Читать книгу How to Die - Ray Robertson - Страница 7
ОглавлениеPART ONE
No one forgets their first time. It’s the other first time—the one that darkens the mind rather than delights the body—that isn’t always as instantly memorable. But it’s there—somewhere—along with the initial recognition that our parents aren’t the wisest, most powerful people in the world who will always be there to protect us, that people don’t have to love us back just because we want them to, and that the game of life doesn’t come with a set of inviolable rules that everyone is obliged to follow in the interest of fair play. Not that it’s difficult to understand why we don’t always remember the precise time and place when we first became aware, however dimly, of death. That everyone is going to die. That I’m going to die. Human beings tend to hide from what hurts. Or at least attempt to. But Grandma’s funeral or the family pet’s last visit to the veterinarian or a flattened frog in the middle of the street remind us of what we try to forget but never entirely can.
Novelists aren’t good at much. Busy describing how the world lives, there isn’t much time or inclination left over to do much worldly living oneself. But remembering things—in particular, the seemingly inconsequential but singularly significant minutiae of daily existence—is an occupational necessity. I remember my first whiff of nothingness. Wrote about it in my novel What Happened Later:
Let’s go around, I said.
An August afternoon Sunday when I was five, an idling ’69 Buick Skylark with power windows but no air conditioning, a train that wouldn’t end like Christmas will never come and summer vacation will go on forever. I was hot and bored and thirsty and there was cold pop at home on the bottom shelf of the bar fridge in the basement.
We can’t go around, my dad said.
Why not?
Because they’ll put you in a box and put you in the ground and they won’t let you out.
I thought about what he said. It didn’t make sense. I said the only sensible thing I could think of.
But you’d let me out, I said.
My father leaned against the steering wheel and craned his neck left, looked as far down the railroad track as he could. Sweat rivered down the back of his neck. He looked in the rear-view mirror to make sure there was no one behind us; put the car in reverse and gave the steering wheel a sharp tug to the right. We weren’t going to wait around anymore. Finally, we were moving. Looking in the mirror again, this time at me in the back seat:
I don’t want to see you fooling around when there’s a train coming, he said.
I won’t.
You either stand back and wait for it to go by, or you walk around to where it isn’t, you hear me?
I know.
Hey?
I’ll wait for it or walk around.
My mother sucked a last suck from her Player’s Light and pulled the ashtray out of the dash, crushed out her cigarette on the metal lip. It was full of mashed cigarette butts crowned with red lipstick kisses.
Because when they put you in that box in the ground, boy, that’s it, nobody can help you.
But, I wanted to say.
But I didn’t say anything. And my dad—I waited—he didn’t say anything either.
Not that I consider myself as having been particularly thanatosophically precocious; death-consciousness simply comes to some early, while others don’t attend their first class in Introduction to Eventual Personal Extinction (a.k.a. Death 101) until they’re well on their way to graduating from life. When I asked a friend of mine from high school, now a successful dentist in his mid-fifties with a much younger wife and three small children and a vacation home in Arizona neighbouring a private golf course, if he ever thought about his eventual non-existence, he answered, “I’m too busy to think about death.” His response might seem glib, even for a dentist with a three handicap, but it’s typical of most people’s attitude if asked the same question.
And why shouldn’t it be? Not just because there are other things more pleasant to contemplate or because considered rumination isn’t as common a human activity as, say, envying, lying, or over-eating, but because, as Freud argued, it’s virtually impossible for human beings to imagine their own deaths. “Whenever we attempt to do so,” he claimed, “we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators . . . At bottom no one believes in his own death . . . [I]n the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.” And not just when we’re young and ontologically unsophisticated. Consider the seventy-two-year-old writer William Saroyan’s last public words (in a phone call to the Associated Press announcing his terminal cancer): “Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.” (Perhaps understanding that we must die, yet not really believing it, is merely a helpful evolutionary trick, a pre-programmed delusion that allows us to live more secure, hence more adventurous lives—and therefore be happier, more aggressive procreators. It wouldn’t be the first time biology got caught calling the shots.)
