Why Cry for a Soul Set Free?

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Portrait of Christina Rossetti

Spiritual Sunday

Yesterday we buried my mother’s ashes in the Turner, Maine cemetery, where we still have the cottage that my great grandmother Sarah Ricker built. Siblings, cousins, and spouses gathered, and by daughter-in-law Betsy sang “It Is Well with My Soul” and “Precious Lord.” In August we will have a public memorial in Sewanee, the community to which my mother devoted her life, but this one was just family.

Few poems are more cited at such occasions than Christina Rossetti’s “Let Me Go.” There’s a reason for this. “Why cry for a soul set free?” she asks, and I think of how, at the end, my mother wanted to die. Rossetti writes to console those who have not yet begun “the journey we all must take”—and, of course, to console herself as well.

She leaves us imagining our loved one as “dreaming through the twilight/ That doth not rise nor set.” And then provides us with this excellent advice:

When you are lonely and sick at heart
Go the friends we know.
Laugh at all the things we used to do
Miss me, but let me go.

There was much laughter following the burial. As was only right.

Let Me Go
By Christinia Rossetti

When I come to the end of the road
And the sun has set for me
I want no rites in a gloom filled room
Why cry for a soul set free?

Miss me a little, but not for long
And not with your head bowed low
Remember the love that once we shared
Miss me, but let me go.

For this is a journey we all must take
And each must go alone.
It’s all part of the master plan
A step on the road to home.

When you are lonely and sick at heart
Go the friends we know.
Laugh at all the things we used to do
Miss me, but let me go.

When I am dead my dearest
Sing no sad songs for me
Plant thou no roses at my head
Nor shady cypress tree

Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet
And if thou wilt remember
And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not fear the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on as if in pain;

And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.

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Good Night, Sweet Lady

Sir John Everett Millais, Ophelia

Friday

Because my mother died when she did, we are able to attend the Bates family reunion in our Maine cottage, which we hold every three years. We will bury her ashes tomorrow in the Turner cemetery, next to the ashes of my father.

When we pour them into the ground, I will internally recite a passage from Hamlet that I owe to my mother. The passage appeared in the final issue of the Sewanee Siren, the town newsletter that she founded and that she edited for 18 years. She used Ophelia’s farewell speech to say goodbye to her readers in 1986 and, changing the words from plural to singular, I use them with her now:

Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies; good night, good night.

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The World Will End in Fire AND Ice

Wildfires in southwestern France, caused by climate change

Thursday

As Europe sets all-time record temperature highs, I’m updating (but not by much) a post I’ve run in the past. “Some say the world will end in fire,/Some say in ice,” Robert Frost writes in his well-known poem, and it increasingly appears that all these someones are right. The current heat wave, often accompanied by fires, follows terrifying reports of accelerating glacier melt. According to National Geographic three years ago,

Greenland ice sheet is losing mass about six times faster than it was just a few decades ago, whatever tenuous balance that existed before long since upended. Between 2005 and 2016, melt from the ice sheet was the single largest contributor to sea level rise worldwide, though Antarctica may overtake it soon.

Within the past 50 years, the ice sheet has already shed enough to add about half an inch of water to the world’s oceans, and that number is increasing precipitously as the planet heats. During this summer’s extreme heat wave that parked over Greenland for a week and turned over half its surface ice to slush, meltwater equivalent to over 4 million swimming pools sloughed into the ocean in a single day. Over the month of July, enough melt poured into the ocean to bump sea levels up by an easily measurable half a millimeter.

Frost, who may have Milton’s hot hell and Dante’s cold hell in mind, is writing about relationships, not climate change. As he sees it, the relationship is in trouble whether the partners are fiery passionate or icy cold. Fire is louder and more flamboyant, but the silent workings of cold can be just as deadly:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

The poem is just as relevant to our current situation, however, where apocalypse is looking increasingly likely.

