Tag: mortality

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.

 

 

 

 

A Last Transitioning

I just returned from visiting a ninety-eight-year-old relative who, although she is weak and has been under hospice care for many months, has never spoken of her own death in my presence. She has never acknowledged her mortality in any way.  However, since the last time we were with her, she has learned a new word for what she feels she is going through: transitioning.  She affirmed quite emphatically that she was in the process of transitioning, that she would be transitioning soon.  There was never any discussion of what she would be transitioning to, but that didn’t seem to matter.  I guess transitioning seems less terminal, more transitive.  For whatever reason, it is a concept, a term, that she is comfortable with.

This terminology, however, made for some humorous conversations. I heard her, for instance, leave a phone message for a financial manager telling him that she wanted to talk to him because she would be “transitioning” soon.  In this day, when “transitioning” is usually used in a different context, it might make people who don’t know her well wonder if she is having a deathbed gender conversion.  But I don’t mean to make light of it; I am grateful that she has found a word to describe her experience, a word that she can be comfortable with.  And the end of life is surely an ongoing transition which must be borne, appreciated, accommodated.

Our culture has many euphemisms for death; Wikipedia can give you more than fifty.  Many have religious connotations: “going to heaven;” some are earthy: “kick the bucket;” some are transactional: “checking out.”  But we are loath to look at death directly.  Irvin Yalom, my favorite psychiatrist/author, wrote a book entitled Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Fear of Death.  The title comes from a quote from La Rochefoucauld: “You cannot stare straight into the face of the sun, or death.”   Yes, and despite the optimistic title of Yalom’s book and the advice he provides, facing our mortality never seems to get much easier.

Literature gives us many images of death, with deathbed scenes ranging from the horror of Tolstoy’s Ivan Illich to the sweet demise of Dicken’s Little Nell.  But, today, I am more interested in poetry, and no one can confront the truth like Philip Larkin.  He wrote an aubade, a poem about early morning hours in bed, in which he talks about lying in the dark facing “the dread of dying, and being dead,” thoughts which “hold and horrify.”  Aubades are usually romantic poems, about lovers having to leave each other at sunrise after a blissful night.  Larkin fixates only on his fear of having to, inevitably, leave life.

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

Till then I see what’s really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

I have known people who claimed they had no fear of death; I never believed them.  I know other people who say they are afraid of the process of dying, but not death itself.  I can almost believe them.  Clearly my skepticism is deeply colored by my own fear of annihilation.

There are other views of death in poetry.  Stevie Smith calls death “Black March” in her poem of that title; she thinks of death as an “old friend,” “a breath of fresh air,” “a change.”  She looks forward to thinking of a visit from her old friend; she seemingly cannot face life without knowing he is somewhere, cloaked in grey chiffon, waiting for her.  “I have a friend/ At the end of the world. / His name is a breath/ Of fresh air.”

And then there is Robert Louis Stevenson, who spent most of his life struggling gallantly with tuberculosis, but has no intention of resisting death when it comes:

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

I may never have Stevenson’s openness to death, but I sincerely hope to have Stevie Smith’s confidence that, at some point in my life, death will be a friend.  And I will lose my fear about a final transition.

If you want to contemplate death through some of my fiction, you might try “And Now, A Word from Dead Barry,” or “Tale of Two Grannies.”

Memento Mori

We all need to be reminded of things, and the older we get the more mnemonic aids are necessary.  We try to put everything on the calendar (and then try to remember to look at the calendar); we set up our computer to remind us of birthdays and anniversaries.  Doctors and dentists send us appointment reminders; Facebook sends us memories.  But, perhaps, what we really need help with are the more important things in life.

I recently re-read Muriel Spark’s wonderful Memento Mori. You probably know Spark from her Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; in Memento Mori she moves her observational skills to wonderful advantage from a Scottish boarding school to a set of oldsters. In the book, the very elderly characters keep getting solemn calls reminding them that they will die – no dates, no threats – just: Remember, you must die.  This, nevertheless, upsets the old people tremendously and they try all means (and suspect all kinds of people) to stop the reminders – the memento moris,  if you will.  Police are called, detectives are hired, snooping abounds.  But nothing can stop the calls.  And here’s the odd thing: the voices on the phone vary with each recipient.

There are rich and poor people in the book; the rich are having a lavish and catered old age, while their former servants live in geriatric wards run by the state.  They all get the calls.  Death is knocking at the door.  Why does it upset them so much?  Why do we know exactly how they feel?