But even if we’re not psychologically capable of fully comprehending our own death, we are able to feel its presence, however dimly sensed or no matter how imperfectly we might be able to articulate it. Even without staring directly at the sun, it’s possible to point to its place in the sky. Literature is humankind’s best record of who it is—most everything else is, at best, either reality-corroding clichés or, at worst, egocentric self-advertising—and the most compelling evocations of death in literature (whether in the form of novels, short stories, poems, memoirs, or essays) approximate Mallarme’s Symbolist poetic dictum: “Paint, not the object, but the effect it produces.” We might not possess the psychological equipment to take a clear and definitive photograph of death, but, by snapping away at its varied effects, we can know the unknowable a little bit better, just as the mystic doesn’t speak directly of “God” but, instead, of God’s manifestation in nature, music, or the experience of love.
It’s because impression, metaphor, and inference (and their employment in literature) are superior to purely conceptual thinking in disclosing some of death’s mystery that philosophers tend to obfuscate more often than illuminate. Art is empirical and therefore the ideal tool for handling something that is understood, to whatever degree, on a primarily experiential level. “No reader who doesn’t actually experience, who isn’t made to feel . . . is going to believe anything the . . . writer merely tells him,” Flannery O’Connor counselled. “The first and most obvious characteristic of [good writing] is that it deals with reality through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted, and touched.”
Even philosophers who make a point of differentiating themselves from other thinkers deemed cripplingly logocentric tend to double death’s riddle by obscuring it in a mess of twisted syntax and near-meaningless nouns and verbs. Here’s Martin Heidegger taking a crack at the subject with characteristic Heideggerian clarity and linguistic grace: “The existential project of an authentic being-toward-death must thus set forth the factors of such a being which are constitutive for it as an understanding of death—in the sense of being toward this possibility without fleeing it or covering it over.” And, yes, many German philosophers do seem to believe that it’s a virtue to construct prose that goes down about as well as a tinfoil sandwich, but here’s a sample sentence from Being and Nothingness, France’s most well-known twentieth-century philosopher’s, Jean Paul Sartre’s, magnum opus: “Death is not my possibility of no longer realizing a presence in the world but rather an always possible nihilation of my possibles which is outside my possibilities.” Got that? Have the scales begun to fall from your eyes? One immediately thinks of Friedrich Nietzsche, one German philosopher who did write with perspicuity, elegance, and even (rare for his profession) wit: “They all muddy their waters to make them appear deep.” No matter how impressive their academic credentials or how long their list of prized publications, as the nineteenth-century man of letters Jules Renard avowed, “So long as thinkers cannot tell me what life and death are, I shall not give a good goddamn for their thoughts.”
More than our opposable thumbs and consequent ability to create such contemporary wonders as Twitter, shoot-and-splatter video games, and reality television, foreknowledge of our own mortality is humankind’s defining characteristic. We may not know when we’ll die or how or why or what happens afterward, but we do know we are going to die. It’s ironic, then, that often our first encounter with death is through the loss of the family pet, who, lacking our gift (curse?) of self-consciousness, is denied this bitter wisdom. Our beloved cats and dogs may have felt pain and loss of vitality preceding their expiration, but not anxiety or sadness or fear at their impending annihilation. Those feelings are left for us to experience, often for the first time.
My first pet was a bushy-tailed grey Persian cat named Pepé, as in Pepé Le Pew (she came with the name—we inherited her from an elderly neighbour who couldn’t care for her any longer), who died when I was nine years old. Unlike children who are raised on farms and see the life cycle up close on a daily basis (“Don’t get attached to the animals, they’re not your friends, they’re food”), those of us who grow up in suburbia or in the city tend to be shielded from death’s glare. One day Pepé seemed to be lying around more than usual and wasn’t interested in her toy mouse as much, and the next day, when I came from school, she was gone. My mother told me that she and my father had taken Pepé to the vet because she hadn’t been feeling well, and the vet said she was very, very sick, and it would be cruel to let her suffer, so they’d had her put to sleep. It was then that I noticed that her food and water bowls were gone from their usual place on the kitchen floor and that the living room wasn’t littered with her balls, toys, and the long piece of silver tinsel she’d claimed as hers from the Christmas tree a couple of months previous. My mother told me that dinner would be ready in about half an hour. We were having pork chops and canned green beans and boiled potatoes.