Speaking of apocalyptic accounts that get at our situation, I have cited two other works in this regard, Homer’s Iliad and C. S. Lewis’s Last Battle. I wrote the following about the Iliad in August 2019 in conjunction with the burning of the Amazon rainforests:

My anger finds some articulation in a horrific scene in The Iliad. Because Hector has killed his dearest friend, Achilles reengages in the war and goes on a killing spree so bloody that the River Scamander reacts in horror. When Achilles clogs its channels with dead Trojans, it rises up in a giant wave and bears down on the Greek warrior.

Because Achilles is beloved by the Gods, however, the iron-working god Hephaistos enters the fray, and his technology is brought to bear. I think of the Amazon’s unparalleled biological diversity as I read what happens next:

                 Then against the river
Hephaistos turned his bright flame, and the elms
and tamarisks and willows burned away,
with all the clover, galingale, and rushes
plentiful along the winding streams.
Then eels and fish, in backwaters, in currents,
wriggled here and there at the scalding breath
of torrid blasts from the great smith, Hephaistos…

And further on:

[The river] spoke in steam, and
his clear current seethed,
the way a caldron whipped by a white-hot fire
boils with a well-fed hog’s abundant fat
that spatters all the rim, as dry split wood
turns ash beneath it. So his currents, fanned
by fire, seethed, and the river would not flow
but came to a halt, tormented by the gale
of fire from the heavenly smith, Hephaistos.

This isn’t the only time that Achilles is associated with devastating fire. In an earlier passage, Homer uses fire imagery to capture his slaughter:

                               A forest fire will rage
through deep glens of a mountain, crackling dry
from summer heat, and coppices blaze up
in every quarter as wind whips the flame:
so Akhilleus flashed to right and left
like a wild god, trampling the men he killed
and black earth ran with blood. As when a countryman
yokes oxen with broad brows to tread out barley
on a well-bedded threshing floor, and quickly
the grain is husked under the bellowing beasts:
The sharp-hooved horses of Akhilleus just so
crushed dead men and shields. His axle-tree
was splashed with blood, so was his chariot rail,
with drops thrown up by wheels and horses’ hooves.
And Peleus’ son kept riding for his glory,
staining his powerful arms with mire and blood.

Achilles may be Iliad’s hero, but Homer fully intends for us to experience the tragedy of what happens. Once the most humane of the Greeks, as Caroline Alexander points out in her superb book The War that Killed Achilles, Achilles has lost all perspective and grinds to dust everything that is human and sacred: Nature is ravaged, bodies are desecrated, and people’s hearts are torn apart. One can plausibly argue that The Iliad is the world’s greatest anti-war work as it exposes the colossal waste of armed conflict.

The war that today’s humans are waging against nature is occurring on an epic scale and is having epic consequences. Unlike in The Iliad, however, reactive nature will dole out consequences that even heavenly fire cannot resist. Our descendants will curse us for the world we have left them.

***

Now on to sea-level rise. Here’s the passage I cited from the last work in the Narnia series, where Lewis rewrites the Book of Revelation:

At last something white—long, level line of whiteness that gleamed in the light of the standing stars—came moving towards them from the eastern end of the world. A widespread noise broke the silence: first a murmur then a rumble, then a roar. And now they could see what it was that was coming, and how fast it came. It was a foaming wall of water. The sea was rising. In that tree-less world you could see it very well. You could see all the rivers getting wider and the lakes getting larger, and separate lakes joining into one, and valleys turning into new lakes, and hills turning into islands, and then those islands vanishing. And the high moors to their left and the higher mountains to their right crumbled and slipped down with a roar and a splash into the mounting water; and the water came swirling up to the very threshold of the Doorway (but never passed it) so that the foam splashed about Aslan’s forefeet. All now was level water from where they stood to where the waters met the sky.

When fire and ice team up, we’re in trouble like we’ve never seen before. As a character tells Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the popular television series by that name,

When I saw you stop the world from, you know, ending, I just assumed that was a big week for you. It turns out I suddenly find myself needing to know the plural of apocalypse.

