|
GREEN PARADISE LOST |
|
11. A Proper Sense of Death There is something in us that doesn't ever want to let go to face even as inevitable a fact as a new season. Some people cling and cling like the oak leaves that hold on till next spring and the new ones push them off. Last night flocks of wild geese flew over our house. In my half sleep I heard them honking. Unerringly they follow the rhythm of the seasons -- their instinct telling them when to leave for southern climates. Some may not make the trip back and yet all go in good grace. Their great wide V stretches over the heavens, momentarily putting out the stars as they pass. When we human beings let go and embrace the new, when we flow with the seasons, and merge with the same basic rhythm that tells the geese when to go, we hear things beyond sound, and feel things beyond touch, and a kind of serenity settles over our spirits. [1] A Proper Sense of Death To do this -- to claim the gift of life -- we must also claim a new understanding of death. In the Genesis myth all the goodness of life was put within the Garden and then it was all cursed with pain, suffering and death in the Fall. Of course the myth gave woman a starring role in the Fall, as suddenly man's derivative and dependent helpmate Eve became a major character who in sinning exhibited both initiative and masculine aggressiveness while ending the whole Utopian scene. Besides being used for centuries against women, the story of the Fall has served to distort our understanding of both death and human life. Rather than dying being as integral to human life as being born, Death became a Curse "which might not have been," a punishment for sin, a sort of lethal and arbitrary celestial "ZAP." Death became the Enemy, something apart from our true nature, something we could not claim as a part of our human pilgrimage. Over the centuries it has been easier for us to view ourselves (as Ernest Becker does) as "gods with anuses," because we have never "owned" or "claimed" dying as a part of our humanity. We are today engaged in many quarters in a reappraisal of death. I want to present now three examples of such reappraisals, the first by Lewis Thomas, president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City: [Death] is a natural marvel. All of the life of the earth dies, all of the time, in the same volume as the new life that dazzles us each morning, each spring. All we see of this is the odd stump, the fly struggling on the porch floor of the summer house in October, the fragment on the highway. I have lived all my life with an embarrassment of squirrels in my backyard, they are all over the place, all year long, and I have never seen, anywhere, a dead squirrel. I suppose it is just as well. If the earth were otherwise, and all the dying were done in the open, with the dead there to be looked at, we would never have it out of our minds. We can forget about it much of the time, or think of it as an accident to be avoided, somehow. But it does make the process of dying seem more exceptional than it really is, and harder to engage in at the times when we must ourselves engage. • • • There are 3 billion of us on the earth, and all 3 billion must be dead, on a schedule, within this lifetime. • • • We will have to give up the notion that death is catastrophe, or detestable, or avoidable, or even strange. We will need to learn more about the cycling of life in the rest of the system, and about our connection to the process. Everything that comes alive seems to be in trade for something that dies, cell for cell. There might be some comfort in the recognition of synchrony, in the information that we all go down together, in the best of company. • • • We may be about to rediscover that dying is not such a bad thing to do after all. Sir William Osler took this view: he disapproved of people who spoke of the agony of death, maintaining that there was no such thing. • • • [David Livingston, based upon his own experience of near-death while in Africa] was so amazed by the extraordinary sense of peace, calm, and total painlessness associated with being killed that he constructed a theory that all creatures are provided with a protective physiologic mechanism, switched on at the verge of death, carrying them through in a haze of tranquility. I have seen agony in death only once, in a patient with rabies.... It was as though, in the special neuropathology of rabies, the switch had been prevented from turning. • • • I find myself surprised by the thought that dying is an all-right thing to do, but perhaps it should not surprise. It is, after all, the most ancient and fundamental of biologic functions, with its mechanisms worked out with the same attention to detail, the same provision for the advantage of the organism, the same abundance of genetic information for guidance through the stages, that we have long since become accustomed to finding in all the crucial acts of living. [2] Another who has been involved in a contemporary reappraisal of death and has helped a great many with their own grief and dying is Elisabeth Kuebler-Ross. Writing in her book Death: The Final Stage of