My love's splashing oar
My friend Robin says the in breath is the present, the out breath is the past. I've struggled to find solace in Buddhism, perhaps a path, but it is hard for me to be comforted by impermanence, even as it crowds my vision in this late winter. But what Robin says offers a path through our sorrows, both real and anticipated.
Death has been no stranger of late; you know of what I speak, the grief caught in your throats.
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd,
And the great star early droop'd in the western
sky in the night
I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-
returning spring.
Walt Whitman writes here of death, the death of Abraham Lincoln, yoking mourning and spring, the time of the new, of rebirth, of planting. Towards the end of the poem, he travels with death, companionably, something unlike Dante: "Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me/And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,/And in the middle as with companions." And Emily Dickinson: "Because I could not stop for Death--He kindly stopped for
me--The Carriage held but just Ourselves--And Immortality." Is there ever any shadow between death and ourselves? Our path forward is as much defined by the improbable moment of our birth, when seen from the perspective of galaxies, to the moment of our death, which embraces us on every in breath.
Anne Bradstreet, who lived here, in the new country of the 1600s (nay, the old country, already inhabited, with people, with trees) wrote a poem about death titled "Before the Birth of One of Her Children," because that is what it was, what it is, for women: birth and death, impossible to separate. "How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend," she writes, before beseeching the still living to
"[L]ook to my little babes, my dear remains" to protect them from injury when she has shuffled off this mortal coil, as Hamlet put things.
From the Chippewa, translated by Frances Densmore, a poem: "My Love Has Departed."
A loon,
I thought it was
But it was
My love's
Splashing oar.
Densmore was an American anthropologist and ethnographer born in Red Wing, Minnesota who collected thousands of recordings at the turn of the last century for the Smithsonian Institute--from the Chippewa, the Mandan, the Hidatsa, the Sioux, the northern Pawnees of Oklahoma, the Papago of Arizona, the Pueblo of the Southwest, the Seminoles of Florida, the Kuna of Panama. What do we make of her quest to preserve the present, which already contained the astonishing and then terrible past, to commit those words to a future listener?
Margaret Atwood's poem "Death of a Young Son By Drowning."
He, who navigated with success
the dangerous river of his own birth
once more set forth
on a voyage of discovery
into the land I floated on
but could not touch to claim.
His feet slid on the bank,
the currents took him;
he swirled with ice and trees in the swollen water
and plunged into distant regions,
his head a bathysphere;
through his eyes' thin bubbles
he looked out, reckless adventurer
on a landscape stranger than Uranus
we have all been to and some remember.
There was an accident; the air locked,
he was hung in the river like a heart.
They retrieved the swamped body,
cairn of my plans and future charts,
with poles and hooks
from among the nudging logs.
It was spring; the sun kept shining, the new grass
leapt to solidity;
my hands glistened with details.
After the long trip I was tired of waves.
My foot hit rock. The dreamed sails
collapsed, ragged.
I planted him in this country
like a flag.
A woman I know says we are just terrible at thinking about, talking about death in this country. She is just back from Africa. You can die in Africa from an asthma attack, she says.
A Yoruba funeral poem from Nigeria.
I cannot carry it
I cannot carry it
If I could carry it,
I would carry it.
When the elephant dies in the bush
something is carried into the house.
When the buffalo dies in the forest,
something is carried into the house.
But when the mouse dies in the house,
something is thrown in the bush.
The reverence of certain deaths, the workaday nature of others.
The other night, while we played Scrabble, Asher shared that he thought the saddest death was when a baby dies in its mommy's tummy because that baby doesn't even get a day in life.
The twins and I were recently reading a book called When Dinosaurs Die, by the delightful Marc Brown, he of Arthur fame, and one page depicts a little dinosaur praying at the side of the bed: "God, please bring Daddy back." Elijah sat straight up in bed (what? that's an option?) He put his hands together and prayed out loud: "God, please bring Aunt Pat back." He peeked an eye open at me.
"Do I say amen?"
I said, "It's traditional."
"Amen."
A few minutes passed.
"What if God brings back the wrong Aunt Pat?"
I immediately thought of the old story "The Monkey's Paw." Published in 1902 and written by W.W. Jacobs, three wishes are granted to the owner of a mummified monkey's paw, said to be capable of granting three wishes. Mr. White makes the first wish, for two hundred pounds to pay off his mortgage. The next day, his adult son Herbert is killed in an accident at the factory where he works--the company makes a goodwill payment of two hundred pounds to the bereft Whites. Mrs. White's grief-stricken next wish is that Herbert come back to life, despite Mr. White's premonition of summoning his son's mutilated and decomposing body. When a knock comes at the door, Mrs. White begins to unlock the door, while Mr.White, terrified of "the thing outside," uses the last wish.
"The knocking ceased suddenly, although the echoes of it were still in the house."
Mrs. White gives out a "long loud wail of disappointment and misery."
Outside, the "street lamp flickering opposite shone on a quiet and deserted road."