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Learning about Death through Lit

Wednesday

One of literature’s gifts to humanity is how it allows us to vicariously live through situations that we encounter later in life. Think of it as survival training. Therefore, when I was with my dying mother this past month, scenes from novels and lyrics from poems flooded in, providing me with tools to negotiate the emotional turbulence.

While it is probably over 50 years since I read D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, one scene above all stands out to me. It’s not surprising that I would remember the death of Paul’s mother since it is the culminating scene in the book. Still, I remember being shaken to the core when I read it then, and, in going back now, I was struck by how close it matched up with our own ordeal. The only difference is that Julia and I did not give my mother a killing dose of morphine when she was in her final days and hours. Under instructions from hospice, however, we did increase the dosage, administering it at those moments (fairly few) when she became agitated.

What I recall about the novel is the agony of Paul and his sister Annie as they await the ending. Gertrude Morel has always been a fighter, and that prolongs the dying.

Early on, the episode captures how mother and son have reversed roles, something which happened with us as well:

“Shall I give you some milk?” he asked.

“A little,” she replied plaintively.

And he would put some water with it, so that it should not nourish her. Yet he loved her more than his own life.

Julia, like Annie, slept next to my mother every night. And my mother, like Gertrude, did “not weep, or even complain much”:

She had morphia every night, and her heart got fitful. Annie slept beside her. Paul would go in in the early morning, when his sister got up. His mother was wasted and almost ashen in the morning with the morphia. Darker and darker grew her eyes, all pupil, with the torture. In the mornings the weariness and ache were too much to bear. Yet she could not—would not—weep, or even complain much.

Also like Gertrude, my mother would ask for the time and the day when she awoke. It was a way of situating herself in a reality that was becoming increasingly murky:

“You slept a bit later this morning, little one,” he would say to her.

“Did I?” she answered, with fretful weariness.

“Yes; it’s nearly eight o’clock.”

He stood looking out of the window. The whole country was bleak and pallid under the snow. Then he felt her pulse. There was a strong stroke and a weak one, like a sound and its echo. That was supposed to betoken the end. She let him feel her wrist, knowing what he wanted.

Here’s a contrast, however. My mother seemed far more willing to die, and while she didn’t talk about moving on, I did. To be sure, I didn’t mention heaven didn’t talk about heaven because neither she nor I find that a compelling metaphor, but I did say that I thought the spirit persists when the body dies—and that, because of that, her spirit would meet up with the spirits of my father and her parents and and her grandson (and my eldest son) Justin. Paul doesn’t ever have deep talks with his mother, which might be part of why she can’t let go. Instead, he looks to the doctor for help:

Sometimes they looked in each other’s eyes. Then they almost seemed to make an agreement. It was almost as if he were agreeing to die also. But she did not consent to die; she would not. Her body was wasted to a fragment of ash. Her eyes were dark and full of torture.

“Can’t you give her something to put an end to it?” he asked the doctor at last.

But the doctor shook his head.

“She can’t last many days now, Mr. Morel,” he said.

My mother had administered to her own mother in her final weeks and believed that my grandmother’s doctor intervened medically, although she doesn’t know for certain. It would simply have entailed increasing the dosage, which is what Paul and his sister ultimately do. First, however, there’s much more suffering for everyone involved:

Paul went indoors.

“I can’t bear it much longer; we shall all go mad,” said Annie.

The two sat down to breakfast.

“Go and sit with her while we have breakfast, Minnie,” said Annie. But the girl was frightened.

And:

Paul went through the country, through the woods, over the snow. He saw the marks of rabbits and birds in the white snow. He wandered miles and miles. A smoky red sunset came on slowly, painfully, lingering. He thought she would die that day. There was a donkey that came up to him over the snow by the wood’s edge, and put its head against him, and walked with him alongside. He put his arms round the donkey’s neck, and stroked his cheeks against his ears.

His mother, silent, was still alive, with her hard mouth gripped grimly, her eyes of dark torture only living.

It was nearing Christmas; there was more snow. Annie and he felt as if they could go on no more. Still her dark eyes were alive. Morel, silent and frightened, obliterated himself. Sometimes he would go into the sick-room and look at her. Then he backed out, bewildered.

