Tag: jorge borges

Last Days – “When the Cranes Fly South”

Have you ever wondered what your last days will look like?  For most people, death is a process and not a moment.  Authors have tried to capture that experience – one thinks of Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilych – but not from experience.  Jorge Borges tries to image meeting his own dying self in “August 25, 1983.” No one gets to look back on their own end times; few of us can reliably predict when it will happen.  Borges was off by three years to the good.

I am often skeptical about books about old age, books with elderly protagonists, which are written by young people.  But Lisa Ridzén’s novel, When the Cranes Fly South, rings true.  The author says that she was inspired by the case notes she found from her grandfather’s carers during the end of his life.  She gives us what feels like a true picture of the messiness, the inevitability, and the release of death.  It is a lovely book.  I was also deeply impressed by the Swedish health care/home care system, which faithfully provides for visits four times a day.  The carers feed the grandfather, take care of the dog, bring in firewood – and generally do whatever is necessary to put an old man’s mind to rest.

But, of course, the old man’s mind does not rest, he does not go easy into that good night.  His wonderful canine companion, Sixten, is a large elkhound and the subject of controversy with Hans, his son, who thinks it is not fair to the dog or the caregivers to confine the dog with a sick old man.  Hans also insists that his father (Bo) take regular visits to his wife, who is in the deep haze of dementia and has been in a memory care home for a couple of years.  Bo can see no point in visiting the “husk” of his lifelong love, and when his poor wife throws them out of her room at the care home, we sympathize with Bo, who knows enough to keep memories separate from the current realities of his life.  Bo preserves one of his wife’s favorite scarves in a canning jar, so that he can occasionally open it to get a whiff of how she used to smell and think about how things used to be.  He loves his wife; he treasures his memories.  In his weakened state, he cannot reconcile the reality of her dementia with the warm feeling he gets every time he opens the canning jar.

Two of the passages which rang true for me had to with Hans, Bo’s son.  Hans is trying to do right by his father while working a demanding job and mourning the end of his marriage.  Bo wishes he could help Hans put all these challenges into perspective:

Despite everything, I wish there was something I could say to help Hans.  To make him realize he can stop stressing.  Maybe he would stop thinking about Sixten if he just relaxed a little.  But I don’t know what I can do about his restlessness.

Bo thinks about the fact that Hans will be in his place someday, dying and at the mercy of his daughter and the caregivers:

How will he react when Ellinor [Hans’s daughter] tells him he is no longer capable of taking care of himself?  Who will he be once he stops working, once his body  starts to give up the way they always do?   Right then, I realize that he might end up like you [Bo’s wife/Hans’ mother], forgetting Ellinor and drifting from one day to the next, and I pull a face and shake my head.

Of course, Hans cannot imagine himself in his father’s place, but the truth is that both things – the stress today and the inevitability of aging tomorrow – are related.  If death and old age were constant companions, were realized as inevitabilities, perhaps the stresses of the present moment would diminish in proportion.

This book was a huge bestseller and award-winner in Sweden.  Recently, I wrote about the Swedish bestseller about “death cleaning.”  Clearly, Swedish readers are eager for real discussions about old age and preparations for the end of life.  This is to their credit.  When the Cranes Fly South is not an easy book in some ways; death is often messy and Ridzén gives us clear images of incontinence, falls, nostalgia, grief – losses of all kinds.  We get the picture of a man who knows he has to leave, but clings to those things that give his life meaning – his dog, his woods, the scent of his wife’s scarf – as long as he can.  While we feel for him and with him, he is not an object of pity by the reader, by his caretakers, or by himself.

For most of the book, we are in Bo’s head.  Again, I was suspicious of a first novel by a 36-year-old which tried to enter the mind of a dying 89-year-old.  Who am I to say if it is accurate?  But it feels right, and it got me thinking about how I would handle my own last days, what needs to be discarded, and what needs to be held onto until the very end.  Highly recommended.

Death is a major (and the final) life event.  We have elaborate rituals for childbirth, fairy-tale weddings, graduations, and other major life events.  But it is much harder to orchestrate death.  In the Middle Ages, it was very important to have a “good death,” shriven of our sins, family around, comfortable in one’s own bed.  There was even a term for the art of ending your life well: ars moriendi.  By the seventeenth or eighteenth century, however, death had become a more private and hidden affair.  People today plan their funerals, create bucket lists, and do extensive estate planning, but do they think about their actual death?  Of course, it is not easy.  My husband was recently in the hospital again, and there is nothing more impersonal than a hospital.  But that is where a lot of dying happens.

