The Choice: To Die or to Go on Caring

Yesterday we buried a long-time friend, 98-year-old Maurine Holbert Hogaboom, a New York actress who had retired to southern Maryland.  Tomorrow we commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of my oldest son Justin.  April, a month of new beginnings, has too often proved cruel as well.

Nature often works ironically.  Justin, feeling joyous on a beautiful spring day, exuberantly flung himself into the St. Mary’s River, only to be grabbed by an unexpected current and pulled under.  Gentle breezes wafted over us as we sat on the gravestones overlooking the river watching the divers.  I felt like the father in Mary Oliver’s poem “The Lost Children,” who is serenaded by the “thrush’s gorgeous and amoral voice” while blundering through the underbrush looking for little Lydia. 

Oliver’s poem, incidentally, provided me with two passages that brought me comfort during the long sleepless night following the drowning.  About Lydia’s father, Oliver says, “pain picked him up and held him its gray jaw.”  Later she writes, “when loss leans like a broken tree.”  I repeated those passages, sometimes one, sometimes the other, over and over to myself throughout that long night.  It was as though I myself was thrashing around in the cold river and they were my life raft, signs that someone else understood the pain I was feelings.

Since Justin’s death, I have been drawn to literary images of drowning.  A particularly powerful one concludes William Cowper’s “The Castaway”:

No voice divine the storm allay’d,
     No light propitious shone;
When, snatch’d from all effectual aid,
     We perish’d, each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelm’d in deeper gulphs than he.           

I am also drawn to Gardiner, the whaling captain in Moby Dick who tries to enlist Ahab in the search for his 12-year-old son, who has been lost at sea.  Ahab is so obsessed with his quest for the white whale that he refuses, and Ishmael looks back at the ship, the Rachel, as they sail away:

But by her still halting course and winding, woeful way, you plainly saw that this ship that so wept with spray, still remained without comfort. She was Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were not.

The Biblical allusion is to a passage Matthew (2:18) about Israel’s mourning (personified by Rachel) following Herod’s decision to kill all children in Bethlehem:

In Rama was there a voice heard,
lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children,
and would not be comforted,
because they are not.

While I fond solace in hearing my pain expressed, I am also lifted up by other responses to the drowning, such as that of my second son Darien.  The night after it happened, he swam in the spot where Justin had gone under.  The reason, he told me later, was so the river wouldn’t have power over him.

From time to time over the upcoming weeks, I plan to reflect upon the life I have lived since Justin’s death.  Have I lived in a way that honors his memory?  For now, I will just note that I have taken the second of the two options put forward in another Oliver poem, this one about John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed).  Oliver speculates that Chapman has suffered some great heartbreak but nevertheless has chosen “to go on caring about something.”  The result is dazzling beauty, “apple trees as lovely as young girls.”  You can read the entire poem here.  The final stanzas set forth our choices.  Chapman’s choice results in “patches of cold white fire,” the blossoms on his apple trees:

                           whatever

the secret, and the pain,

there’s a decision: to die,
or to live, to go on
caring about something.  In spring, in Ohio,
in the forests that are left you can still find
signs of him: patches of
cold white fire.