She kept her hold on life still.

Eventually Paul and Annie feel compelled to take the fatal last step:

He looked round. Her eyes, like dark bubbles in her face, were looking at him.

“No, my dear,” he said gently. Another fibre seemed to snap in his heart.

That evening he got all the morphia pills there were, and took them downstairs. Carefully he crushed them to powder.

“What are you doing?” said Annie.

“I s’ll put ’em in her night milk.”

Then they both laughed together like two conspiring children. On top of all their horror flicked this little sanity.

His mother, trusting, takes the night milk, even while complaining about the bitterness. Paul lies to her, which is something I tried never to do with my mother, although I understand why he does so:

“It’s a new sleeping draught the doctor gave me for you,” he said. “He thought it would leave you in such a state in the morning.”

“And I hope it won’t,” she said, like a child.

She drank some more of the milk.

“But it is horrid!” she said.

He saw her frail fingers over the cup, her lips making a little move.

“I know—I tasted it,” he said. “But I’ll give you some clean milk afterwards.”

“I think so,” she said, and she went on with the draught. She was obedient to him like a child. He wondered if she knew. He saw her poor wasted throat moving as she drank with difficulty. Then he ran downstairs for more milk. There were no grains in the bottom of the cup.

I particularly relate to Paul’s tenderness towards his mother:

They turned the clothes back. Paul saw his mother like a girl curled up in her flannel nightdress. Quickly they made one half of the bed, moved her, made the other, straightened her nightgown over her small feet, and covered her up.

“There,” said Paul, stroking her softly. “There!—now you’ll sleep.”

“Yes,” she said. “I didn’t think you could do the bed so nicely,” she added, almost gaily. Then she curled up, with her cheek on her hand, her head snugged between her shoulders. Paul put the long thin plait of grey hair over her shoulder and kissed her.

“You’ll sleep, my love,” he said.

“Yes,” she answered trustfully. “Good-night.”

I also relate to how Paul and his sister—Julia and I in our case—felt alone in a dark immensity:

They lingered before the bedroom fire, feeling the night big and black and snowy outside, their two selves alone in the world. At last he went into the next room and went to bed.

He slept almost immediately, but kept waking every now and again. Then he went sound asleep. He started awake at Annie’s whispered, “Paul, Paul!” He saw his sister in her white nightdress, with her long plait of hair down her back, standing in the darkness.

“Yes?” he whispered, sitting up.

“Come and look at her.”

He slipped out of bed. A bud of gas was burning in the sick chamber. His mother lay with her cheek on her hand, curled up as she had gone to sleep. But her mouth had fallen open, and she breathed with great, hoarse breaths, like snoring, and there were long intervals between.

“She’s going!” he whispered.

“Yes,” said Annie.

But Mrs. Morel doesn’t go instantly, just as my mother held out longer than we thought she would.

“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.

They were both silent. He looked out of the window, and could faintly discern the snow on the garden.

“You go to my bed,” he said to Annie. “I’ll sit up.”

“No,” she said, “I’ll stop with you.”

“I’d rather you didn’t,” he said.

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.

The erratic breathing continues for hours, as it did in our case:

It went on just the same. She lay with her cheek in her hand, her mouth fallen open, and the great, ghastly snores came and went.At ten o’clock nurse came. She looked strange and woebegone.

“Nurse,” cried Paul, “she’ll last like this for days?”

She can’t, Mr. Morel,” said nurse. “She can’t.”

There was a silence.

“Isn’t it dreadful!” wailed the nurse. “Who would have thought she could stand it? Go down now, Mr. Morel, go down.”

And then, at last, relief comes, followed by tenderness:

At last, at about eleven o’clock, he went downstairs and sat in the neighbor’s house. Annie was downstairs also. Nurse and Arthur were upstairs. Paul sat with his head in his hand. Suddenly Annie came flying across the yard crying, half mad:

“Paul—Paul—she’s gone!”