I couldn't help imagining opening our door and greeting another Aunt Pat, not gruesome in the manner of a Victorian ghost story, but bespectacled, comfortably dressed, yet a stranger. How does God keep track of all of the Aunt Pats? It's a legitimate question.
Walking the dog yesterday morning, the wind was gentle, with the slightest nod to spring. A woman we passed trilled: "Feels like it's almost spring!"
What can we say about death, we thick-with-denial Americans? I read an article in the newspaper this week about how resistant senior citizens are to the moniker, how loathe to frequent senior citizen centers, how they cleave to sport and travel. Apparently it's a problem for the people charged with running these centers: how to convince the elderly to partake of their services when elderly is always the next decade, and then the next, on and on, ad infinitum.
I just read The Overstory, by Richard Powers, which is a beautiful, staggering novel about the existential crisis facing us: the destruction of the earth necessary for our very survival. One character blames the end of the world on fiction itself: "The world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people." Of course, Powers' novel is the counterargument--it is a love song that is also an elegy for the earth and a call to action. The past, when forests covered this country; the present, when you read the novel; the future, which cannot be said, any longer, to be unforeseeable. Spring, in the near term, may not be capable of offering up Whitman's lilacs, Atwood's new grass.
The in breath is the present. The out breath is the past. But who are we if we do not contemplate a future? It is that future that haunts us when we mourn the lost--the moments we will not have. It is the future drifting on ahead of me that sends me scavenging for possibilities--a change in diet, a change in doctors, the news of a clinical trial. Perhaps the better way is to live in the present, to look up from my fingers tapping at my keyboard to bear witness to this moment, in my warm kitchen, with the twins spooning applesauce into their mouths, Avery sending videos of swimming otters, Zach sending a photo of rock climbing, Zoe with missives from college, Cam inviting us to dinner at his new apartment in the city. I can't quit the future, though. I haven't been able to stop wanting more, more of this. Which is what we mourn when we mourn.
We have to learn to mourn the earth and to consider possible futures and what paths lead to them.
We have to learn to live in the present, in the in breath, to pause on the fact that at this moment, we may have the great, good fortune to dwell in this particular space, with these particular people (and with that thought, borrowed from Rebecca Makkai, can I also urge you to read The Great Believers, which is about the lost generation of gay men to AIDs, told as the struggles between a few lost people).
Spring is coming. Winter is still here. Last year's autumn, with the beginning of first grade, my trip to California, the small pleasures of Halloween, the change in medicine, what have I already lost?--that autumn is already distilled by the softening trap of memory. It's many out breaths ago.
We humans are marvelous at contradictions. We commit words to the page, and imagine readers.
Death has been no stranger of late; you know of what I speak, the grief caught in your throats.
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd,
And the great star early droop'd in the western
sky in the night
I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-
returning spring.
Walt Whitman writes here of death, the death of Abraham Lincoln, yoking mourning and spring, the time of the new, of rebirth, of planting. Towards the end of the poem, he travels with death, companionably, something unlike Dante: "Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me/And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,/And in the middle as with companions." And Emily Dickinson: "Because I could not stop for Death--He kindly stopped for
me--The Carriage held but just Ourselves--And Immortality." Is there ever any shadow between death and ourselves? Our path forward is as much defined by the improbable moment of our birth, when seen from the perspective of galaxies, to the moment of our death, which embraces us on every in breath.
Anne Bradstreet, who lived here, in the new country of the 1600s (nay, the old country, already inhabited, with people, with trees) wrote a poem about death titled "Before the Birth of One of Her Children," because that is what it was, what it is, for women: birth and death, impossible to separate. "How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend," she writes, before beseeching the still living to
"[L]ook to my little babes, my dear remains" to protect them from injury when she has shuffled off this mortal coil, as Hamlet put things.
From the Chippewa, translated by Frances Densmore, a poem: "My Love Has Departed."
A loon,
I thought it was
But it was
My love's
Splashing oar.
Densmore was an American anthropologist and ethnographer born in Red Wing, Minnesota who collected thousands of recordings at the turn of the last century for the Smithsonian Institute--from the Chippewa, the Mandan, the Hidatsa, the Sioux, the northern Pawnees of Oklahoma, the Papago of Arizona, the Pueblo of the Southwest, the Seminoles of Florida, the Kuna of Panama. What do we make of her quest to preserve the present, which already contained the astonishing and then terrible past, to commit those words to a future listener?
Margaret Atwood's poem "Death of a Young Son By Drowning."
He, who navigated with success
the dangerous river of his own birth
once more set forth
on a voyage of discovery
into the land I floated on
but could not touch to claim.
His feet slid on the bank,
the currents took him;
he swirled with ice and trees in the swollen water
and plunged into distant regions,
his head a bathysphere;
through his eyes' thin bubbles
he looked out, reckless adventurer
on a landscape stranger than Uranus
we have all been to and some remember.
There was an accident; the air locked,
he was hung in the river like a heart.