Growth, she says: Experiencing, rather than being shielded from, death, I have been able to understand it as an expected and integral part of life. • • • I am convinced that these experiences with the reality of death have enriched my life more than any other experiences I have had. Facing death means facing the ultimate question of the meaning of life. If we really want to live we must have the courage to recognize that life is ultimately very short, and that everything we do counts. [3] Fontaine Belford has written about the place of death in literature, and about the differing place which death holds in comedy and tragedy: The most fundamental definition of comedy and tragedy is that a comedy is a play ending in marriage, a tragedy a play ending in death. The feminine with its emphasis on the species, the race, focused on the life which biologically did not end, the cosmic chain of birth and death and birth. It was comic. The masculine with its focus on the individual and his own private and personal life and destiny, faces the death which will end it. Each of our separate plays will end in death, but the great play will go on. Tragedy and comedy! [4] Perhaps it has been this inability to accept death into a cosmic comic view of life which has enticed men into rejecting the limitations of humanity and into struggling instead "to be as gods." But the Tower of Babel which civilized man has erected consists not in the height of his walls and towers but in the power of his machines to articulate his will. Charles Ferguson has described this development in man's spirit: It was natural if not inevitable that man's accomplishments should induce in him ... a voluptuous self-esteem. From an idealization of the machine, he began to move toward an idolization of himself. His power appeared to be infinite. The think machine was early seen to be abler than man in some particulars and rapidly capable of becoming superior. Yet man had created it. Was he not moving rapidly along a path toward infallibility when he might be no longer merely a creator but equal to the Creator? [5] At another point Ferguson describes the jet airliner as a daily miracle -- reminder to man of his abilities: After a few breathless moments on the runway, the passenger seems to ascend personally. Then he is where he has longed to be for ages -- in the sky and above the earth. Right at hand he may have pie in the sky or towering ice cream sodas stacked endlessly. Or he may see the shadow of the plane on the clouds below, caught in a moving halo that keeps pace with the movement of man, to assure him of his glory. Man on top. It is his supreme achievement. So far. A little higher than the angels. The Psalms improved. Man as god, just as he foresaw he would be. Nature, man's old enemy, reduced to a woolly euphemism called turbulence. [6] Western experience has been haunted through the centuries by the Genesis account which has labeled us fallen, in the bondage of Death, and separated from the original gift of life. The Fall has been thought of as downward -- from grace to some lower and more sinful (and mortal) state. But perhaps this must be re-thought. It may have been a fall up into anthropocentric pretention and illusion -- up into thinking man could get beyond death, beyond flesh, beyond nature, and really be "on top." And in attempting to be as gods, we have not properly valued being human. *** In A Second Birthday the lay theologian William Stringfellow writes about how his own long struggle with pain, sickness and nearness to death brought him to a newly dawning sense of life, what he calls his "second birthday." Of this he says: Vocation has to do with recognizing life as a gift and honoring the gift in living. *** In the Gospel, vocation means being a human being, now, and being neither more, nor less than a human being, now. *** Worship is the celebration of life in its totality. He writes of the place of self-love in what others, expressing their gratitude for his recovery from death, call a miracle: Self-love is decisive. I do not mean, by that, a strenuous will to live. I refer to a reality which is, indeed, rather the opposite: a love of self which, esteeming life itself as a gift, expects or demands no more than the life which is given, and which welcomes and embraces and affirms that much unconditionally. I mean self-love which emulates, and, in the end, participates in, the love of God for life. [7] Life Itself Is the Gift In a strange way, when we fail to accept death, we miss the gift of life. In our striving to "be god," we miss what it is to be human. ***
Each day is a beginning. ***
