Tag: death

“Remember, You Must Die”

In Muriel Spark’s comic/tragic novel Memento Mori, old folks keep getting strange phone calls telling them nothing more than “Remember, you must die!”  The elders, rich and poor, male and female, are alarmed by the unwanted reminder and even recruit a detective to try to track down the culprit.  But the voices on the phone vary, and one of the characters decides that it must be Death that is calling them.  One might wonder why old folks would find such “news” upsetting.

In much earlier times, death was so common that people needed few reminders.  Buddhism recommends meditating on one’s own death daily, and monks often went to charnel houses to do so.  In the West, memento mori were common.  Paintings often included skulls and household objects were crafted to look like coffins.  It was considered good to be reminded of how brief and miraculous our being was.  In his “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” Freud intimated that people lived more authentic lives in times of war when the specter of death was always present, hard to ignore.  These days, the specter and certainty of death have surely receded. Silicon Valley is not even convinced that it is inevitable – they are “solving death.”  If Freud is right that acceptance of death makes a more authentic life, one might worry.

Lately I was reminded that we ourselves, we elders, are a kind of unappreciated memento mori for younger folk.  I was at a wedding last weekend, and surely was one of the four or five oldest persons there.  I thought again of Larkin’s poem “The Old Fools,” which he wrote when he was about 50, and begins as the poet looks at some of the elders around him:

What do they think has happened, the old fools,

To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose

It’s more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,

And you keep on pissing yourself, and can’t remember

Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,

They could alter things back to when they danced all night,

Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?

Or do they fancy there’s really been no change,

And they’ve always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,

Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming

Watching the light move? If they don’t (and they can’t), it’s strange;

Why aren’t they screaming?

We are the memento mori now.  But are the young folks more afraid of death or of getting old? When Gulliver meets, in his Travels, the Struldbruggs – who age and age but are immortal – he sees them as a way of reconciling himself to death.  Gulliver swears that “no Tyrant could invent a Death into which I would not run with Pleasure from such a life [that of a Struldbrugg].” Gulliver decides that this amelioration of the mortal fear of death (which is far preferable to aging) is the only possible use for the immortals, and he considers bringing some specimens home with him “to arm our People against the Fear of Death.”

And why aren’t we “screaming”?  Well, some of us are as we run around cramming in travel and surgeries and whatever it takes to stop the reminders of our aging, but most of us accept it.  Some of us even like it.  In a way, our own bodies remind us that we are not going to last forever as bits and pieces wither, are surgically removed, or metamorphose into something we hardly recognize.  So, most of us have death on our horizon. I keep the memorial cards from loved ones who have passed away around the house where I can see their pictures daily and remember those who have passed ahead of me.  There is an old cemetery on my regular walking route, and one of the common headstone inscriptions is: “As you are now so once was I, as I am now so shall you be. Remember me as you pass by, prepare for death and follow me.”  Indeed.

Additionally, we have learned something in the process of getting older.  “Do they fancy there’s really been no change?” asks Philip Larkin sarcastically.  No, we know about the physical changes, but we also know that there is something that does not change very much at all. Don’t ask me to define it, but it is still there.  We aren’t screaming – not because we are looking forward to death – but because many of us have reconciled ourselves to it.  And, as Freud posited, we are better off for it.

I would note that one of Larkin’s very last poems, “Aubade,” is about the fear of death:

And so it [death] stays just on the edge of vision,

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill

That slows each impulse down to indecision.

Most things may never happen: this one will,

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Poor Philip!  I would contrast his fear with Stevie Smith’s poem “Black March” about her welcoming relationship with death or Maya Angelou’s wonderful “On Aging.”

For one of my short stories about approaches to death, you might try “A Perfect Ending.”  Other blogs on this subject include “Memento Mori” and “The Purpose of Old Age.”  Jorge Borges wrote a story (“August 25, 1983”) imagining his own death, which I tried to emulate in my story “May 12, 2036.” It makes death very concrete when you pick a date!  Try it!

Or you might try Chapter 10 in Book III of Gulliver’s Travels.