I’d heard the expression “put to sleep” before, when our next door neighbour’s beagle had been euthanized. I was friends with the family’s younger brother, who was my age, but it was his older brother by a year who I overheard saying, “I wonder what Molly is dreaming about” when the subject of their recently deceased dog came up. My friend smiled and said, “Squirrels, probably,” and his brother smiled too. “Yeah, probably,” he said. I didn’t know what happened to Pepé or Molly or anyone else’s pets once they made their only one-way trip to the veterinarian, but I knew they weren’t sleeping. Not what we called sleeping, anyway. People who said that their pet “had to be put down” seemed closer to the truth. Put down wasn’t much more helpful in aiding my understanding of what actually occurred behind the veterinarian’s walls, but the polite violence of the phrase felt, uncomfortably, right. Poor Pepé: she’d been put down.
I felt sorry for her, that she wouldn’t get to slap at her piece of tinsel again. I felt sorry for me because I wouldn’t get to tease her with it again, holding it in front of her face then pulling it away, the way she liked. I missed her because other people’s cats weren’t her, were different colours and different sizes and didn’t like to play the same way—weren’t my cat. I felt funny because someone who was here all the time suddenly wasn’t anymore. She was just a cat, I knew, but she was Pepé, and now there wasn’t a cat called Pepé anymore. It didn’t seem fair. It didn’t make sense.
The first person I knew who died wasn’t someone I knew. Not really. My mother’s grandfather died when I was four, a year or so before my almost-epiphany at the train tracks. He lived in a small building behind my grandparents’ house—actually, a tarpaper hut no bigger than a large garden shed that lacked running water and its own bathroom—and I only remember, when visiting my grandparents, being aware that outside, out back, there was an old man—a man even older than Grandpa—who lived in a shed. My mother’s parents were French-Canadian exiles from the nearby farming community of Paincourt, who’d moved to Chatham looking for better-paying work. I’m not sure they ever found any. My grandfather eventually got a job driving a dump truck for a sand and gravel company, and he and my grandmother rolled their own cigarettes, drank lots of whisky and listened to loud country and western music, and would switch to French whenever they didn’t want anyone else to know what they were saying. But the old man in the shed . . . That’s about it: an old man standing in the doorway of a shack while a grey sky pours down cold autumn rain, and even then I’m not sure my mind isn’t making something up and calling it a memory merely because I’m trying to come up with one. A quick phone call to my mother reveals that he’d worked the bush in both Quebec and around Paincourt as a hunter’s guide, that he could roll a cigarette with one hand, and that they discovered a cyst on his back that turned out to be fatally cancerous. I remember his funeral better than I remember him.
But that’s a lie; an exaggeration, at least. I don’t remember the ceremony. I don’t remember seeing the body (my mother informs me it was an open casket affair). I don’t remember watching the corpse being lowered into the ground. I do remember hot rain and steam rising from the road. I remember suits and ties and dresses and the smell of wet polyester. I remember it being too hot inside the car on the ride there and my jacket being itchy. I remember my mother’s hairspray smelling like my mother, and the beginning of a small bald spot near the top of my father’s head. What else? Nothing else except my mother telling me that I’d been a good boy and we were going home soon. I don’t remember crying or complaining or needing any assurance, but I remember feeling happy when my father took off his tie and handed it to my mother who stuffed it into her purse and the car was moving and we really were going home.
Then there are the celebrities, our North American royalty, those who we never knew personally, but whose lives, in some ways, we know better than those of our friends and family and maybe even our own—and whose deaths are almost as equally memorable and meaningful. Each generation has its own “Do you remember when so-and-so died?” and “Where were you when you first heard the news?” For my parents’ generation it was the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. For mine, you never forgot where you were when you heard that Elvis Presley was dead. I was eleven years old and trading baseball cards with Jim Siddle in the basement, the August heat and humidity making it the only cool room in the house. My mother, who kept the local radio station in the kitchen on all day, heard the news first and called down the stairs. “Ray,” she said. “Elvis is dead.”
