MYTH AND MORTALITY
Testing the Stories
Harry Willson
Copyright 2007 Harry Willson
published by
AMADOR PUBLISHERS
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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Testing the Stories
Contents
V. Stories from Infantile Wishing
D. Someday My Prince Will Come
VI. Stories from the Contemporary Media
VII. Stories from Socio-political Movements
VIII. Stories from Practical Observation
IX. Stories from Religion, Which Preserve Ego
A. Only My Group Has the Truth
X. Stories from Philosophy, Which Transcend Ego
William Blake believed that if one went deep enough, the personal became the universal. I believe it, too. I intend to go very deep, exposing the personal -- it will be up to the reader to determine if anything which approaches the universal has resulted. I recall the young assistant editor who wrote that my topic was not universal enough. She said I had to find something of wider interest and wider application than human mortality. Of course, I realize she wasn't counting the number of people who are mortal. Perhaps she was trying to count the number of people who are willing to think about it.
During the early stages of my life, I was spared direct encounters with Death. My grandparents had died already. Two boys from the neighborhood were killed in the armed forces in World War II, but they were ten years older than I. I watched their parents grieve, but did not miss them, the dead young men, because they had not been close to me.
A six-year-old playmate of my two younger sisters drowned in the creek while I was at high school football practice, and the incident was a serious trauma for my sisters and parents, but somehow Death itself did not touch me.
Elderly persons I had known and loved died while I was away at college and graduate school: the cousin we called "Aunt Mary," who taught me to play the piano; Mr. Mitman, the church elder for whom I had worked on the truck farm for years; Mrs. Hartman, a kind elderly friend across the street. But even all that left me unscathed. I came home for a brief visit, and found one or another simply gone.
The first funeral I attended, I was a pallbearer. I now wonder if that's unusual. My wife's grandfather had died and we went to her home for the funeral. I had not been close to him.
The second funeral I attended I officiated. At age twenty-one, I became student pastor of a Presbyterian Church in northern New Jersey. I drove home from seminary in a raging snowstorm in order to conduct the funeral of a man I had never met. I came to know and love that family later, but at that funeral, Death was still distant. The funeral was a type of performance, a sort of test, of me -- but Death and I were still not acquainted.
Over the next thirteen years I performed many funerals. When the dearly departed were strangers to me, I read the verses that were supposed to be comforting. I remember being upset over the death of a teenager I had never met, killed in a car wreck. Mostly the funerals were of old people, who had been sick. Death was what followed age and illness, mostly.
The message Christian pastors are charged to deliver deals with Death as though it were part of man's punishment for wrong-doing. Victory over Death is the heart of "the gospel." But a young pastor full of vigor and zeal can get by without feeling much of that. I was more concerned in those days about the deaths in Viet Nam, and what I felt was our collective responsibility for causing them, far more than the Christian message of eternal life, and victory over Death.
The hardest funeral for me was the very last one at which I officiated -- a sixteen-year-old favorite of mine, Jeannie, who succumbed after fighting leukemia for several years. Her family persuaded me to preside, even though I had already left the church, in sorrow and anger over that faraway war. My text was from Job: "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord." I spat out the last words with venom, not accepting in my heart that the Lord was good or wise or merciful, or that what he had just done was in any way a blessing.
But all that was almost forty years ago. I haven't gone back to the church. My own children are grown and on their own. Many bridges have gone under the water. My sixth book has been published, Freedom from God: Restoring the Sense of Wonder. Another manuscript is ready: The Wonder of Being Old. It contains some of my musings about this stage of life, and Death.
I don't have to preach at funerals anymore, and it's a good thing, because now I would not be able to quote the old verses without comment, and my comments would reveal my doubts about many things. I'm no longer sure enough of myself to know quite what to say. What I'm inclined to say now, I couldn't have said back then, because I didn't know it, wasn't old enough and hadn't tried on enough elderly people's moccasins.
Several factors contributed to the fact that I was estranged from my parents for more than a decade -- not totally out of touch, but not close. My second marriage seemed to cause some of the tension, but mostly it was my renunciation of Christianity and my aborted career as a clergyman. At bottom I now see the problem was my refusal to remain a child.