Interestingly, I had just about finished drafting this blog when I read an interview in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review.  The “By the Book” subject was Tara Westover, a historian and the author of the bestseller Educated.  She was asked what classic novel she had only recently read, and answered with Spark’s Memento Mori and described the book:

A bizarre and dark little fable about aging and mortality – about economic abundance and emotional poverty.  I laughed out loud the whole way through.

“I laughed out loud the whole way through.”  This is the comment of a younger person (Westover is 36).  If you are old, you will empathize and perhaps grimace, but you will not laugh out loud.

Freud posited that the reason people felt most alive, most vital, in wartime, was because they were face to face with death all of the time.  Shouldn’t that also be true in very old age?  I wonder.

Memento mori has a long history.  You see skulls added to Dutch paintings to remind the viewer that the end is coming.  Cathedrals often had images of skeletons and the Last Judgement, cemeteries were put next to churches, and Buddhists often meditated in charnel houses – all to remind people that they are mortal.  It seems we have always needed that reminder.

When Longfellow was invited to his 50th class reunion at Bowdoin, he composed a long poem entitled, “Morituri Salutamus,” which means “We who are about to die salute you,” the salutation that the gladiators purportedly greeted their blood-thirsty audiences with.  It is a mediocre poem (for Longfellow at least), but he does exhort his elderly classmates not to forget their mortality and encourages them to look at the bright side:

For age is an opportunity no less

Than youth itself, though in another dress.

And as the evening twilight fades away

The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.

Longfellow does not quite identify what the “stars” of old age are, leaving us something to meditate upon.

The Buddha recommended five daily recollections to keep us centered on the truth of our existence and prompted his monks to recite them daily.  They are:

  1. I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.
  2. I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health.
  3. I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.
  4. All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.
  5. My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

Pretty negative, one might say.  And yet, doesn’t the transience of life make it more poignant?  Is the true suffering in recognizing that we will die or in spending our old age flailing against that reality?    Marx described religion as the “opiate of the masses” because it distracted people from improving the life in front of them.  Perhaps this is true for both civilizations and for individuals.  But as the mynah bird in Huxley’s utopian Island spent all day crying out “Attention” in order to pull listeners back to the present moment, so perhaps we should have something in our lives to remind us of our mortality.  You could do worse than to start with Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori.

The Coronavirus and Its Gifts

T. S. Eliot famously enumerated the three gifts of old age. I believe old age does have gifts, real gifts. And perhaps so does this horrific period we are going through – at least for those of us fortunate enough to be fearful but yet untouched, those of us lucky enough to have homes to shelter in and food in the cupboard. Without minimizing the pain and fear of this plague, it might be worth thinking about what unintentional gifts it might be strewing in its wake.

For one, there is the gift of time. I must admit that I miss the ritual of my weekly meetings and errands. I miss regular exercise at the gym, and the mental and physical energy I garner from the women I do yoga with. I miss concerts and movies and travel. All of a sudden days yawn wide, and it is up to me to see that as suffering or opportunity.

Time allows for depth. Our generation has seen our opportunities to read, watch, experience, travel and meet people multiply. And yet, there is less and less time to reflect on what we read, what we see, what we really think. Auden was worried about this over fifty years ago:

Again, while it is a great blessing that a man no longer has to be rich in order to enjoy the masterpieces of the past, for paper-backs, first-rate colour reproductions and stereo-phonograph records have made them available to all but the very poor, this ease of access, if misused – and we do misuse it – can become a curse. We are all of us tempted to read more books, look at more pictures, listen to more music than we can possibly absorb; and the result of such gluttony is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads, looks at, listens to, is immediately forgotten, leaving no more traces behind it than yesterday’s newspaper. (“Words and the Word” in Secondary Worlds)

I have often talked about the joys of “re-reading” (for another view on this see Vivien Gornick’s Unfinished Business – Notes of a Chronic Re-reader or my story “Nothing New”), and now we have the time. The books we love are probably in the house or loaded on our Kindle, and their very familiarity may provide both comfort and surprise at how  different they seem as both we and the world are in a different place.

A second gift of Covid-19 might be an increased cognizance, a more visceral recognition, of our own mortality. The virus reminds us that we are “knocking on heaven’s door.” Most of us have never lived such times; we have been singularly fortunate. For other generations in other places, it was a situation they were intimate with. I am reminded of Freud’s “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.” Freud is speaking about World War I, but he could easily have been talking about the coronavirus:

We were [before the war], of course, prepared to maintain that death was the necessary outcome of life, that everyone owes a debt to nature and must pay the reckoning – in short that death was natural, undeniable and unavoidable. In reality, we were accustomed to think it were otherwise…. It is evident that war is bound to sweep away this conventional treatment of death. Death will no longer be denied; we are forced to believe in him. People really are dying, and now not one by one, but many at a time, often ten thousand in a single day.