In a second he was back in his own house and upstairs. She lay curled up and still, with her face on her hand, and nurse was wiping her mouth. They all stood back. He kneeled down, and put his face to hers and his arms round her:

“My love—my love—oh, my love!” he whispered again and again. “My love—oh, my love!”

The hospice nurse commented on how she was struck when I did something similar.

But as one must return to the world, in the novel the characters turn to practical concerns:

When he took his face up from his warm, dead mother he went straight downstairs and began blacking his boots.

There was a good deal to do, letters to write, and so on. The doctor came and glanced at her, and sighed.

“Ay—poor thing!” he said, then turned away. “Well, call at the surgery about six for the certificate.”

When I was in college, D. H. Lawrence was my favorite author–so much so that I even included a poem of his (the sexually explicit “Tortoise Shout”) in our wedding ceremony. I’ve moved on from him since but I see some of the same reticence in the Morel household that I experienced growing up in the Bates household.

What is different is that I have become much more open to talking about, and communicating, my emotions. Lawrence helped me with that when I was in college—that’s one reason why I appreciated him so much—and that led me to other authors who trained me in becoming more communicative. I particularly remember receiving useful instruction from novelist Margaret Drabble.

A lifetime spent reading literature, in other words, helped prepare me for dealing with this death.

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Death Exposes Our Conflicted Humanity

André Malraux, author of Man’s Fate

Tuesday

Yesterday I wrote about the conflicting feelings that tore at my heart following the death of my mother this past Saturday. There was numbness and sadness, to be sure, but there was also relief and even joy—relief that she was no longer suffering and joy that Julia and I, so long immersed in her illness, can now go out and engage in activities and travel. And then there was guilt over those feelings of joy.

The most intense literary version of these contradictory feelings may appear in Andre Malraux’s 1933 novel La Condition Humaine (Man’s Fate). Set during a communist insurrection against Chinese premier Chaing Kai-shek, the novel includes a character who has very conflicted emotions about the deaths of his wife and his sick child. While he cares for them deeply, they also prevent him from throwing himself whole-heartedly into the insurrection.

At one point Hemmelrich, who runs a phonograph shop, refuses to participate in an assassination attempt on the premier because of concern for his family. Then, when the attempt fails, he blames himself for its failure. It so happens that the authorities still see him as an accomplice and blow up his shop, killing his wife and son. At that point he experiences a “profound joy of liberation.” By “tearing from him everything he still possessed,” Malraux writes, destiny had freed Hemmelrich.

His first feeling is apparent indifference, which is not from hardness of heart but from shock. We often use denial at first to cushion us against a blow we fear will tear us apart:

He knew he was suffering, but a halo of indifference surrounded his grief, the indifference which follows upon an illness or a blow in the head.

More difficult to understand is the joy and the satisfaction that follow:

In spite of the catastrophe, of the sensation of having the ground give way under his feet, leaving nothing but empty space, he could not banish from his mind the atrocious, weighty, profound joy of liberation. With horror and satisfaction he felt it rumble within him like a subterranean river, grow nearer; the corpses were there, his feet which were stuck to the floor were glued by their blood, nothing could be more of a mockery than their murders—especially that of the sick child: he seemed even more innocent than the dead woman…

Malraux elaborates on the reason for the emotions:

[B]ut now, he was no longer impotent. Now he too could kill. It came to him suddenly that life was not the only mode of contact between human beings, that it was not even the only mode of contact between human beings, that it was not even the best; that he could know them, love them, possess them more completely in vengeance than in life. Again he became aware of his shoe-soles, stuck to the floor, and tottered: muscles were not aided by thought. But an intense exaltation was overwhelming him, the most powerful that he had ever known; he abandoned himself to this frightful intoxication with entire consent. “One can kill with love. With love, by God!” he repeated, striking the counter with his fist—against the universe, perhaps…

Then comes a welter of conflicting feelings:

He wanted to laugh, to weep, to find relief from the awful pressure on his chest. . . . Nothing stirred, and the immense indifference of the world settled, together with the unwavering light, upon the records, the dead, the blood.