My father's letters were full of Bible verses, quoted in hopes that I would come to my senses and get back on track. My replies did not help bridge the growing rift. "You cite texts as if you thought I had forgotten some verse, and if only I would remember it, then I would straighten out. The problem is that I know all those texts, in Greek and Hebrew, and have not forgotten one jot nor tittle. You see, I am not a back-slid Christian. I am a post-Christian. I tried that. I did all that. I tested that and found it doesn't work, for me. I have gone on to the next thing. If I were to do what you expect me to do, or hope I'll do, it would feel like a huge step backward for me."
When I left the church I found myself in a precarious mental state. I was feeling that I had spent my entire adult intellectual life, all my professional expertise, on something which had turned out to be a crock of baloney, putting it politely. But that is not a good state of mind to be in. All kinds of nihilism beckon.
I was "lucky." I found a job teaching sixth graders, and was free to teach whatever came up, largely. The boys and I spent months -- I spent years -- studying the myths and legends and fairy tales of the world. We dug into all those belief-system stories, from all over the world. I found Joseph Campbell, ages before Bill Moyers introduced him to the TV audience, and his writings were like food and drink for a starving man. I gobbled it all up, and reread and studied and inwardly digested the myths of the world.
I began to examine my dreams, and formed groups in which together we examined one another's dreams. I read Freud and Jung -- all about The Unconscious and archetypes. And I found all the broken pieces, which had been me, coming together at last. I had not learned Greek and Hebrew for nothing. Those Scriptures were the basic texts of a belief system, which was the way to inner truth for many. The claim that it was The Only Way was simply ridiculous in the light of all that study of what the peoples of the world have known and believed for ages, but it could function as one of many Ways. That insight allowed a partial reconciliation with my parents. I could let them have their Way. It was fine, for them, even if not for me.
I tried very hard to "get through," to both my parents, for years, by letter. I stayed away, because of one disastrous visit I made there with my new wife, Adela, early in our marriage. But I kept sharing with them what I was learning, in hopes that they would allow me to be me, and that we could be friends, as adults.
It didn't work. They kept trying to push me backward. They kept treating me as a child. Some of my responses became admittedly a little shrill. "This parent/child relationship is hereby ended, for lack of a child!" They didn't think it was clever, or funny, or true.
One of the dream groups helped immensely. My troubled dreams, and the patience and love of the people in the group, finally brought me to see that I must give up "that neurotic hope," as a dear friend put it. That hope that I could be an adult friend of my parents, that hope that they'd be interested in my happiness and further growth rather than their "plans and hopes" for me -- give that up, and be healed. I did, and went through something that felt like grief, including tears and nightmares. But it became calm inside. The letters in both directions said less and less. But I did not tell them to get out of my life altogether, as I might have. I allowed the kind of relationship they seemed satisfied with. "Since he won't obey, we'll keep it cool and keep correct appearances."
The tie was no longer strong and close and binding. I had already gone through grief. I had done all I could, short of obeying, which was out of the question, if I was to be a free and responsible adult human being.
I had not been in my parents' home for eleven years. Two thousand miles separated us. My father was eighty-five years old, and had suffered from emphysema for many years, after smoking heavily since he was twelve years old. My mother was ten years younger and in good health. She had fought a tendency to be overweight all her life. She had worked very hard and earned a rest.
My father's illness worsened. A call came from my sister, Sue. He had suffered an embolism -- an air bubble in the brain, not unlike a stroke, but probably with no brain damage. He was hallucinating badly, mostly nuclear war stuff.
I decided to go visit, alone, in the midst of a bitter cold winter. I entered the hospital room the evening I arrived. The problem started up immediately. "Oh, my boy came home! Aren't you my little boy?"
"No." My first word was, "No." "I am not a boy. I am a man. I am an old man!"
"Oh, well, I didn't mean that."
"That's what you said!"
The visit confirmed my memories of his contrariness. I joined the group which tried to convince him that he must give up driving. "You could have another seizure and hurt someone."
"The doctor's gonna fix that."
"No, he isn't. It could happen again at any time. It is immoral, and unChristian, for you to drive. You could black out and kill a dozen people."
My sister Sue took care of it by talking to the doctor. When he dismissed the old man from the hospital, he wrote a prescription for some medicine. Then on a fresh sheet he wrote a second prescription, which said simply, "No driving."
That settled it. I went out into the cold for groceries, in my father's car, after getting him home from the hospital, and when I returned he greeted me with, "I sold the car." Over the telephone he did it, for a song.