We might start by trying to imagine what kind of death we would have, what we would want.  You might try, as Borges did, to write a story about the end of your life.  Where do you think you’ll be?  Who will be there?  What will you be thinking about?  We have little control about our dying, but conjuring up the end might give us a little more clarity on the things we can control.

In When the Cranes Fly South, Bo has a good death.  He has the people he loves around him and his hand on the head of his beloved elkhound.  “Everything is crystal clear,” he thinks.  At least, that is the way our author imagined it would happen.  May everything be “crystal clear” for you in your last moments.  I often wonder if, at that moment when everything extraneous fades away, we will see more clearly.  May it be so for all of us.

 

 

 

Fantasies to Reject in Old Age (or Sooner)

Youth is a time for fantasy, but it occurs to me that we may never outgrow some illusions.  The nature of our fantasies changes as we age (Santa Claus and Prince Charming may have been discarded), but our need for such magical thinking apparently does not.  I have been reading Swamplands of the Soul, by the Jungian James Hollis, which is a far more uplifting book than you might expect from the title.  Hollis and others whom I will discuss think that elderly fantasies are not entirely harmless.  And if you think you don’t have any such illusions, please read on.

Hollis is particularly interesting on the subject of aging and fantasy. He says that there are at least a couple of fantasies that we all need to reject as we grow old:

The two greatest fantasies we are obliged to relinquish in the second half of life are that we are immortal exceptions to the human condition, and that out there somewhere is some “Magical Other” who will rescue us from existential isolation.

My body has been working hard to convince me that it won’t last forever; so, I think I have probably come close to accepting my mortality (ask me on my deathbed).   But the “rescue” fantasy is harder – and it includes, according to Hollis, “Taking responsibility for choices, to cease blaming others or expecting rescue from them, …and to accept the pain of loneliness.”   I do have trouble with the blame thing – partly because my family of origin loved the blame game and partly because it is indeed an easy way of avoiding responsibility.  I have spent countless hours with therapists, siblings, and friends detailing the sins of the childhood that made me what I am.  But that’s over.  The older I get, the surer I am that those recalled injustices just don’t matter anymore.

As for the “Magical Other,” I think I have finally learned that no one can rescue me from myself.  I also realized over time that it was not simply a knight in shining armor I was looking for to redeem me. I often fell prey to the false belief that more money, another house, a new situation, a grand trip could do the job – never seeing that any remediation for “existential isolation” comes from acceptance within.

Much “magical thinking” is the product of conceiving our life as a story.  As James Carse says in his wonderful Infinite Games, “Because we know our lives to have the character of narrative, we also [think] we know what the narrative is…. [But] true story tellers do not know their own story.”

And of course, if we have a story, we want a happy ending.  This is another fantasy to reject in old age (related to Hollis’s second one).  My husband and I have recently lost the last of our parents, and it is clear that life’s end may be many things, but it is seldom happy and often it is quite the opposite.  The old have happy moments, happy memories – but to tell ourselves that everything will come out right in the end (think Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) is indulging in a fantasy.   Many of us delay making necessary changes to our lives because we picture a quiet deathbed scene in our own bed, with loving (and not burnt out from taking care of us) friends and relatives holding our hands and playing our favorite music.  May it be so for you, but I hope I know enough not to count on it.  But accepting this does not mean despair.  Joko Beck posited that it could mean something else entirely:

When people know their death is very close, what is the element that often disappears?  What disappears is the hope that life will turn out the way the want it to.  Then they can see the strawberry is “so delicious” [even though there is a tiger below – you may know the story] – because that is all there is, this very moment. (Everyday Zen)

It is easy for me to say that I accept Hollis’s imperatives to accept mortality and to reject optimistic fantasies and magical thinking.  It is not easy to do, and recidivism occurs frequently.  Young children often cannot tell fantasy from reality; dreams seem real, Santa’s reindeer can fly, and there really are monsters under the bed.  We are older, but are we wiser?  We justify telling lies to children to protect them, to make the world seem less threatening.  An argument might be made that elders need the same protections.  I will, however, keep trying to “put away childish things.”