After locking up his store in a useless but symbolic act, he strides forward into the future, no longer held back by his former responsibilities:

His shoulders thrust forward, he pushed ahead like a barge-tower towards a dim country of which he knew only that one killed there, pulling with his shoulders and with his brain the weight of all his dead who, at last!, no longer prevented him from advancing.

And finally:

His hands trembling, his teeth chattering, carried away by his terrible liberty, he was back at the Post in ten minutes. (emphasis mine)

I can’t say that my emotions were this intense after my mother died. After all, she had lived a good, long life, and there is something fitting about someone fading away at 96. That’s why, in such cases, we gather “not to mourn a death but to celebrate a life.” But I must confess to having felt something along these lines when I was watching divers search for the body of my son 22 years ago, after he died in a freak drowning accident.

Paramount among my emotions was denial—I felt sorry for whoever it was who had lost a child in that water, even though a deep part of me knew that it had to be Justin. But I must confess to having also experienced a certain relief—relief that I wouldn’t have to worry about what Justin would do with his life after college, relief that I would be spared Justin’s infatuation (although I was pretty sure it was temporary) with Christian fundamentalism.

Was I horrible person? Is Himmelrich a horrible person? I don’t think so in either case. Rather, I think that the mind, faced with unimaginable horror, looks around for every possible rationalization and coping mechanism. We get mad at the lost one because his or her death is tearing us apart. We rationalize that the death could be a good thing because we can’t face up to the prospect of an event that has no bright spot, no silver lining. The mind, in other words, rends itself because the love goes so deep.

In Himmelrich’s case, tragedy resolves itself in a kind of death song: his love is transmuted into murderous revenge. In my case, I needed those ways of distancing myself from the death in the early moments so that I could fully open myself to my grief when I saw the body.

When I did, all the anger at Justin dissipated, as did my attempts to rationalize. Instead, I saw him as the baby I had once carried in my arms, and I touched his cold body and sang him a lullaby he had loved as a little child.

The 12th century Jewish poet Judah Halvi has written, “’Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch,” and it’s fearful because love renders us vulnerable and exposed. In our fear, we lash out in ways that may make us appear callous and insensitive. Our lashing out, however, actually reveals just the opposite.

I look forward to celebrating my mother’s life in an August 20 memorial service. And while I have never gotten over Justin’s death, the tragedy has—to quote Langston Hughes’s “The Trumpet Player”—mellowed to a golden note.

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Mixed Feelings about a Death

Illus. of Kafka’s Metamorphosis

Monday

What strange thoughts will slide into our heads following the death of someone we love. I was relieved when my 96-year-old mother passed away in Saturday’s early hours. Although it was what we wanted and what she said she wanted, yet I was torn about feeling glad.

I thought of the ending of Kafka’s Metamorphosis and the relief that the family experiences when their son, who has transformed into a giant cockroach (“large vermin” in certain translations), finally passes away. Their lives have been upended by the event and, with his passing, they can finally move on with their lives. Here’s how the story ends:

After that, the three of them left the flat together, which was something they had not done for months, and took the tram out to the open country outside the town. They had the tram, filled with warm sunshine, all to themselves. Leant back comfortably on their seats, they discussed their prospects and found that on closer examination they were not at all bad—until then they had never asked each other about their work but all three had jobs which were very good and held particularly good promise for the future. The greatest improvement for the time being, of course, would be achieved quite easily by moving house; what they needed now was a flat that was smaller and cheaper than the current one which had been chosen by Gregor, one that was in a better location and, most of all, more practical. All the time, Grete was becoming livelier. With all the worry they had been having of late her cheeks had become pale, but, while they were talking, Mr. and Mrs. Samsa were struck, almost simultaneously, with the thought of how their daughter was blossoming into a well built and beautiful young lady. They became quieter. Just from each other’s glance and almost without knowing it they agreed that it would soon be time to find a good man for her. And, as if in confirmation of their new dreams and good intentions, as soon as they reached their destination Grete was the first to get up and stretch out her young body.