Maybe I tell all this because, if I appear a little contrary and stubborn myself in this story, it's hardly any wonder.
My mother was delighted with this visit, and with another that I made very briefly by bus with a writer friend two summers later. She wanted appearances to be right. The dutiful son comes to see his ailing father from time to time. She and I had quarreled over external appearances long ago. She couldn't believe that I didn't care what the neighbors thought, about anything. Evidently my long absence, and my peculiar life-style, which included divorce, remarriage, periodic job-quitting and career-changing, no visible means of support at all at times, demonstrating a kind of faith in the Cosmos which they would not allow as comparable to their faith in God -- all that had made for strange and strained explanations to the neighbors. Now that I was visiting again, everything was all right, they thought. It didn't seem to amount to much, and wasn't all right with me, because Adela wasn't included, but it was as much connection as there was likely ever to be.
During the bus-trip visit Dad came nearest ever to talking about Death. "I don't want to live to be a hundred, like I thought I did." His grandmother had done so.
"Oh? How so?" I asked.
"Life's not that inter'sting anymore."
"Oh," I said, and thought a minute. "I guess not, then," I added. He gave me a funny look, as if that wasn't what he wanted or expected me to say. I had his evaluation of life in mind, later. If he hadn't told me that, perhaps I would have handled him differently than I did.
The following spring another call came from Sue. More embolisms, more general weakness -- our father wouldn't last long. I called my mother. "Do you want me to come?"
"I'd rather you came for the funeral."
"Oh. All right. Are you all right?"
"It's rough, but we're makin' it, one day at a time."
"Shouldn't he be in a home? You'll exhaust yourself," I told her.
"I'll be all right. I want to do it."
"O.K."
So, I waited for the news that he had died. I had to chuckle when I realized that what still mattered most to my mother was how it would all appear to the neighbors.
Sue called. Dad was likely to pull out of it for now, even though she had thought he would not. I told her about his sentiments of resignation of the previous summer. She had not heard of them at all. "They're not in his mind at all, evidently," I suggested.
"Nope!" she agreed, quickly and forcefully.
In July she called Adela with news. Mom had died. Sue stopped by early in the morning, on her way to work, and found her on an armless, backless stool against the wall, with her head leaned back against the wall, still warm but dead. There hadn't been enough violence to knock her off the stool. Dad, where he had lain for months on the daybed in the same room, was turned away from Mom, not in his normal position.
I had promised Mom I would go for Dad's funeral! When I called Sue, I could feel her wanting me to come, so I agreed. Ann, my other sister, was reacting more emotionally than Sue or I -- "He killed her! He killed her!"
"What does Ann mean?" I asked Sue.
"He demanded too much. Every ten minutes. Day and night. Wouldn't let her turn the light out. She couldn't keep it up. She was exhausted." I learned, in fact, that she had admitted to Sue on Tuesday that she couldn't do it anymore, but when they tried to put him in a home, there was no room. They thought there'd be a place by Saturday. Sue found Mom dead on Friday.
I flew from Albuquerque to Philadelphia and rode up into the Susquehanna West Branch valley with Ann. I arrived at the home I was born in more than fifty years before on a Saturday evening. My sisters, some of our children, some of my grandchildren, friends and neighbors all filled the house. I approached my father in his daybed, and his greeting was, "I think maybe I was too much work for Mother," meaning my mother, not his, although he often called her that.
My sisters tell me that that was his first, and only, so far as they know, spoken acknowledgment of her death. His words and that tone suggested that he was expecting in reply something like, "Oh, don't talk like that," or maybe, "Well, she did what she thought she had to do."
Instead, I replied, totally unpremeditated and sounding as Scottish as my mother, very much in her tone of voice, "So I hear!" He never brought the subject up again, although I did.
A place was found for Dad in a different nursing home, the day after Mom's death. Payment was required in advance, instantly. My sisters arranged the payments, but then kept him at home, for two reasons. My father was required to attend the funeral. I asked if it was really necessary, and Ann burst out, "Yes! He needs to know what he did!" I subsided. The other reason was that everyone, including me and grandchildren and in-laws and boyfriends -- everyone was going to be required to take turns by the hour, according to a written sign-up sheet and schedule which Ann provided, doing what Mom had killed herself trying to do, day and night. Take care of Grandpap.