Picardy Thirds and the Need for a Happy Ending

If you are not a musician, you may not know what a Picardy Third is.  Put simply, it means that when a piece is in a minor key (think somewhat melancholy), it is the major third chord that the composer uses at the end of the piece to give it a … happy ending.  Bach did this all the time.  It is also often done in hymns: things may be sad, they may be tough, but it is all going to be alright (assuming you behave yourself and go to the right place when you die).

Humans have always wanted happy endings, even when they weren’t there.  Samuel Johnson famously lamented about Shakespeare’s King Lear that

I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.   

Because many agreed with this sentiment, Nahum Tate’s revision, The History of King Lear (1681), with a “happy ending” was amazingly successful.  Lear gets to be king again and Cordelia lives happily ever after.  Tate’s redaction was of negligible literary value as compared to the original; however, it was almost the only version produced for about 150 years.  As Samuel Johnson said in reference to the revision, “the publick has decided” for the version where Cordelia “retired with victory and felicity.”  Well, there is a victory for sentiment over great literature.

We’ve been groomed to want and expect a happy ending.  If you are my age, you might remember watching Lassie on Sunday nights.  Lassie always had a scary problem to solve (child and/or dog in trouble) but it always ended happily (rescue, reunion, smiles all around).  Lassie was followed by Disney, where even Grimm’s Fairy Tales were cleaned up enough for our innocent minds.

But we all do it, don’t we?  We want to end on a major third, a happy ending, a victory lap.  But life isn’t like that.  Life ends in death; we might accept the end, but making a victory out of it is something else.  (I won’t talk about religion here, but you can see the connection.)

We have always known that there is something inherently tragic about life: It ends in death.   Jonathan Swift once wrote to a bereaved acquaintance, “Life is a tragedy, where we sit as spectators a while and then act our own part in it.”  Spinoza characterized most of life as “vain and futile,” but admitted that he was looking for a system that would allow him “unending happiness.”

If life has always been tragic, it somehow seems more so these days.  Many decades ago, Aldous Huxley predicted our current situation: “Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.”  As I read this, I could not help but think that “planned obsolescence” applied not just to appliances, computers, and human bodies, but also to the planet that nurtures us.

We are looking for that Picardy Third to end on, but it seems more and more elusive.  As Kafka says, “There is infinite hope, only not for us.”

If you want to hear a short piece of music that ends on a Picardy Third, try listening here.  If you want a happy ending, you are going to miss a lot of great literature, great music, and the abundance of your life in its major and minor keys.  I would rather be living in one of Shakespeare’s tragedies than pretending in the worlds of Tate and Disney.

My short stories do not often end in a Picardy Third.  You might try “Closing Time” or “Every Winged Bird According to Its Kind.”

Very Old People, Vollendungsromans,  and Lore Segal

When I was young, I devoured “coming of age” novels.  These works are often classified as Bildungsromans – bildung meaning “education” and romans, “novel.”  Think of Catcher in the Rye, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, or Little Women – you surely had your own favorites.  I clung to such books because I was looking for a chart for navigating my changing world.  Now, I suppose, YA (Young Adult) novels fill this niche – although I would guess there might be a good reason to read an adult-level book if an adult is what you are trying to become (grumbles the old lady).

As I approach old age or move from a “greener” old age to a drier, more fragile, old age, I look for books about the coming of an even older age.  There is also a term for books about the “winding down” of life: Vollendungsroman.  And, while it is important to me that such books be written by someone who has experienced the last vestiges of life, there are not a whole lot of people who are still writing at the outer limits, into their 90s or beyond.  I have written about some of them here, but we just lost a master in this regard, and it is Lore Segal whom I want to talk about today.

Last October, there was an article entitled “A Master Storyteller at the End of Her Story” in the NYTimes Sunday magazine about Lore Segal’s last days.  It was published in the same month that she died at age 96 and noted that she wrote (sometimes dictating) until the very end. In the article was this notation from an author-friend of Segal’s:

“With writers who survive into their old age my sense is that sometimes the spirit is willing, but the ability to get it onto the page starts to wane,” says the critic and author James Marcus, a close friend of Lore’s. “It’s just not true for Lore.”