There’s surprise, of course. How could someone as wealthy and well-known as Elvis really die? But there’s more than that. It’s not about mourning the music or the films or the good deeds left undone—after all, we still have and will continue to have all of the things that the deceased did that made them well-known to begin with. And unless we’re star-obsessed sociopaths, it’s obviously not personal sorrow we experience (or imagine we experience). What we miss is the departed’s ubiquitous presence. Their (at the risk of committing an act of linguistic ugliness of Heideggerian proportions) there-ness. If Elvis can die (Elvis, who Mojo Nixon so sagely sang of in his most well-known tune, “Elvis Is Everywhere”—i.e. in our jeans, in our fast-food, in our parents, in our entire popular culture), then, gulp, I guess we can die too. When the larger-than-life lose their lives, we intuit (as we could never purely logically surmise) that no one is larger than life, that celebrity pantheism is a false religion. Elvis has left the building, folks, and he isn’t coming back, no matter how long or hard we wolf whistle and applaud. And so we sit alone in a suddenly very quiet, very empty auditorium whistling “That’s All Right Mama” in the dark.
My next funeral I remember better, but not to my credit. A twelve-year-old cousin had died in a swimming accident, a cousin from the side of the family (he was my mother’s brother’s son) who did things like swing over the Thames River from an old tire hung from a tree before diving into the dirty water below, things I would have never been allowed to do. Worse, I would have never even imagined doing them. My uncle’s four kids (all boys) were poor—my uncle worked as a roofer only when he wasn’t on a Sudbury Champagne (Canadian Club and ginger ale) bender—and couldn’t afford to play year-round organized sports like I did, but when everyone got together a couple of times over the summer for boozy barbecues, it was them, not me, who were quicker, stronger, and better at lawn darts and touch football. I had glowing white Adidas running shoes and wore wristbands like the Golden State Warriors’ Rick Barry, so it didn’t seem right that they’d always beat me to the finish line in our makeshift running races or would leave me on the ground watching one of them tear off on their way to another touchdown.
My cousin drowned in the Thames—the tire was cut down from the tree, his surviving brothers didn’t swim in the river anymore—and like everyone else at the funeral, I shook hands with his dad and brothers and kissed my aunt on the cheek and took my turn slowly walking past the open casket. He was only a year older than me, but in his suit and with his folded hands resting on his stomach and a silent smile on his face, it seemed like more than that, it seemed like he was more mature. I wasn’t glad he was dead, but I felt as if I was finally better at something than him. Smarter, because I didn’t do stupid things like swim in the filthy Thames; superior, because I was alive and he wasn’t. “When a man takes to his bed,” Baudelaire wrote, “nearly all his friends have a secret desire to see him die; some to prove that his health is inferior to his own, others in the disinterested hope of being able to study the death agony.”
When we’re children, funeral homes are like horror movie sets the monsters forgot to visit. Whatever unease one experienced upon entering was significantly dissipated when leaving. Yes, it was hushed quiet, a barely detectable pipe organ over the unseen speakers, and there were coffins in every room, all of them surrounded by bundles of flowers and some of them even with their lids open to reveal their closed-eyed occupants. But there was something too bureaucratic, too communal about the whole affair to provide one with authentic chills and thrills. If the service wasn’t much more interesting than any other time someone at the front of the room talked and talked and talked while everyone else had to sit still and be quiet and listen, and if you happened to be stuck sitting beside your Aunt Marjorie for the entire hour or more (good for five dollars on your birthday and ten at Christmas, but bowlegged and wheezy and with shiver-inducing halitosis), how could a funeral home be anything other than what it seemed to be: somewhere you had to go to do something that had to be done?
Cemeteries, however, were something else. Bicycling over with a couple of friends on a sunny summer afternoon, the big green trees big leafy lungs, breathing in and out the warm, billowing breeze, and wherever you rode or walked the wonderfully soothing smell of freshly mowed grass, “It might,” as Shelley claimed, “make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.” But it wasn’t only bucolic charm and calm. It sounded quiet and felt slow and looked so empty (but in fact was so full) it encouraged you to shut up and slow down and empty your mind (quite an accomplishment when it comes to ordinarily ceaselessly chattering thirteen-year-old boys). Empty your mind to better take in what was all around you, underneath you, everywhere. A small city of the dead. People, couples, children, families that were alive once, just like you are now, just look: born on this day of this year, died on that day of that year, Rest in Peace, Loved Forever, Will Not Be Forgotten. And except perhaps for some of the more recent arrivals, with newer headstones not yet defaced with identity-eroding lichen and memorialized with a jar of wildflowers or a weather-battered wreath, all long forgotten.