They retrieved the swamped body,
cairn of my plans and future charts,
with poles and hooks
from among the nudging logs.
It was spring; the sun kept shining, the new grass
leapt to solidity;
my hands glistened with details.
After the long trip I was tired of waves.
My foot hit rock. The dreamed sails
collapsed, ragged.
I planted him in this country
like a flag.
A woman I know says we are just terrible at thinking about, talking about death in this country. She is just back from Africa. You can die in Africa from an asthma attack, she says.
A Yoruba funeral poem from Nigeria.
I cannot carry it
I cannot carry it
If I could carry it,
I would carry it.
When the elephant dies in the bush
something is carried into the house.
When the buffalo dies in the forest,
something is carried into the house.
But when the mouse dies in the house,
something is thrown in the bush.
The reverence of certain deaths, the workaday nature of others.
The other night, while we played Scrabble, Asher shared that he thought the saddest death was when a baby dies in its mommy's tummy because that baby doesn't even get a day in life.
The twins and I were recently reading a book called When Dinosaurs Die, by the delightful Marc Brown, he of Arthur fame, and one page depicts a little dinosaur praying at the side of the bed: "God, please bring Daddy back." Elijah sat straight up in bed (what? that's an option?) He put his hands together and prayed out loud: "God, please bring Aunt Pat back." He peeked an eye open at me.
"Do I say amen?"
I said, "It's traditional."
"Amen."
A few minutes passed.
"What if God brings back the wrong Aunt Pat?"
I immediately thought of the old story "The Monkey's Paw." Published in 1902 and written by W.W. Jacobs, three wishes are granted to the owner of a mummified monkey's paw, said to be capable of granting three wishes. Mr. White makes the first wish, for two hundred pounds to pay off his mortgage. The next day, his adult son Herbert is killed in an accident at the factory where he works--the company makes a goodwill payment of two hundred pounds to the bereft Whites. Mrs. White's grief-stricken next wish is that Herbert come back to life, despite Mr. White's premonition of summoning his son's mutilated and decomposing body. When a knock comes at the door, Mrs. White begins to unlock the door, while Mr.White, terrified of "the thing outside," uses the last wish.
"The knocking ceased suddenly, although the echoes of it were still in the house."
Mrs. White gives out a "long loud wail of disappointment and misery."
Outside, the "street lamp flickering opposite shone on a quiet and deserted road."
I couldn't help imagining opening our door and greeting another Aunt Pat, not gruesome in the manner of a Victorian ghost story, but bespectacled, comfortably dressed, yet a stranger. How does God keep track of all of the Aunt Pats? It's a legitimate question.
Walking the dog yesterday morning, the wind was gentle, with the slightest nod to spring. A woman we passed trilled: "Feels like it's almost spring!"
What can we say about death, we thick-with-denial Americans? I read an article in the newspaper this week about how resistant senior citizens are to the moniker, how loathe to frequent senior citizen centers, how they cleave to sport and travel. Apparently it's a problem for the people charged with running these centers: how to convince the elderly to partake of their services when elderly is always the next decade, and then the next, on and on, ad infinitum.
I just read The Overstory, by Richard Powers, which is a beautiful, staggering novel about the existential crisis facing us: the destruction of the earth necessary for our very survival. One character blames the end of the world on fiction itself: "The world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people." Of course, Powers' novel is the counterargument--it is a love song that is also an elegy for the earth and a call to action. The past, when forests covered this country; the present, when you read the novel; the future, which cannot be said, any longer, to be unforeseeable. Spring, in the near term, may not be capable of offering up Whitman's lilacs, Atwood's new grass.
The in breath is the present. The out breath is the past. But who are we if we do not contemplate a future? It is that future that haunts us when we mourn the lost--the moments we will not have. It is the future drifting on ahead of me that sends me scavenging for possibilities--a change in diet, a change in doctors, the news of a clinical trial. Perhaps the better way is to live in the present, to look up from my fingers tapping at my keyboard to bear witness to this moment, in my warm kitchen, with the twins spooning applesauce into their mouths, Avery sending videos of swimming otters, Zach sending a photo of rock climbing, Zoe with missives from college, Cam inviting us to dinner at his new apartment in the city. I can't quit the future, though. I haven't been able to stop wanting more, more of this. Which is what we mourn when we mourn.
We have to learn to mourn the earth and to consider possible futures and what paths lead to them.
We have to learn to live in the present, in the in breath, to pause on the fact that at this moment, we may have the great, good fortune to dwell in this particular space, with these particular people (and with that thought, borrowed from Rebecca Makkai, can I also urge you to read The Great Believers, which is about the lost generation of gay men to AIDs, told as the struggles between a few lost people).
Spring is coming. Winter is still here. Last year's autumn, with the beginning of first grade, my trip to California, the small pleasures of Halloween, the change in medicine, what have I already lost?--that autumn is already distilled by the softening trap of memory. It's many out breaths ago.
We humans are marvelous at contradictions. We commit words to the page, and imagine readers.
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