For the next four days I took my turn, and extra turns, and never relented from what felt like my task. I did not plan it in advance and did not rehearse my lines in any way. I simply continually challenged him that it was his move. Everyone reported that he slept seldom, day or night, yet he often appeared to be sleeping when it was my turn to do what Jessie died trying to do. I did not use the time for rest. I spoke to him anyway, allowing for some kind of subliminal hypnogogic effect. "Let go. Let go. Go. Be on your journey."
There had been tension between Mom and Sue, over the care Dad demanded. His infantile need for special attention grew steadily worse. Sue insisted to Mom, "You must limit him."
"It's easier to give in to him than to fight him."
Sue could hardly watch Mom do what she was doing and refused to do it herself.
"Jessie, come make me comfortable," he demanded.
Sue went to him. "What do you need?" He gave her a blank look. "What do you want?" Sue asked.
"I don't want you. I want Jessie." But he didn't need anything, and didn't even have anything particular in mind.
Sue scolded him and warned Mom again, "You must limit him." But her practical ways disturbed Mom.
"Yer faither's daein'!" she blurted in thick Scottish accent.
"Aye, but you be careful, or he'll be the death o' you first," Sue warned, using one of Mom's Scottish phrases.
"How can you say such a thing? Where did you come from?" Mom asked. A taboo hung around the subject for her, it seemed, the subject of dying, and I wouldn't have thought so, but it was true. When Sue told me all this, I was glad Mom didn't have to deal with my retort. It blurted out o' me as Sue repeated Mom's exclamation, "Yer faither's daein'!"
"Aye, 'n why'n't he gi' on wi' it?" I could talk a little Scots, too. But Mom didn't have to cope with that one. She died first. Maybe she knew what she was doing.
An incident during my earlier visit in the cold came to mind. Dad's first night home from the hospital was wakeful for him. He was up several times and got up to stay at 5:00 a.m. He and Mom slept together on that living room daybed, but he had Mom awake most of the night. I had been upstairs, and was awakened by him several times.
I got up early and found him already up, glaring at the kerosene space heater. "It's broken. Bob'll have to fix it." Bob is Sue's husband.
He had turned switches the wrong way, turned it off, thank the Powers That Be.
I was furious. I lit it, and then lit into him. "You better leave that thing alone. You'll burn the house down. And you're gonna hafta lie still at night. It doesn't matter if you sleep. You can sleep day or night. But at night Jessie must sleep. She must get that rest. If something happens to her, we're all in trouble, especially you." He gave me a funny look, and so, for that matter, did Mom. I appreciated Sue's later troubles, remembering that incident.
Several times near the end Jessie had tried to find relief. She told Sue she couldn't continue. Plans went into motion to put Dad in a nursing home. Then Jessie pulled the string. "I can't do it. Let's see what happens," and plans for the nursing home were dropped. Maybe she really meant it the last time she put the plan in motion, but in the end she still couldn't do it. So she laid down the entire burden. She feared life, what life seemed to be insisting on thrusting upon her -- that her husband be put in a home and she live with that -- she feared Life more than she feared Death.
Sometimes it feels that her fear of what the neighbors would think or say mattered most of all. She slipped away with no violence, at any rate. "We're takin' it one day at a time," she said to me on the phone, not knowing, or not telling, how many days, how few days, there were still to go. She found a way out.
My daughter Mary took her turn at "taking care of Grandpap." Mary is a very competent mother of four and knows about care-giving. "Get me a drink," he ordered, and she got up and did.
"Wipe my eyes," and she got up again and did, removing drops of sweat with a damp cloth.
"Move that blanket."
"Why, Grandpap?" she asked, not getting up.
"Move it. Fold it right."
"Are you cold?"
"No," he declared, shaking his head impatiently.
"Does it bother you?"
"No."
"Then I'm not going to get up and move it just now."
"Mary, you're contrary as a mule."
It struck us all as funny, when Mary retold it, but it revealed still more of what Jessie had had to go through. Sue had heard her mutter, just once, "Shut up, Harry. Just shut up." Without preamble he burst out, when I was there, "I thought I'd be dead by now." Another time he asked no one in particular, "Why doesn't God come and take me?" Another time, sweeping his arm to include all in the room, he said, "I want you all to pray that I will die."