He goes on to say that he was struck by her late writings’ “unsparing depiction of a period of life – namely the end – that is typically rendered with a gauzy wistfulness, if it’s ever rendered at all.”   Segal herself says this:

The point of writing, I believe, is finding the right words.  And being old is being old.  Dying is dying.  You must not be scared to say it.

No euphemisms for this old lady.  She wrote a series of stories about a group of old ladies who have met periodically for lunch over the decades.  Many of the stories were collected in Ladies’ Lunch and Other Stories, but the last one was published in the New Yorker just as Segal died; it was a series of vignettes about her ladies and was entitled “Stories About Us.”

When I was newly married, I talked to other young women about keeping house (how often do you wash your sheets?), furnishings, saving up to buy a house.  When I was a young mother, I queried my friends about how to get babies to sleep through the night.  As a working woman, I had lunch with my friends and talked about our bosses, chances for promotion, what to wear to the office, and whether to divorce our husbands.  Later, when we were all middle-aged, we talked about retirement – where, when, how much did we need?  Newly retired people talk about travel, classes, investments, hobbies.  Slightly older people seem to discuss physical therapists, dental work, cruises, and fears for our grandchildren.  All of this is familiar I am sure – but what do really old people talk about?  Lore Segal gives this to us. Her ladies are done with trivial topics.  Together, they are looking into the face of the death, and it is refreshing.

Segal’s ladies have rules.  They take a full twenty minutes (and no more) to chronicle their latest ailments; they keep up with each other’s families, but also with a limit.  They strategize with each other about how to stay in their own apartments (despite the machinations of their desperate families). They think out loud about the end of life.  How will it happen?  Who will go next?  They have conversations that they could not have with their children or grandchildren.  “Our children would not believe how calmly we look around the table wondering which one of us will be next,” says one of the ladies.  They are proud of being “commonsensical.”

They talk about all the things they have resolved never to do again – travel, see movies in the theater, driving – and then they talk about reneging on their resolutions.  They bond against their common enemies – who are often their own children.  They support each other, while realizing that holding on forever is a losing cause.  And they are brave.  Oedipus at Colonus walks into the sacred grove to meet his fate; these ladies face the ambulances and nursing homes with the same grace. (By the way, Oedipus at Colonus was written when Sophocles was over 90.)

Many of the ladies in the stories are Holocaust survivors; Lore Segal was one.  She came to England on the Kindertransport, and later to New York with her mother.  In the end, these ladies come back to that early experience of knowing death was just outside the door.  “There are no happy endings,” one of the characters reminds us.  They reminisce that they have spent their busy, intellectual lives asking “why?” and “what is it all about?”  with few answers.  And still the end comes knocking at the door.  Reading Segal reminds us that this is the human condition.  And the attitude toward the human condition should be sharing, acceptance, and the noticing of how the “fuchsia blooms” on our way out.  Lore Segal’s stories are highly recommended.

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.”

If I Should Die Before I Wake…

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about letting go. There are many things that we have to let go of – the past, our youth, our mistakes – but the one I didn’t mention, that seldom gets mentioned, is death. Having just heard Mr. Rogers (in the body of Tom Hanks) telling me that there is nothing about life that is not manageable if it can be talked about, maybe it’s time to talk about death. (Highly recommend the movie.)

Early religions – Judaism for example and the Greeks – relegated the dead  to a shadowy place which did not seem very pleasant. The Greeks had Hades and its “shades.” (Remember Aeneas’s trip to the underworld?)  The Old Testament Sheol was held to be a still and dark place where souls – good and bad – went after death.

Eventually there was some belief in a more substantial afterlife –it was the Pharisees who believed in resurrection (but not necessarily of the body) and the Sadducees who did not. Paul had been a Pharisee so he was already half way there when he was struck by the light and began to preach the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Of course, hand in hand with the possibility of heaven came the threat of hell. In Buddhism and Hinduism, souls were reborn again and again until they got it right. Interestingly enough, the goal for Buddhists is nirvana or extinction, non-returning, while the goal for Christians is eternal life. In all cases, however, death is a threshold to be gotten over. And that threshold is constantly at the end of our horizon whether we acknowledge it or not.

In Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death (also highly recommended), the author discusses the way we all deal with death. Some of us believe (or try to believe) in an afterlife. Some of us think that our lives will live on in our deeds, a ripple effect (think of Fred Rogers), some that our projects will live on after us (our immortality projects), and some that we will live on in our posterity, our children and grandchildren. And some of us think all of the above, depending on the circumstances at the moment.

And some of us just keep hoping it will be otherwise – that medical technology will somehow solve the problem before our time has come. There is apparently a thriving business in this aspiration in Silicon Valley.

I thought about death as a child. Every bedtime ended with this prayer:

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep;
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen.

This was followed by a list of “God blesses,” which always included members of the immediate family, Nana and Papa, and sometimes visiting friends or beloved pets or teachers. But the line, “if I should die before I wake,” left this particular child with the specter of departing sometime before the oatmeal was ready in the morning. Think about that. Adults may often wake in the middle of the night thinking about their own extinction (a la Larkin’s “Aubade”), but what did it mean for every child in a culture (this was not something my parents invented) to end every day with a reminder of their mortality? And did I believe that I would go to heaven if I did die before morning? Somehow, I think I did. But it is harder now.

Jung, among other, talks about the therapeutic value of a belief in an afterlife. Yes. But the key word there is belief. That is one way to cope. Another is acceptance of death as part of life, as necessary to life, as what gives shape to life. There is an article in last week’s New Yorker by the art critic Peter Schjeldahl, who is living with a diagnosis of “rampant” lung cancer. He is going to die before long, but has had a chance to reflect on it for those of us who think we won’t die “before long” and this is what he recommends: “Take death for a walk in your minds, folks. Either you’ll be glad you did or, keeling over suddenly, you won’t be out anything.”

Whatever method we choose, death has more power when we don’t face it in one way or another. Only then can we get on with it. Shakespeare said it the best:

So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

One more thing – this is the season of Old Father Time who is pushed out of the way by the Baby New Year. I have written on these symbols before, but it is worth noting on the eve of a new decade that the year may become young, but we will not. Let us keep this truth in mind (and here we are facing facts again!) as we watch the celebrations and frame our resolutions. Let us resolve to live within our own time. We can chuckle at the baby new year just as we delight in our grandchildren; but we are in a different time of life. And I, for one, am often glad of it. I think of the words of Don Mclean’s “Wonderful Baby”:

Wonderful baby nothin’ but new,
The world has gone crazy, I’m glad I’m not you.
At the beginning or is it the end?
It goes in and comes out and starts over again.

The story for this week, “A Balm in Gilead,” is about accepting the ending of things (or not). Here’s to the New Year, and may it be full of meaning, acceptance, and peace.

Short Benediction for W. S. Merwin

The poet W. S. Merwin died yesterday at the age of ninety-one.   My favorite Merwin lines come from his poem “Air” :

This must be what I wanted to be doing,
Walking at night between the two deserts,
Singing.

Think about it.  The desert we come from and the desert we are headed for.  Meanwhile, sing.

Poets are influenced by other poets, and when I read “Air” (written in 1963), I hear an earlier poem (1895) by Stephen Crane:

I walked in a desert.
And I cried,
“Ah, God, take me from this place!”
A voice said, “It is no desert.”
I cried, “Well, But —
The sand, the heat, the vacant horizon.”
A voice said, “It is no desert.”

This, by the way, was from Crane book of poetry The Black Riders,  which the poet said he liked far more than his very successful novel, The Red Badge of Courage.

But this is a homage to Merwin, who actually wrote a poem called “For the Anniversary of My Death“:

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

If you were to write a poem or a letter to commemorate the anniversary of your death, what would you say?  Here is another example from Frost’s “A Lesson for Today“:

I hold your doctrine of Memento Mori.
And were an epitaph to be my story
I’d have a short one ready for my own.
I would have written of me on my stone:
I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

And then there is this from Stevenson’s “Requiem“:

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he long’d to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

Go back and read Merwin and then think about the anniversary of your own death, the epitaph for your stone, a summary of your life.  But please read Merwin, who gave us words to help us sing between the deserts.