the loss of relationships, of contact with loved ones, that bothers Jane.  “Dying is nothing, but…the separation!” she howls.  Jane and Donald prepare poems for her posthumous volume, compose her obituary, pick a Psalm for her funeral.  Unlike in the Yaloms’ book, there is some notion of a religious afterlife, at least on Jane’s part. 

The Nearings had a different kind of ending.  Scott Nearing is 100 years old and frail, but he decides that he has had enough and stops eating.  In Loving and Leaving the Good Life Helen Nearing, writes:

He would take no pills, no drugs, and hoped to avoid doctors.  He became less and less concerned with continuing to inhabit a weakening body.  When he could no longer carry his part of the load and take care of himself, he was ready to go on.  I was at one with him in this.  The way one dies, it seemed to me, should reflect the way one had lived, and I was glad to help him do it gracefully.

Scott dies peacefully by his wife’s side.  If you have read their earlier book (Living the Good Life – a hippie Bible) about how they consciously set out to live a good and meaningful life in Vermont, you will recognize the intention to do things consciously, and, as Helen puts it, gracefully.

These memoirs clearly served a therapeutic service for the writers.  The act of tracing the roots of the relationship is preparatory to trying to acknowledge what the last separation means.  Reading these books – all highly recommended – should be done long before we are in the position of facing such realities.  Planning for the unknown is impossible, but contemplating the possibilities can be a worthwhile exercise.

These were all good marriages, but we are reminded that even good marriages come to an end.  Irvin Yalom concludes his memoir thus:

I shall end our book with the unforgettable opening words of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”  That image both staggers and calms.  I lean back in my chair, close my eyes, and take comfort.

Good marriages intensify that “brief crack of light,” and while we cannot stop mortality, we can appreciate every good day we are granted.  There are other lessons in these books, but this is the wisdom that remains.

 

 

 

 

Old Parents and Prodigal Children

Perhaps the story of the Prodigal Son means something different when we are old.   Will we take our children back when they fail or falter?  How many times?  With or without their children in tow?  In the story of the prodigal son, we are left to think that everything ends up ok – except perhaps, for the resentment of the older and more responsible brother.  The story (from Luke 15) ends with the father telling his “good” son why he has killed the fatted calf for his wayward sibling:

 And he said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.  It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.

But in real life, this is seldom the end of it.  Does the prodigal son stay on the straight and narrow or does he wake his father coming in drunk every night?  Has he sired children that are looking for support?  If he runs away a second time, will he be taken in again? In “Death of the Hired Man,” Robert Frost said that: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, /They have to take you in.”

How many times?  How many fatted calves? How much money?  How much heartache?  Surely, parenthood is a lifetime job, but we protected them when they were vulnerable – who is protecting the old couple who have frayed their nerves and spent their nest egg for the prodigal son or daughter who just keeps returning?  It is surely a question for our time.

Recently, I mentioned the story of the prodigal son to a parent who has had to exercise some tough love with an adult child, but seems to feel painfully guilty about it.  She pointed out to me that the father in the story represents God, not a typical parent.  Ah, I sighed, you are surely right.  But don’t we all see that gracious parent in Luke as the model of the endlessly forgiving parent?  Killing those fatted calves whenever there is a glimmer of light?

Because, here is the thing.  It is terribly difficult to renounce parenthood.  Harder than divorce, harder even than becoming estranged from your parents.  Your children can cut you out, but it is extremely difficult to cut them out – even when you have run out of energy and fatted calves.

There was a grand essay by Rebecca Solnit in Harpers entitled, “The Mother of All Questions.”  The question she poses is whether to have children.  (She has none.) And, of course, this is a weighty question, particularly in these days of economic distress and climate crisis.  But, when most of us made the decision to procreate (or neglected to make it and just let nature take its course), we were not possessed of our full maturity or even our right minds.

So here is the harder question: “Is it ever too late not to have children?”  To cut yourself off from your children?  Or, less extreme, is it ever too late to not make parenthood a primary identity?  Not to feel like we have to have the patience of the prodigal’s father, of Job, of God, in the face of the relentless demands of adult children?  It is not a question I have had to answer in any but the most minor ways, but I have watched the anguish that prodigal sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, can cause.

Here is another strange thing.  There are few novels, plays, or poems about good parents with bad children.  There is Balzac’s Pere Goriot, William March’s The Bad Seed, and a few other horror stories – however, novels and poems about bad parents abound. (Think of Philip Larkin’s wonderful “This Be the Verse.”)  Culture is on the side of the children.  While our offspring are children, that is the way it should be.  But what about when they are fifty and we are seventy?  There is no right answer to this question, but I find myself with great empathy for those who are asking it.

For a view of differing attitudes toward parents, you could try my story “Tale of Two Grannies” or look at “Snickerdoodles.”  Neither of these tales, however, depicts the extreme situations I am discussing.  It is probably no accident that most of the stories of “bad children” are tales of horror.  Again, I empathize and only hope it is never a situation I experience.