Mom had told me that last one over the phone. "He wants us to pray that he die!" She was having trouble doing it, or even imagining it. Somehow we've been taught to pray that people not die -- sick people, soldiers, people lost at sea or in mines, whoever. Our myths don't deal much with his situation. I almost called it a strange situation, but have decided that it is not really strange anymore. An old person, through with life, but not dead yet -- it is becoming downright common.
Yet I was annoyed with his behest. Once again, as always with him, it was something someone else was supposed to do. "Be dead by now" is passive, totally passive, still not something he has to do. Something he has to deliberately just up and do -- something which is his thing, his business, his responsibility.
And I had some difficulty, challenging him to take up his last task, it felt, because I didn't believe his myth anymore, and neither did he, it turned out, and we didn't have words and metaphors that could help him at all. I tried the metaphors of a journey -- go on, go on through, go on home, cross over. He refused to listen to the idea at all.
I was excused from the night shift, but took a double Sunday morning stint of taking care of Grandpap, while many others went to church. As I entered the living room, he called, "Are we making any progress?"
I looked at him carefully. He appeared a little weaker, perhaps even thinner, although he was literally only skin and bones. He seemed more weary. So I said, "I think maybe so."
Later I wondered about it. He more likely meant did I think he was getting better. He wasn't tuned into the task of getting on with his pending departure, even though it was pending. But for how long could he delay it, by sheer willpower and bull-headedness and mulishness and stubbornness? All those descriptions had been used of him earlier in his life, especially by his wife, our mother.
I was unrelenting in laying his one last task before him. "You have one more thing to do, and you're not doing it." I told him he didn't need to worry, as he insisted on doing, about blankets, paper handkerchiefs, or the light on or off, or even suspicious spots on the skin of his legs and bottom.
You must make your lonesome journey.
You must make it by yourself.
Nobody else can make it for you;
You gotta make it for yourself.
"Go on. Go on a journey. You must go. You know you must. You sang that song so often. You taught it to us. Let go. Go."
I told him his demands for attention didn't have much to do with actual care for his real needs. "You want someone to come over every thirty seconds and reassure you that you haven't died yet. You look afraid."
"Of course, I'm afraid!" He was wide awake and indignant.
"How can you be afraid?" I asked. "After all you taught us? All about how God loves you and Christ has prepared a place for you? About how all is forgiven and we go to a better world? Don't you believe all that? What is there to be afraid of?" He gave his head one negative shake, which had always meant not, "No," but rather, "Now we'll leave off talking about that!"
Ann tried to tell him that Jessie, our mother, had shown him how to do it. Just lean back and let go of life and go to sleep. It was the one occasion in which I felt I had help in what had become my task. But he would not.
"You must close your eyes, and go," I told him. "You do this journey inside there. Do you see a road?"
He shook his head, "No."
"You're a follower of The Way," I told him. "You always liked that name for it. Now you must go down that road. Away out of this world. We'll be all right. You go on ahead. It's time now. Close your eyes, and go. Let go, and go." But he would not.
Another time I asked him, "We're supposed to be like Jesus, right?"
"That's the idea," he said, sounding a little skeptical. Part of the problem for him was that his adversary knew all the verses, better than he did.
"He said he came not to be ministered unto, but to minister. What's your ministry?" We had often discussed the meaning of that word, twenty years earlier as I was "leaving the ministry."
"Well, I can write those checks!"
"No," I said. "Sue has to write them. Your ministry is over, now. Now you must leave it all, and go on." He didn't like it. I suspect, at this later date, that that approach was doomed because of all his negative feelings about my having left "the ministry," that is, professional ecclesiastical status, so long before.
We attended what is called the "viewing" in that part of the world, at the funeral home in the evening. My mother's body was on view. The mortician's art was displayed; quantities of lipstick were altered early on by request. It still didn't look quite right, I thought. Mouth too firm, and turned down sternly. Fingers not twitching. I inherited her twitch, and its absence will be a sure sign that I am dead, as it was in her case.
"Why do I seem to feel so little?" I wondered to myself. Is something the matter with me? No. I felt it before. I grieved already. Back when I quit being the little boy. Not so long ago, really, but before this. We could have been great adult buddies, but, no.