To pull the blinds of habit from the eyes, Jean Hersey speaks of the priceless gift of "living in the moment" which she receives from the visit of her grandson. I always learn so much from my young visitor that many a new door opens. Perhaps the most valuable thing I learn relates to the special joy that lies in each moment. Every day for us becomes a succession of nows. Spring is eons away; last fall doesn't exist. The past may be wonderful to ruminate on and draw strength from, the future exciting, thrilling to anticipate, to plan for; but the present, the "now," is the only time we are really alive. This very moment is actually all we ever have. Of this Jesse forcefully reminds me. Even "next week" produces a vague look in his eyes, and when I talk about last week, I have lost him. He is studying a small black cricket that is crawling over the rug, and last week -- what is that? [9] Everything Created Is Vulnerable In a strange way, only when we face the vulnerability of created life and can accept that vulnerability, can we claim the real gift of life in the "now." It is when we are still fighting off death that we launch vast campaigns of "achieving," which focus on the future and hurry us past a real tasting or feeling of what we are experiencing in this moment. Huston Smith speaks of this thrust of achieving -- "this dream of onward and upward," he calls it -- which has been so prominent in our Western civilization: If within this vast universe a thread of life were to angle always upward, leaving a trail that looked from a distance like the jet stream of an ascending plane, such a never-circling life force would be a freak. For everywhere else -- name one exception-- nature favors the curves that space itself conforms to; the yin-yang rhythms of turning gyres and waves that crest and fall. O my people! can you not see how it is hope, not fact, that powers this dream of onward and upward toward the dawning light? if human life is truly natural -- and this, surely, the evolutionists would want us to believe -- it is seasonal. Fall and winter are its lot as assuredly as summer and spring. Half the art of living is a talent for dying. [10] (Emphasis added.) In Plant Dreaming Deep May Sarton writes of the gardener's' sense of seasonal change: For the joys a garden brings are already going as they come. They are poignant. When the first apple falls with that tremendous thud, one of the big seasonal changes startles the heart. The swanlike peony suddenly lets all its petals fall in a snowy pile, and it is time to say good-by until another June. But by then the delphinium is on the way and the lilies ... [for] the flowers ring their changes through a long cycle, a cycle that will be renewed. That is what the gardener often forgets. To the flowers we never have to say good-by forever. We grow older every year, but not the garden; it is reborn every spring. [11] (Emphasis added.) Accepting creation is accepting that seasonal quality to life, accepting the fall and winter of life just as we enjoy the spring. It is accepting the whole arc of a life span, the curve down into fragility as well as the curve up into vigor. It is accepting the blessing in mortal flesh, which is a temporary blessing. In order to get the blessing, we must take into ourselves the temporary quality of it, and claim that also as our own. A doctor friend of Elisabeth Kuebler-Ross writes in Death: The Final Stage of Growth about his own acceptance of that temporary quality in the period after his surgeon told him, "It was a malignant tumor." He has just been speaking of being impressed by "the grace of that young Irish American surgeon and saint who started the medical aid program to Southeast Asia, as he faced his own terminal malignancy." Through Tom Dooley, two real options became vividly real. The answer to "How much time do I have?" became "There are 'x' days left and, however long 'x' is, there are only two possibilities, to live them in despair or to really live them to the hilt, making them count, as Dooley did." The choice was clear and a great weight was lifted from my shoulders. It would be impossible to exaggerate the significance of that moment. It led to the next realization, that really we're all in the same boat, with 'x' days to live. Even if cured of the cancer, I'm a day closer to dying today than yesterday. We all are. For all of us then, it isn't the quantity of life but the quality that counts. It took a malignancy to put life into perspective.... [12] The Rhythm of Life Why is it so hard for us to accept the rhythms of mortal life? Fritjof Capra in The Tao of Physics writes: "Modern physics has shown that the rhythm of creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons and in the birth and death of all living creatures, but is also the very essence of inorganic matter. According to quantum field theory, all interactions between the constituents of matter take place through the emission and absorption of virtual particles. More than that, the dance of creation and destruction is the basis of the very existence of matter, since all material particles 'self-interact' by emitting and reabsorbing virtual particles. Modern physics has thus revealed that every subatomic particle not only performs an energy dance, but also is an energy dance; a pulsating process of creation and destruction." [13] (Emphasis added.) Life is a rhythm of creation and destruction. Human life is seasonal, as Huston Smith puts it. Thus there must be not only "a time to be born" but also "a time to die"; a time to be young, and a time to age. If we understand what it is to be human (i.e., seasonal), we can taste and savor each season in