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 both the story and the exercise.  What do you think you will have to say at the end of your life?  What was important, transformational, disappointing?  Look at it as practice in dealing with reality.

I would also recommend a wonderful book by Stephen Levine, “A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last.”  It inspired my story, “Encore.”

I Am What I Am

 

When I was a small child in Rhode Island, Salty Brine and his collie named Jeff hosted a children’s program which, among other entertainments, ran the black and white cartoons of an indomitable, spinach-eating sailor.  Popeye had made his own peace with life and sang out his philosophy: “I am what I am and that’s all that I am, I’m Popeye the sailor man.”  Of course, in Popeye’s seagoing dialect, it came out “I yam what I yam,” which is how Robin Williams sang it when he played Popeye in 1980.  As a child, I loved Popeye and hated Bluto.  Life was simpler then.

But the phrase, “I am what I am,” has been rattling around in my head again lately.  It is, of course, primarily Biblical.  When Moses beholds the burning bush and talks to his Maker, he is concerned about how to convey the reality of his theodicy to his fellow Hebrews. “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?”  God said to Moses, “I am who I am.”  Then, in case Moses is still confused, God adds: “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I am has sent me to you.’”  Poor Moses took this strange message down to the people.

We get the phrase again in the New Testament – this time from Paul in his letter to the Corinthians.  “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain.”  Paul is talking about the fact that Jesus appeared to him on the road to Damascus.  It seems a strange statement, for surely we all are what we are?  What does he mean?  One might wonder.  Ben Franklin seems to have his tongue firmly in his cheek when he asks: “I am what I am and that’s all that I am and if I’m supposed to be somebody else, why do I look like me?” 

But the speaker of this phrase that I have mostly been fixated on for the past week is that of Jonathan Swift.  As many of you know, I have spent much of my life pondering Swift; this blog is titled after his own resolutions about old age. But that list was compiled long before Swift entered his own raving and often very public senescence. Here is a story from the year before he died, recounted by his grandnephew, Deane Swift:

On Sunday the 17th of March [1744], as he [Jonathan Swift] sat in his chair, upon the housekeeper’s moving a knife from him as he was going to catch at it, he shrugged his shoulders, and rocking himself, said I am what I am, I am what I am: and, about six minutes afterwards, repeated the same words two or three times over.

Swift’s cry seems to erupt from someone who does not feel understood and yet wants to be accepted. It is the cry of someone who has changed beyond even his own recognition, but wants to find peace.   Swift raged in Biblical language because it is his language – he is the Rector of St. Patrick’s, after all, and well steeped in the King James Bible.  While God knows that Moses can never understand God’s nature but yet wants a relationship with him, Swift cries out in the same way to the people around him.

 Jorge Borges was also intrigued by Swift’s words.  Borges lists the following possibilities: “He may have felt, I will be miserable but I am, and I am a part of the universe, as inevitable and necessary as the others, and I am what God wants me to be, I am what the universal laws have made of me, and perhaps To be is to be all.” Borges combines these interpretations with the inclusive and; all possibilities are accepted (including that of being miserable) and all possibilities include acceptance of the inevitable.  One might take this existential statement to indicate that Swift has accepted his fate, the face in the mirror.  But he does not necessarily like it.  While God’s “I am” is presumably a statement of changelessness, Swift’s is perhaps the acceptance of change.  When Swift was a bit younger, he told a fellow writer that he was like some trees, in that he would “die from the top.”  One might wonder if he knew what was happening to him.

I think that “I am what I am” is a strong phrase, but it is painfully close to a phrase I hate: “It is what it is.”  When the latter slogan became ubiquitous at the turn of the twenty-first century, the word-czar William Safire coined the term “tautophrase” to describe such a self-evident statement.  “Facts are facts,” “what’s done is done,” and “it is what it is” are all inane tautophrases.  And so is, “I am what I am.”  And yet.  The phrase elicits some essence of our being that withstands age and circumstance.  It also calls for acceptance of all these things: our essence, our age, and our circumstances.  “I am what I am,” says the old lady.  “Obviously,” says William Safire.

 

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.”