Friday
While losing my mother at 96 is definitely not like Julian losing his mother in Flannery O’Connor’s “All That Rises Must Converge,” I can relate somewhat to his feelings of being adrift once she is gone. In his case, he is entirely dependent upon her, and embarrassed by her, and resentful of his inability to break away from her. Thus, when she dies suddenly after they descend from a bus, he finds himself launched into an unknown world:
Stunned, he let her go and she lurched forward again, walking as if one leg were shorter than the other. A tide of darkness seemed to be sweeping her from him. “Mother!” he cried. “Darling, sweetheart, wait!” Crumpling, she fell to the pavement. He dashed forward and fell at her side, crying, “Mamma, Mamma!” He turned her over. Her face was fiercely distorted. One eye, large and staring, moved slightly to the left as if it had become unmoored. The other remained fixed on him, raked his face again, found nothing and closed.
“Wait here, wait here!” he cried and jumped up and began to run for help toward a cluster of lights he saw in the distance ahead of him. “Help, help!” he shouted, but his voice was thin, scarcely a thread of sound. The lights drifted farther away the faster he ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried him nowhere. The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow.
O’Connor’s commitment to minute detail makes the death particularly unsettling, an instance of her Southern Gothic style. That captures Julian’s feelings in the moment. But they are then replaced by his horrified realization that, from this moment on, he is entirely on his own.
Or at least he will realize this once the initial shock dissipates.
Not having Julian’s love-hate relationship, I am not thrown off as much by my mother’s own death. Nevertheless, I have the an unnerving feeling that my buffer is gone. As long as a parent is still alive, it’s as though he or she is running interference, like a blocking lineman for the quarterback. Sooner or later, we’re all going to be sacked, but it appears that the sack will come more suddenly when the person in front of you goes down.
Jonathan Swift captures this situation in “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift,” one of the 18th century’s most remarkable poems. Imagining what people will say about him when he is on his deathbed, and then when he has died, Swift thinks that most will shrug it off fairly rapidly. For instance, here he is imagining himself the subject of gossip at the card table:
My female friends, whose tender hearts
Have better learn’d to act their parts,
Receive the news in doleful dumps:
“The Dean is dead: (and what is trumps?)
Then, Lord have mercy on his soul!
(Ladies, I’ll venture for the vole.)
Six deans, they say, must bear the pall:
(I wish I knew what king to call.)
Even his special friends won’t mourn too long:
Here shift the scene, to represent
How those I love my death lament.
Poor Pope will grieve a month, and Gay
A week, and Arbuthnot a day.
St. John himself will scarce forbear
To bite his pen, and drop a tear.
The rest will give a shrug, and cry,
“I’m sorry—but we all must die!”
Indifference, clad in Wisdom’s guise,
All fortitude of mind supplies…
There is one group of people who will sincerely grieve, however—and it is those who, like me, feel that they have just lost their buffer against death:
The fools, my juniors by a year,
Are tortur’d with suspense and fear;
Who wisely thought my age a screen,
When death approach’d, to stand between:
The screen remov’d, their hearts are trembling;
They mourn for me without dissembling.
Or as Gerald Manley Hopkins, in “Spring and Fall,” explains to a grieving Margaret, “It is Margaret you mourn for.”
Swift’s satiric point is that people will never feel as sorry for us as we feel sorry for ourselves, which I suppose is true. Julian may seem distraught over his mother’s death, but it is unclear whether the death upsets him as much as the fact that he is now on his own—which means, among other things, that he will have to find a job.
In my own case, I think I just take it for granted that we move somewhat quickly beyond the deaths of others, just as people will one day move more or less quickly beyond mine. It took me months before I was able to do so with my child, but in the end I realized that life needed me more than he did. The same is true with my mother and, because she was old, the acceptance comes much more quickly.
In any event, it’s important to have ritual to honor those we loved and to bring closure to their lives. Furthermore, they are never entirely gone but return in a wide range of memories. At the moment, I’m just grateful that I had as many years with Phoebe Bates as I did.