its own time as Mrs. Miniver does in Jan Struther's novel: It was lovely, thought Mrs. Miniver, nodding goodbye to the flower woman and carrying her big sheaf of chrysanthemums down the street with a kind of ceremonious joy, as though it were a cornucopia; it was lovely, this settling down again, this tidying away of the summer into its box, this taking up of the thread of one's life where the holidays (irrelevant interlude) had made one drop it. Not that she didn't enjoy the holidays: but she always felt -- and it was, perhaps, the measure of her peculiar happiness -- a little relieved when they were over. Her normal life pleased her so well that she was half afraid to step out of its frame in case one day she should find herself unable to get back. The spell might break, the atmosphere be impossible to recapture. But this time, at any rate, she was safe. There was the house, as neat and friendly as ever.... And there was the square itself, with the leaves still as thick on the trees as they had been when she left in August; but in August they had hung heavily, a uniform dull green, whereas now, crisped and brindled by the first few nights of frost, they had taken on a new, various beauty. Stepping lightly and quickly down the square, Mrs. Miniver suddenly understood why she was enjoying the forties so much better than she had enjoyed the thirties: it was the difference between August and October, between the heaviness of late summer and the sparkle of early autumn, between the ending of an old phase and the beginning of a fresh one. • • • Upstairs in the drawing-room there was a small bright fire of logs, yet the sunshine that flooded in through the open windows had real warmth in it. It was perfect: she felt suspended between summer and winter, savoring the best of them both. She unwrapped the chrysanthemums and arranged them in a square glass jar, between herself and the light, so that the sun shone through them. They were the big mop-headed kind, burgundy-colored, with curled petals; their beauty was noble, architectural; and as for their scent, she thought as she buried her nose in the nearest of them, it was a pure distillation of her mood, a quintessence of all that she found gay and intoxicating and astringent about the weather, the circumstances, her own age and the season of the year. Oh yes, October certainly suited her best. [14] "Green Winter" But what of aging? Can we accept that weakening of the muscle fiber, that decline in vigor, that loneliness of those who remain for those who have gone? What indeed can one savor in a season that is peopled largely by the absences of those who once were, a season that is "the glass mostly empty"?
Preserve me from the occupational therapist, God, As I read those words I am overcome with tenderness for my own Sam, also grayer and more vulnerable than when we too first let down our hair to each other, but so much more precious to me because I now understand the human limitedness of our time together. I want to rush in to where he is sleeping and waken him to celebrate the present moment which is slipping by with the liquid speed of the Mozart piano nocturne I have playing on the phonograph. But we will waken together to greet the sea and the morning, and that will be time. "Grandfather, does the water go on a long way?" "Yes, boy, further than you or I can imagine." "Is the water old then?" "Neither old nor young. It just goes on." "Will I be as old as you are? Will I be as old as that frog? What is it like to be old?" "It is all just floating on the water, on and on." "Grandfather, what is this?" "It is called milkweed, boy. Let it fly." "Look, it goes up and up. Is it alive?" "Yes, in its way. Can you still see it?" "It's higher than the birds. I've lost it now. I wish I could fly." "You will, boy, in your way." "Grandfather, tell me about flying. Tell me about water. Tell me about everything. Tell me what it is, to be alive." [16] The Supreme Quality of Being Transitory I don't mean by all this that we should enjoy dying. I don't think we enjoy being born. But both are natural, and a proper part of human life. Death is a fitting and proper destiny for the human -- a part of the arc and span of being mortal flesh. *** Swathed in coats and scarves, they went out and sat in a row on the little flagged terrace. The evening might have been ordered with the fireworks; it was cold, still, and starry, with a commendable absence of moon. And when the first rocket went up Mrs. Miniver felt the customary pricking in her throat and knew that once again the enchantment was going to work. Some things -- conjurers, ventriloquists, pantomimes -- she enjoyed vicariously, by watching the children's enjoyment; but fireworks had for her a direct and magical appeal. Their attraction was more complex than that of any other form of art. They had pattern and sequence, color and sound, brilliance and mobility; they had suspense, surprise, and a faint hint of danger; above all, they had the supreme quality of transcience, which puts the keenest edge on beauty and makes it touch some spring in the heart which more enduring excellences cannot reach. [17]
|