I'm sorry she didn't get to live a few years on her own, free of this task. But then who am I to arrange her life, or to resent what her life consisted of? He took her widowhood away from her.
I was glad, right in the middle of it, that she didn't have to hear me exhort him to be about his true business, to get on with it, to quit stalling, to let go. She would have hated that. We'd have ended up ranting at each other. This peace is better. She knew what she was doing. That's why she didn't want me to come before his funeral. "Yer faither's daein'!"
"Is he? He's hangin' on, it looks to me like. He's deliberately not dying! Where's his courage? Let's see it. I see fear and cowardice and whimpering ego. He wants to live forever. He doesn't care who else dies!"
Thank the Powers That Be, she didn't have to listen to any of that kind of thing. My sisters and I thought it, and said some of it the evening after the funeral, and that was enough.
In order for my father to attend my mother's funeral, as Ann and Sue insisted, it was necessary that paramedics from the fire department take him to the church, and attend to him while there. "He needs to know what he did," Ann had said, but he seemed mostly unaware, in the church. At one point he barked out, over the soft sweet organ prelude, "Why don't they get on with it?" The paramedic reached over and patted him on the shoulder.
What a sentence! I thought. That's just what I've been saying, inside my head, in imaginary conversations with my mother -- "Why'n't he gi' on wi' it?"
After the church service he was taken back home, while we went to the graveside for the final ceremonies. The music and the coffin and the flowers and the limousine ride all reminded me, in a vaguely uncomfortable way, of my distant past as a clergyman. None of it touched me deeply, as one might think the burial of one's mother should.
"They're buryin' yer mither!" Aye, they are. We are. Because she died.
I went to the house, while everybody else was at church waiting for a dinner prepared by the church women for the family. I found a Bible and read aloud the verses my father had slept through at my mother's funeral.
"Let not your hearts be troubled: you believe in God, believe also in me. In my father's house are many mansions, if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself, that where I am there ye may be also."
I asked him if he believed that, that he was going to be with God, where Jesus was. He gave his head that single negative shake.
"No," I said. "I'll not hush. We need to talk about this. You need to hear this, to pay attention. He closed his eyes. "You hear me?" I asked, raising my voice a little, sounding just like my mother. He opened his eyes again. "O.K.?" I insisted.
"Yes," he said. "Go ahead and read it."
I paged in the book, and then read more of what had been read at the funeral an hour earlier.
"Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."
Again I asked him if he believed that.
He said, "Yes, I believe that," but I thought he was saying it to shut me up. I did not believe him.
I tried one more time.
"The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me -- "
He interrupted. "The doctor will make me better."
"No, he won't," I said flatly, surprised at my own patience. "He can't. Nobody can. The time for that is gone. Now you must go through that valley."
He gave that negative shake of his head again and closed his eyes, dismissing me. "You think you'll be the first man who'll live forever?" I asked quietly. He opened his eyes, and shook his head "no" once again, one shake, and closed his eyes.
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found;
Was blind, but now I see.
They sang that at my mother's funeral. I found it strange that at some level I did believe in Grace, and I was not at all sure that my father did. I wondered what he thought, as they sang it. Maybe he didn't hear it. How can a person say he believes something for eighty years, and then in the eighty-ninth year demonstrate that he doesn't believe it? When the time comes to do it, and not just talk and sing about it, he does not do it.
I don't believe that I'm a wretch, as the song says, but I feel more at home in the Cosmos than my father did. The whole process became an uncanny confirmation of my view of Christianity and mythology and life and death. If he had died a triumphant and victorious Christian death, perhaps I would have had to rethink some things once again. But he did not.
When we arrived home after the dinner at the church, I picked up my father and carried him out the door and down the steps and into Mary's van. He did not weigh eighty pounds. Mary drove us to the nursing home.
"I don't like this," he said.
"I don't like it, either," I admitted.
"Why are we doing it, then?" he asked.
"Because no one can take care of you."
He glared at Sue. "She can take care of me!" he declared, not even using her name.
"No, she can't," I stated flatly. "She has a family, a job, and a life to live. It's out of the question." I didn't even look at Sue, but she touched my arm. I never ever considered laying that task on her, and I believe she was grateful.
At the home nurses and orderlies took him away. My sisters and I spent time in the office of the Director of Admissions. We requested no force-feeding and no heroic measures. That would be in the doctor's hands, we were told. Sue was sure the doctor was already in agreement with us. The key phrase would be, "No transfer to the hospital," where the heroic business, and huge expenses, would automatically go into effect.
