Tag: philip larkin

“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.

Why Are We Avoiding Paradise?

This past weekend was full of endings and beginnings.  Friday was Halloween, which – of course – marks the end of my favorite month, but is also the Eve of All Saints Day, when we remember the saintly dead.  That is followed by All Souls Day, when we remember all the dead. And, of course, it was the beginning of a new month, and the time when we turned back the clocks.  A propitious time for self-reflection.  November is the time of year which corresponds (metaphorically) with my age.  I have a few challenges ahead of me in the next few weeks, but both the young trick-or-treating ghouls and the thoughts of lost souls remind me of how good it is to be alive.  We somehow left Paradise behind as we grew up; can we regain it in old age?

That we are already in Paradise is something that is hard to comprehend and easy to forget.  I think often of the words of Joko Beck in her wonderful Everyday Zen (where she seems to talk directly to John Milton!):

There is no paradise lost, none to be regained.  Why?  Because you cannot avoid this moment.  You may not be awake to it, but it is always here.  You cannot avoid paradise.  You can only avoid seeing it.

You cannot avoid paradise.  You can only avoid seeing it.   Can it be true that the pathetic work of our long lives has been to hold paradise at bay?

Did we have paradise once and lose it?  Or did we just push it into a corner and place a fierce angel to guard the gates?  James Baldwin is much taken with such thoughts of paradise.

Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden.  I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword.  Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it.  Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. (Giovanni’s Room)

Wordsworth is sure that, as infants, we brought paradise (trailing clouds of glory) into the world with us, but lost it, forgot it, along the way:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—

But why should we forget?  From “The Old Fools” by Philip Larkin, one of the most miserable and cynical poems about old age there is, comes this remarkable passage:

At death you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It’s only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here.

“The million-petalled flower of being here.”  If that is not paradise, if just the possibilities and potentialities of “being here” is not paradise, I do not know what is. And yet, I forget.  We all forget.  As Frederick Buechner puts it, we allow “Too good not be true” to turn into “too good to be true.”  In other words, paradise is all around us; we ourselves have put up the barriers, the angels with their shining swords are hired by us and paid a monthly wage to stop us from going back to where we belong.  Is that it? 

Beck implies that being old, being closer to death, should help us along with this process, if we let it.

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 they want it to.  Then they can see that the strawberry is “so delicious” [even though there is a tiger below] – because that’s all there is, this very moment.

No one but we, ourselves, can dismiss the flaming swords. It is our paradise to take or to leave. No teacher needed, no secret key.  Here is some more advice from Joko Beck:

I’ll tell you how far I’d walk to see a new teacher: maybe across the room, no farther! It isn’t because I have no interest in this person; it’s just that there is no one who can tell me about my life except—who? There is no authority outside of my experience. There is only one teacher. What is that teacher? Life itself. And of course each one of us is a manifestation of life; we couldn’t be anything else. Now life happens to be both a severe and an endlessly kind teacher. It’s the only authority that you need to trust. And this teacher, this authority, is everywhere.

Old people have seen a lot of life.  If there is one thing that we have, it is experience.  We need to trust ourselves, dismiss the shining swords, and enter the paradise that is ours by right.  What are the odds that we would even exist?  That we should persist over all these decades?  We beat those odds; we should be glad to collect the prize.  Or, at least, that is what I keep telling myself. 

I’ll end on this bright November day with a quote from Emerson:

It is so wonderful to our neurologists that a man can see without his eyes, that it does not occur to them that it is just as wonderful that he should see with them; and that is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise; the latter wonders at what is unusual, the wise man wonders at the usual.  (from “New England Reformers”)

In our old age, let’s storm the gates of Paradise.   Jesus said that the kingdom of God is in your midst.  Beck and Emerson tell us all we have to do is to change our perspective.  Change is hard in old age, but perhaps we could at least try.  Time is short.

Several years ago, I wrote a story about a woman’s misguided attempts to create paradise on earth, rather than just opening her eyes to it.  You can find it here.  I also posted a strange story about one last trip “Back to the Garden,” about finding paradise at the very last minute. 

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.

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.”