The world has not gotten to 10,000 deaths a day yet, but over 60,000 people (an undercount assuredly) are being diagnosed every day. Mortality will rise.

Cultures through the ages have understood that people know that they are mortal and yet act otherwise; Sartre said that our own death was “unrealizable.” Yet, in the denial of truth there is no freedom. In the Katha Upanishad, the young Nachiketa goes to Yama, the God of death, and says “O king of death… I can have no teacher greater than you.” In the ancient Mesopotamian myth Gilgamesh, the hero is devastated by the death of his friend Enkidu and goes off on a search for immortality. And when he finds the answer (a magic plant), a snake steals it from him (sound familiar?) and he has to face… his own mortality and the mundane concerns back in his kingdom of Urdu.

The third lesson would entail the virus  waking us up (does it have your attention yet?) and making us realize that we’re part of nature – for better or worse – and we had better start acting like it. Like death, this is something we know cognitively but not viscerally. We are also part of each other and need to do what we can to help. Jung said that “Everything could be left undisturbed did not the new way demand to be discovered, and did it not visit humanity with all the plagues of Egypt until it finally is discovered.” (Thanks to Paul Levy at the Buddhist Global Relief web site for this citation.) Let’s hope it does not take “all the plagues of Egypt” to make us find a “new way,” and let’s pray this particular plague winds down sooner than expected. But let’s also hope that this liminal experience teaches us something about our vulnerability, about our place in the universe. That it humbles us.

Here is a story about a plague/flu that I wrote about a dozen years ago. It is not the coronavirus, though it does come from China. My fictional plague is not often fatal for the individual, but it may be for the species. Just a thought experiment. But doesn’t life feel rather like a thought experiment these days? Be safe and use your time well.

Guns, Mortality, and Old Age

During WWI, Freud wrote an essay entitled “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.” I recommend it. He says that WWI is a “new” kind of war in its disregard for noncombatants, the wounded, and any rules of engagement. Freud points out that the Great War brought two forms of disillusionment – one having to do with the illusion of the true nature of man and nations and the other regarding our illusion that death either does not exist or is very far away. Massive disruptions and killings make us face the fact that death is close, just as far away as the next trip to the mall. “Death will no longer be denied; we are forced to believe in him. People really are dying, and now not one by one, but many at a time.” So it felt to Freud in 1915; so it feels to us today. People are dying in a way that seems senseless and makes us feel defenseless.

The recent (and continual) rounds of massacres of the innocent scare us with their demonstration of the thin veneer of civilization. They also remind us of our mortality in a way that other things do not. Tactful news outlets do not publish the bloody photos; however, our imaginations are as graphic as any photo. Regardless of how healthy we are, how many sit-ups we can do or how often we get a mammogram, it could be us.
One would think that the older we got, the more we would make friends with death. He is a neighbor, after all, and we have many mutual acquaintances. If you live in an area dense with retired folk, the way I do, deaths come along at a regular pace – sometimes long-expected and sometimes suddenly, but yet we cannot quite believe that it could be… me. Yes, we know we will die; we simply do not quite realize it most of the time.

Our generation grew up under the shadow of the atom bomb. We should know death is never far away. I was a child in Florida during the Cuban missile crisis – we were well aware that we were within reach of short range missiles. My father dug a fallout shelter in the crawl space under our house and stocked it with rice and canned goods. We slept upstairs knowing that someday we might have to retreat to the earthen cavity to end our days, and yet time passed and so did that awareness. It is, indeed, amazing that mankind has not used this technology of destruction in the past seventy-four years. Especially since, let’s face it, we cannot even control the use of AR-15’s.

So we look into the face of random death again. Freud says that facing this unwelcome truth is no entirely a bad thing. It “has the merit of taking somewhat more into account the true state of affairs and of making life again more endurable for us… . If you would endure life, be prepared for death.”

None of this is to say that we should not do something about the violence that surrounds us, should not try to re-establish a civilized society where fear does not govern. If civilization could control the atom bomb for all these years, it would seem we could exert an effort to stop gun rampages, and we should do everything we can to do so. And if we find that the fear that guns engender is to the benefit of any person or agenda, we should wonder about why that is and what we can do about it.

My story this week, “A Spoonful of Sugar,” is about one woman’s insight into her own mortality. I recommend the Freud essay and also recommend Ernest Becker’s book Denial of Death.