Since I know that some of you are dog lovers and have had the experience, as I did three years ago, of “putting your pet down,” I offer you this poem by Daniel Groves” called “A Dog’s Life.” It is sad and playful both and may bring a smile amidst the tears.
In “The Beauty of Death,” Kahlil Gibran orders his friends not to mourn him when he dies but to celebrate instead. “Let me rest, for my soul has had its bounty of days and nights,” he says. When Alan learned that he only had a limited number of months to live–months that he managed to stretch to four years–he made sure that he reaped each day’s bounty. He spent a lot of his time intoxicated with the beauty of it all.
When W. B. Yeat died on January 28, 1939, a despondent W. H. Auden wrote, “The day of his death was a dark cold day,” an instance of how we look to the weather for confirmation of our distress. The idea of a dying friend slipping away without leaving a trace is an unsettling one. Much better if the weather functions as a second witness, which it seems to do if it metaphorically expresses how we feel. When my good friend Alan Paskow died on Tuesday, I latched on to the fact that the day began with a tornado alert and that we were lashed by slashing rain for much of the morning.
My friend Alan Paskow is in his final days. Although not in a coma, he appears in perpetual sleep, and each day his breathing is more labored. Thomas Hood’s poem “The Death Bed” captures some of the experience of waiting and watching.
My friend Alan Paskow is finally dying. The poem that comes to mind is Mary Oliver’s “Universal Hospital, Boston.” All around nature is thriving, a contrast with the clean antiseptic rooms within the hospital. The contrast shows up as well in the patient’s eyes, which “are sometimes green and sometimes gray,/and sometimes full of humor, but often not.”
As I wrote last year when the earthquake hit Haiti, all human language, even literature, comes up short when faced with disaster and death. Literature is language by humans about humans, and destruction on this scale seems to laugh narrative and image to scorn. Nevertheless, being human, we try to bring even apocalyptic disasters into a […]
Spiritual Sunday Several times over the past few months I have rhapsodized over Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, feeling a little bit like Keats upon first reading Chapman’s Homer. “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into its ken,” the poet writes, perfectly capturing the experience. One reason I like the novel is […]
Spiritual Sunday Last week I wrote about how my friend Alan, beset with cancer, has been exploring the meaning of love as his health fails. Here’s a beautiful George Herbert poem that captures Alan’s love for creation, his sadness that he must leave it, and (perhaps) his sense that his love may transcend death. Even […]
From time to time I bring you updates about my friend Alan Paskow, currently failing because of cancer. Julia and I visit the Paskows every Sunday night. Julia administers a Reiki massage to Jackie while Alan and I converse. In our recent visits, Alan is always in bed when I talk to him. Our conversation […]
