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Tuesday
For reasons I’m not at liberty to discuss, I’ve been recently thinking about sickness and death. Suffice it to say that, at 73, I have observed several instances of death and dying close-up. I spent my final days with my parents not knowing if the loving words I was saying to them were getting through. I sang a lullaby to my dead son after divers pulled him from the waters of the St. Mary’s River. I spent months talking about life and death with a colleague—a philosophy professor—who was dying of cancer.
Death remains as much a mystery as ever. I think of Mary Oliver’s observation about
the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other sideis salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
I know that, from the moment we are born, we are also dying. Dylan Thomas, whose life ended at 39, wrote, “Time held me green and dying, /Though I sang in my chains like the sea.” For Thomas, life is something to be fought for, and he memorably advises us to “not go gentle into that good night.” Old age, he declares, “should burn and rave at close of day.”
For all its advice for the elderly, “Do Not Go Gentle” strikes me as a young person’s poem. General Sternwood, the father in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, captures more what it’s like to be old and sick. Rather than raging against the dying of the light, he is focused just on surviving. As he tells Philip Marlowe,
“You are looking at a very dull survival of a rather gaudy life, a cripple paralyzed in both legs and with only half of his lower belly. There’s very little that I can eat and my sleep is so close to waking that it is hardly worth the name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider…
Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has his own version of the final struggle—or non-struggle—in Heart of Darkness:
I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be.
If that’s what dying (or nearly dying) looks like from inside, here’s how it appears to outsiders. D. H. Lawrence’s account of watching Mrs. Morel die comes close to what it was like when Julia and I were attending my mother in her final hours:
Annie huddled into the dressing-gown, Paul wrapped himself in a brown blanket. It was three o’clock. He mended the fire. Then the two sat waiting. The great, snoring breath was taken—held awhile—then given back. There was a space—a long space. Then they started. The great, snoring breath was taken again. He bent close down and looked at her.
“Isn’t it awful!” whispered Annie.
He nodded. They sat down again helplessly. Again came the great, snoring breath. Again they hung suspended. Again it was given back, long and harsh. The sound, so irregular, at such wide intervals, sounded through the house. Morel, in his room, slept on. Paul and Annie sat crouched, huddled, motionless. The great snoring sound began again—there was a painful pause while the breath was held—back came the rasping breath. Minute after minute passed. Paul looked at her again, bending low over her.
“She may last like this,” he said.
And further on:
At last Annie crept out of the room, and he was alone. He hugged himself in his brown blanket, crouched in front of his mother, watching. She looked dreadful, with the bottom jaw fallen back. He watched. Sometimes he thought the great breath would never begin again. He could not bear it—the waiting. Then suddenly, startling him, came the great harsh sound. He mended the fire again, noiselessly. She must not be disturbed. The minutes went by. The night was going, breath by breath. Each time the sound came he felt it wring him, till at last he could not feel so much.
This will go on for another four to six interminable hours until the end finally comes.
In the face of such suffering, one can understand why John Keats, who saw his brother die of tuberculosis and who died of it himself, would write (this in “Ode to a Nightgale”),
for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath…
Again, no raging against the dying of the light here. Just an infinite sadness.
When my friend and former colleague Dana Greene was dying of ALS, her husband read her “Let Evening Come,” which Jane Kenyon wrote while dying of leukemia. It so happens that Dana, just months before coming down with the illness, had completed a biography on Kenyon so the reading must have been particularly poignant:
Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
Was Kenyon, to borrow from “Do Not Go Gentle,” one of those wise ones who “at their end know dark is right”? Thomas contends that even these ones rage against the dying of the light, but I’m dubious. Maybe framing a gentle poem like this—or reading a gentle poem like this —eases us through the transition from life to death.
In any event, this transition resists all efforts at understanding. With literature, however, we can come closer to penetrating its mysteries than with any other kind of language. If we have read a lot, we can call upon multiple poems and stories for their assistance in such moments.