Like most people, I fulfilled—and then some—Goethe’s summation of adolescence’s exasperating (if only to others) self-absorption: “In his youth, everybody believes that the world began to exist only when he was born, and that everything really exists only for his sake.” It’s not so much that you’re inconsiderate of other people as it is that it’s difficult to believe that they actually exist. Obviously they do, in a way—everywhere you look, there goes another one—but not in the same singular way you do. How could they? If everyone is unique, then no one is. Other planets are out there (just ask the scientists, they have ways of proving it), but they exist only in relation to you—you, the life-conferring sun. We—me—is the primal prime mover.
A cemetery is an excellent ego corrective. What I think and what I feel and what I do and what I want and WHO I AM doesn’t seem quite so unique and important when everywhere you look (and step) there are thousands of others who must also have at one time considered what they thought and felt and did and wanted and were was also extraordinarily unique and important. Life tends to move too quickly—so many things to think and feel and do and want and be—for one to notice that other people exist. Only in the infrequent instances when we love another individual as Simone Weil defined love (“Belief in the existence of other human beings as such is love”) does the solipsistic scrim we’ve constructed collapse. But in a cemetery it’s difficult to deny that life simply doesn’t give a shit about us. Actually, that’s the extent of life’s concern for us once we’re dead and have gone on to join all the other busy, self-important people underneath the ground: that we make good fertilizer for the lovely trees and the sweet-smelling grass and all the pretty flowers.
A stroll though a cemetery is the anti-selfie (“Look at me! Look at me!” “Why?” “Because it’s me!”). The next logical question a graveyard’s contemplation inspires in the moderately meditative adolescent goes even further in helping to obliterate our cherished illusion of sanctified selfhood. How do you take your eternity, Sir, with burial or cremation? It’s like that childhood game of how you’d rather die, except this time it isn’t a game and the question isn’t hypothetical. Of course, the predicament isn’t as grim as laid out here: there’s not only the option of being either boxed and buried or burned and scattered (or interred or vased); there also remains the possibility of donating your body to science so that medical students can improve their scalpel work and anatomy knowledge by slicing open your carcass and removing and inspecting your organs. It’s not as if they won’t return them eventually—all extracted body parts will be stuffed back inside you (not unlike the stuffing that’s crammed inside a turkey)—before your corpse is either buried or burned, usually en masse. And here we are confronted with that same unsavoury choice again.
The principal argument for burial over cremation would seem to be that one avoids being cremated. It’s difficult to imagine ever being dead enough not to feel the fiery blast of the crematory furnace. And even if frosty logic prevails and one reasons that “I” won’t be the corpse being charred—no “I” being in existence any longer to experience any pain (or anything else)—there still remains the image of one’s loved ones being slid into the roaring oven and emerging as amorphous embers. We might not be there to feel self-pity at our own blazing transformation and ashy end, but how can we avoid horror and sorrow when our family and friends are one moment cherished intimates and the next moment flaming, bubbling flesh? At least when a coffin is resting underneath the earth we know that a relatively intact facsimile of our parent or spouse or child rests there, and not some powdery proxy. This is why people are often buried in their favourite clothes or along with a cherished or emblematic object or with photographs of their surviving loved ones: we’re saying goodbye to all that they once were. We’re saying goodbye to them. They might be sealed up inside a $6,000 bucket and there might be formaldehyde in their veins and an autopsy scar might run the length of their chests, but they’re in there. Admittedly, it’s not much comfort, but it’s some. And at times like these, some is something.