That last image—of Grete getting up and stretching her young body—rings so true. Not that Julia and I are young (we’re 71), but suddenly the world seems to be opening up again. For over a year, our lives have rotated entirely around her and now we can think about going out to eat and attending events together. (Yesterday was the first time Julia and I didn’t have to attend church in shifts.) I recently and hesitantly accepted an invitation to teach at the University of Ljubljana for the month of November and now I can do so without worrying. We can visit Wales and Ireland to further Julia’s roots quest. As with the Samsa family, a world of possibilities opens up.

But it’s all on account of someone I deeply loved dying. You see the conflict.

Of course, Kafka being Kafka, it’s more problematic in the story: the family has locked Gregor in his room so he’ll die sooner. Their relief has a dark side to it that mine does not.

Still, I can’t entirely let it go.

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Twilight, Evening Bell, After That the Dark

Joseph Turner, Fishermen at Sea

 Spiritual Sunday

My mother died at home early Saturday morning, waiting until Julia and I had fallen asleep to go. Before then, as she lay seemingly oblivious to all around her, we spent several hours reading poems to her (including Mary Oliver’s “In Blackwater Woods”) and playing classical music. I also recounted for her many of her favorite memories, giving her life a narrative arc.

When we finally realized that she was dead, we felt that we had done all we could to make her passing a peaceful experience. There was no “moaning of the bar.”

The line is taken from Alfred Tennyson’s moving poem “Crossing the Bar,” in which he imagines his own death and tells us how he wants his mourners to respond. I particularly love the line “too full for sound and foam” because that’s how I felt as I gazed down at my mother’s form. There was a welling up of deep emotion, as though a slow-building but powerful tide, coming from “the boundless deep,” was finally washing over and “bear[ing] me far.” No loud crashing waves.

The poem’s nautical imagery applies both to Tennyson and to those who, standing on the bar, watch his ship moving into unknown waters. The language has a clarity that is missing from the intricate struggles of “In Memoriam,” written decades before in an attempt to reconcile himself to the death of his beloved Arthur Hallam. Composed when he himself was approaching death, “Crossing the Bar” uses spare imagery and simple diction to focus on the final moment.

Tennyson may be speaking from conviction or he may be saying what he hopes for. For my part, I was hoping that my mother would hear, and respond to, that “one clear call” in her final hours. Maybe she did and that’s why she set sail when we left her alone.

Twilight and evening bell,
  And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
  When I embark…

Bon voyage, maman.

Crossing the Bar

Sunset and evening star,
  And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
  When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
  Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
  Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
  And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
  When I embark;

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
  The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
  When I have cross’d the bar.

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The Final Carriage Ride

Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoi , Unknown Woman

Friday

As I sit listening to the steady breathing of my dying mother, my mind searches around for poetry that can frame the moment and, through framing, offer consolation. My mother has had moments of panic and moments of confusion over the past couple of days, but mostly she has been adrift in a half world between waking and sleeping. The relatively little pain she has experienced has been addressed by morphine.

Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death” has never spoken to me as powerfully as it does right now. That’s because I imagine the speaker to be my mother, taking a leisurely trip to “Eternity.” Born in 1925 in upper Peoria society, my mother was very much a lady, and there is something ladylike about the carriage ride described in the poem. My mother always showed the kind of respect to other people that the speaker and coachman Death show each other.

I imagine my mother approaching what appears “a Swelling of the Ground” and suddenly realizing that it is not a house but the next stage. She is alone but not alone. For her, there is no rage against the dying of the light, no Faustian melodramatics, no boisterous boast “Death, thou shalt die.” Instead, there is a slight chill and some understated surprise.

All very civil. Like my mother.

Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed Us –
The Dews drew quivering and Chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – ’tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity –

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Sir Gawain and Classroom Silences

Antoni Gispert Pérez, detail from Execution of Torrijos

Thursday

The other day I came across an amusing website that featured classical paintings that are being used as comic memes. My favorite, above, makes use of Antonio Gisbert Pérez’s painting The Execution of Torrijos and his Companions on the Beach at Málaga (1888), about the death of the Spanish revolutionary by the forces of Ferdinand VII in 1831.