But then there are the worms. Those busy, busy worms and insects and other subterranean trespassers that are as patient as they are persistent. It might take several generations of maggoty discipline and steady burrowing, but the worms always win. A Sterling Deluxe Stainless Steel Casket with an immaculate white silk interior or not, mother’s kind face will eventually be a mouldy meal for the first arrivals to make it through the casket to what’s left of the meat and bones. Cremation at least cheats the worms. And if life really is ashes to ashes, dust to dust, why not bypass middleman Time and get on with the job at hand as soon as possible? Whether scattered across the water or launched into the wind, merging with the universe sure as hell beats waiting around to become creepy-crawler feces.
So what’s the final tally? Who wins how we should ideally end up? As in life, so in death, there is no clear winner. Burial or cremation would seem to equal six of one, a half dozen of the other. Perhaps the only correct answer is akin to the one the ailing elderly sometimes give when asked how they’re feeling: Take my advice, they’ll say. Don’t get old. We laugh, we almost understand, we nod in sympathy. But people grow old. And people die. And here we are back where we started.
But maybe the question goes deeper than what inevitably degraded form we wish to end up as. Perhaps it’s really about how important it is to the individual to concretize (sometimes literally) their desire to be remembered. Like the church benefactor whose generous philanthropy is sometimes subconsciously connected to the desire to get a better seat at the foot of God when his or her time to celestially ascend arrives, the purchaser of the biggest, most expensive, most ostentatious tombstone or mausoleum in the cemetery believes they’re buying remembrance. Someone who has a grave that large and/or expensive must have been someone special, a fact that future generations simply won’t be able to overlook or forget. When it comes to immortality, size matters.
Except, of course, it doesn’t. Nothing does. You don’t need the wise preacher of the Old Testament to tell you that all is vanity and that nothing and no one is remembered for very long. Toppled, broken gravestones scrubbed all-but-blank by decades of season after indifferent season are lesson enough. More than illustrating the futility of the human longing for immortality, an old cemetery reminds us of human beings’ colossal arrogance. “The smaller the mind, the greater the conceit,” wrote Aesop. The bigger the tomb, the larger the delusion.
So what’s to be done? To leave instructions for our remains to be scattered and thereby escape the sin of a shamefully prideful monument to selfhood predicated upon egoistic illusions of immortality? Good for you and whoopdefuckingdo. Ashes in the sea or bones at the bottom of a hole, we’re all poor Yoricks, of whom those who do manage to remember us for a little while might well ask, “Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?”
Silence. End scene.
Psychologically, epistemologically, existentially—all the signs testify to how difficult (if not impossible) it is to wholly comprehend one’s own eventual non-existence. Even the most contemplative of us ends up tripping over our intractable ego on the way to full comprehension. When it comes to grasping the truth of our own annihilation, Ivan Ilych’s dilemma is uncomfortably familiar: “The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter’s logic: ‘Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,’ had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself.” The most logical logic simply isn’t—can’t be—logical.
There’s no such roadblock to understanding when it comes to the death of someone close to us, however. Particularly someone we love. Here, to say that a great deal of imagination isn’t necessary to grasp death’s devastating reality is to commit a cruelly absurd understatement. Our death might always remain a mystery to ourselves, but our wife’s or husband’s or partner’s couldn’t be more obvious. It means pain. Mental, emotional, physical pain. It means sorrow. For their loss of their life, for our loss of them in ours, for a world that can never be the same. It means anger. At them for dying, at life for taking them, at us for being useless to do anything about it. It means stunned insensibility and piercing rage and every unpredictable, exhausting variation in between.
Novelists need to be good fabricators. Life, no matter how rich and interesting to the individual, is rarely compelling enough for the purposes of the novelist. You make things up so that your book makes more sense. I wanted the central protagonist of my novel I Was There the Night He Died to be a man standing at life’s ground zero, all of the comforting certainties that had once been so sustaining—work, love, family, chemical self-medication—having collapsed around him. I pulled from my own life certain experiences with loss and lost direction, but the fundamental damage done to Sam Samson was the death of his wife, Sara, in an automobile accident. Thankfully, my wife is still alive, but I remembered a story a high-school friend told me many years previous when I bumped into him while home visiting my parents. I’d heard that his young wife had been killed a year or so before in a single car collision, and when we had a chance to talk at the bar where we ran into each other, two things stuck with me—stuck with me for more than twenty years, when I came to write my novel.