My favorite literary example of embarrassing silences occurs in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. More on that in a moment.

As a student, I found classroom silences excruciating and would sometimes just blurt something out to break them up. I remember twice being called out for that, the second time by someone who would go on to become famous. Future Minnesota senator and legendary progressive Paul Wellstone, whose Introduction to Government class I took at Carleton College in 1970, once shouted at me, “Will you please just shut up!” when I gabbed on. (The other professor, who had shouted, “Bullshit!”, later explained to me that he was taking out his frustrations at the class on me, given that I was one of the higher performing students. So maybe Wellstone was feeling similarly frustrated.) In any event, classroom silences can seem like highly charged affairs.

Once, in a teaching workshop, the faculty participants were asked how long a silence the average teacher will tolerate before he or she jumps in with an answer. We guessed five or ten seconds but thought perhaps longer. The actual answer: between .7 and 1.5 seconds.

In other words, everyone finds agonizing those moments that often follow a teacher’s question. Which brings me to the 14th century romance. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an imposing giant “hurtles” into Camelot and, appearing to overlook the man sitting in the throne, asks, “Where is the captain of this crowd.” His disrespect for Arthur could not be made more plain:

This horseman hurtles in, and the hall enters;
Riding to the high dais, reeked he no danger;
Not a greeting he gave as the guests he o’erlooked,
Nor wasted his words, but “Where is,” he said,
“The captain of this crowd? Keenly I wish
To see that sire with sight, and to himself say
                          my say.”
          He swaggered all about
          To scan the host so gay;
He halted, as if in doubt
          Who in that hall held sway.

If they were up to the challenge, all the knights would be up on their feet shouting to avenge the insult. Instead, behaving like Uvalde policemen called to a school shooting, “stone-still they sat in a swooning silence”:

There were stares on all sides as the stranger spoke,
For much did they marvel what it might mean
That a horseman and a horse should have such a hue,
Grow green as the grass, and greener, it seemed,
Than green fused on gold more glorious by far.
All the onlookers eyed him, and edged nearer,
And awaited in wonder what he would do,
For many sights had they seen, but such a one never,
So that phantom and faerie the folk there deemed it,
Therefore chary of answer was many a champion bold,
And stunned at his strong words stone-still they sat
In a swooning silence in the stately hall.
As all were slipped into sleep, so slackened their speech
                              apace.

In the so-called “bob and wheel” that ends the stanza, the poet’s sarcasm is exquisite. Surely, it’s not dread that accounts for their silence. No, it’s got to be a matter of courtesy that they are handing all responsibility over to Arthur:

          Not all, I think, for dread,
          But some of courteous grace
          Let him who was their head
          Be spokesman in that place.

In other words, the knights are all thinking, “I’m sure glad someone else is in charge here.”

Nor does it get any better when the Green Giant informs Camelot that he’s there to challenge them to a beheading game: first a knight will cut off his head, after which he will return the blow. The silence which follows probably lasts longer than 1.5 seconds:

If he astonished them at first, stiller were then
All that household in hall, the high and the low…

This allows the Green Knight to pile up the insults:

“What, is this Arthur’s house,” said that horseman then,
“Whose fame is so fair in far realms and wide?
Where is now your arrogance and your awesome deeds,
Your valor and your victories and your vaunting words?
Now are the revel and renown of the Round Table
Overwhelmed with a word of one man’s speech,
For all cower and quake, and no cut felt!”
With this he laughs so loud that the lord grieved;
The blood for sheer shame shot to his face, and pride.

With none of his men willing to stand up for him, Arthur steps forward to take the axe—at which point Gawain saves Camelot’s honor by himself volunteering.

Speaking up in class shouldn’t be as hard as volunteering to take an axe blow (or facing a firing squad), but it may sometimes feel that way. A good teacher, however, will find ways to put the silence to good use. Sometimes excellent discussions are birthed by a pregnant pause.

Or in Camelot’s case, the knights will learn a little humility.

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