He told me he said goodbye to his wife at 8:30 in the morning before they both set off for work, and that he was making arrangements for her gravestone by five p.m. that same day. One more chilling lesson in the terrifying capriciousness of everyday existence: everything in its place and everything acting as it should until you’re suddenly selecting the slab of marble that’s going to sit on your wife’s head for eternity. “We plan, God laughs,” goes the Yiddish proverb. With Gods like these, who needs the devil?
He also told me that when he returned to their empty home after the funeral, his first impulse was to tell her about it. Part of this is obviously habit—wanting to know what time it is, we instinctively look for the clock hanging over the kitchen table although we were the one who moved it to the other side of the room last week—but part of it is because there was a reason this was the person we lived with and chose to spend our life with and trusted beyond all others. “Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction,” wrote Saint-Exupery. Talking to someone who isn’t alive anymore isn’t nearly as odd as not continuing to need someone to rely on and confide in and who sees the world the same way we do.
A parent’s death has its own distinctive fatal flavour. Mothers and fathers are rarely our principal confidants (and if they are, they’ve probably done an inferior job of out-of-the-nest-and-off-you-go parenting). As we age, however, hopefully we come to better understand and appreciate them as individuals with their own personalities and pasts, dreams and disappointments, but they’ll always be our Mom and Dad and will always be unconditionally there—there for us—as undeviating in their benevolent ubiquity as anything (and certainly anyone) can be. Until they’re not. Until they die. First one, then the other, then we’re grown-up orphans. It doesn’t matter that, if we’re lucky, by the time they’re old, we’re adults with independent lives and perhaps children of our own and are even able to occasionally reverse the parent-child roles and now be the stronger, more worldly-wise, more supportive ones. Not until your parents are dead do you really grow up. Grown up to understand how alone we all really are. No tart aphorism from a French existentialist on the cold, uncaring solitariness of existence can have the impact of one’s parents being gone. Forever. And this time, Mommy and Daddy won’t make it right. Would if they could. But they can’t.
A parent outliving a child is an entirely different sort of grief, something most of us, mercifully, will never understand. When an elderly parent dies after a long, (hopefully) full life, there’s sadness, naturally, and even incredulity that the loved one is gone forever, but there’s also a sense of “fairness,” an acknowledgment that the life cycle has been completed, as well as, quite often, relief (for both the sufferer and for those who had to witness his or her suffering). But if on some basic level any death can’t help but seem “wrong,” the loss of a child can only feel obscene. Talk to a parent who’s suffered a son or a daughter’s death—even years later—and the strain to convey even a portion of their sorrow is agonizing to witness, incommunicability the most eloquent expression of their anguish possible. It’s probably not a coincidence that the two couples I know who suffered the death of a child each ended up divorced. It’s possible that they might have split up eventually, but both of the husbands admitted that their partner’s presence couldn’t help but be a daily, corporeal reminder of their child’s death and a shameful, if undeniable, element in the breakup. No one was responsible, it was never a matter of blame, but a new partner, a new home, a new life made them hurt just a little bit less. And with suffering this great, a little can feel like a lot.
Sorrow as a consequence of all manner of familial loss is ordinarily a foregone conclusion. But an argument could be made that the love one feels for a friend, a real friend (“One of [whose] most beautiful qualities,” Seneca wrote in his Letters from a Stoic, “is to understand and be understood”) is in some ways superior to familial love. Our parents have to love us (as we, though perhaps not to the same degree, must love them), just as we are compelled to love our own children. Biology-based, nature-necessitated unconditional love is just that: unconditional. But a friend is a choice (“The soul selects her own society,” Emily Dickinson wrote). A choice made against great odds. Whether good, bad, or (as is most often the case) a maddening mix of both, we all have families. But to find one genuine friend—to discover one person we choose to align ourselves with for life—in a world crowded with what often seems only workmates, neighbours, casual acquaintances, professional contacts, and people to whom we would prefer to remain strangers, is a rare triumph. And to be deeply mourned when death decides that the friendship is over.
As difficult as it would have been to believe at the time, the first friend of mine who died, died young (I was the same age—thirty—when it happened, which seemed, if not ancient, at least bordering on incipient middle-age). Our relationship had always been aggressively ambivalent: a very real, very deep connection based on a mutual love of the right writers and righteous musicians and a shared belief in how serious having fun is and how much fun being serious can be, equalled by an intense competitiveness born of an insecurity that said that two people coming from the same small town couldn’t both possibly go on to create fulfilling lives in the big city based on a love of beautiful sentences, high harmonies, and high ideals. (“It is not enough to succeed,” Wilfred Sheed wrote, paraphrasing La Rochefoucauld; “a friend must also fail.”) One minute you were relieved and emboldened to be looking at someone who truly understood, who really got it, and the next minute, there was that guy who thought he was some kind of big deal, that pretentious little shit from Chatham, Ontario, who thought he was better than everybody else. I don’t have a biological brother, but this was what I imagined having one was like: a lot of laughing, a lot of yelling, and a lot of affection and aggravation so tightly tied up together it was hard to tell sometimes which was which.
When he died—when he died by suicide—we’d had no contact for three years. It wasn’t any one incident or argument that led to the freeze; we’d both independently come to the same conclusion: there simply wasn’t enough oxygen in the room if we both wanted to breathe as deeply and freely as we needed to. He’d long since moved to Montreal, and I was living in Texas when I got the phone call from a mutual friend saying he’d died. I was shocked, of course, but can’t claim to have been unduly despondent. Three years without the exchange of a single spoken or written word when you’re young seems like centuries, and I was knee-deep in the muck of my own life, struggling, like most people approaching or just past thirty, to discover the mud-obscured path I was supposed to be travelling. I talked to my wife (who I met through him) about it, I sent the family a condolence card, I got back to work on my novel. If anything, I was bothered I wasn’t more bothered.
I needn’t have worried—life rarely lets you off that easy. More than two decades later, I still have the same basic dream (although much less frequently now, only a couple of times a year). He’s there, I’m there, and I’m surprised to find he’s alive. I either ask him why people think he’s dead or how it’s possible for him to be deceased yet right here standing in front of me. He never answers. I also usually pay him some kind of oblique compliment (noting the quality of his home library or record collection is a common one). Not enough to make either of us uncomfortable, but enough that he knows I respect him, something, I realize now, I never did—or did enough—when he was alive. For a long time I wondered why, now that I had the chance, I never asked him anything about the fact that he’d taken his own life. Twenty years and many more deaths (including a couple other suicides) later, I don’t wonder anymore. “Whatever can happen at any time can happen today,” Seneca wrote. The mystery isn’t any longer how this or that death happened or why, but that we were ever lucky enough to be alive at all.
Death tends to be most common as a topic of conversation and food for reflection when we’re young, old, or ailing. Although death is usually far removed from childhood or adolescent experience, for that reason alone it’s easier to talk about. Also, because it’s, if not forbidden, at least discouraged as a topic of conversation (like sex), it’s even fun, feels slightly scandalous, to discuss it. Who didn’t toy around with the “Would you rather be shot or stabbed?” question, the “If it had to be one or the other, would you rather drown or suffocate” game?
The desire to be scared in the form of watching horror movies is another one of youth’s ways of flirting with the enticingly unfathomable. In my case, “watch” isn’t the appropriate verb—“gorge” would be more apposite. Not just because it’s more accurate, but because it better captures the tang of my cinematic gluttony. I couldn’t get enough of vampires who bit, mummies who choked, werewolves who clawed and tore, prehistoric monsters risen from their frozen tombs by hydrogen bombs (and man’s nefarious hubris) and driven to stomp, smash, and skewer. Granted, the thrill of the fright was often diluted by the implausibility of the plots or the wooden acting or the dead (and not in a good way) dialogue—or, frequently, all three—but underneath all of the amateurishness there was still the tingle of good old terror. In retrospect, this more than occasional improbability likely aided in maximizing the films’ fright factor. If I hadn’t been intermittently reminded that the werewolf looked more like a college football team’s overly furry, frowning mascot than a half-man, half-wolf killing machine or been made suspicious of those flying saucers that resembled the tinfoil pie plates my mother used for her baking, I might not have been able to stay plunked in front of the television until movie’s end. A little bit of laughter—especially derisive laughter—help makes the terror go down.