"He says he wants to die," Sue told the Director, and I let it stand. "He has dozens of people praying that he will die." The Director understood.
We found Dad in his room. I told him, after looking round, "This is a fine place. You can do what you need to do here." The nurses in the room were stunned, I was told later, and Ann felt very uncomfortable. I wasn't noticing. "I don't want you to be mean and unreasonable with these people," I told Dad. "They have a lot of work to do. Be grateful to them for taking care of you. You have work to do, too, there on the inside. You can close your eyes and be on your way, from here."
I thought of introspection, and an exchange the two of us had had about it. I had been trying to share some of what I had been doing, inside there, in my writing and the dream groups and my memories of childhood. "Too much introspection isn't good for you," he wrote to me.
At that time my reply was an angry yelp, "Introspection is not the most important thing. It's the only damn thing." Later I softened a little. If introspection refers to thinking of ego, and ego only, then too much of that is not a good thing. I wondered later, if that was what he meant, but found myself doubting it.
Introspection inevitably leads to thoughts like, "I messed that up."
"I didn't do that very well."
"I wasn't thinking and got it wrong. I'm responsible for what happened, and it makes me feel bad."
My father seldom thought like that, really. He had an uncanny way of finding someone else to blame.
I felt resentment, right there in the nursing home. It seemed to me that remorse and guilt, over what had just happened, would have been enough to do him in, but he felt none. He, who had handed out such quantities of guilt to others, felt none at all, it seemed.
But I wasn't sure of that, either, later. Maybe that was why he was afraid to die. Now God'll really tan his hide, for what he did to Jessie...
"The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak," Jesus said, when the disciples fell asleep at a time when he thought they should be watching.
"The spirit is willing, but the flesh is too strong!" a fellow told us years later, as his mother's body lingered after her mind and spirit had gone on ahead.
"The flesh is weak, but the spirit isn't willing," I thought to myself as we left the nursing home that late afternoon.
Sue's husband, Bob, took me back to the home next day, so that I could say goodbye to Dad before returning to New Mexico. We found him whimpering. "Why did you let them do this to me?"
"I'm doing it to you, too."
"Why?"
"You can't take care of yourself anymore."
"They don't take care of me here, either."
"Sure, they do. You're warm and clean and dry and fed."
"They don't come when I call," he wailed.
"Oh, of course not," I said. "They have work to do. No one can do what Jessie tried to do. She shouldn't have tried. She died, trying."
He seemed to feel, even yet, no remorse over her death. No concern for Pippin, the little dog that supposedly meant so much to him. No concern for Ann or Sue, and their grief over their mother's death. No perceptible concern for me at all --
He reared up in the bed and looked more alert and more purposeful that I had seen him at any time on this visit. He raised his arm and pointed a finger at me and emphasized each word with that finger, declaring, "I want you to move back to Pennsylvania, soon and permanently."
I chuckled, and laughed it off, and said, "Oh, I can't do that. I have my life, and it's out there in New Mexico. We all have our lives to live. We're all doing fine. And you have your journey to take."
He wilted. The conversation languished, and then picked up a little, between Bob and me.
Dad interrupted, and said to me, "Goodbye, then." I looked at him, a little blankly. "Good luck out there, and goodbye," he added.
I chuckled again, grinning at Bob, raising an eyebrow, as if to say, "This is what he's good at." I turned back to Dad and he repeated again, "Goodbye, then."
It was a dismissal. The final dismissal. Obey, or be gone. He's sending me on my journey! "Oh!" I cried. "You're being the tough one! Why are you so contrary?"
"Goodbye, then." And it became his only refrain. He said it half a dozen more times, as Bob and I tried to resume the "visit." He would have no more. Just, "Goodbye, then." We finally left, with grim chuckles, Bob and I. He really told me off, and dismissed me, for good. There was no happy noble ending, no reconciliation, at all. Those were his last words to me. "Goodbye, then."
So, those of you who have fathers who approve of you, rejoice and be exceeding glad. That is, providing that you are at the same time running your own life and not being someone else's representative or appendage.
I recalled my father's unhappiness at the geographical distance between us. He really disapproved of it from the beginning, but he was stuck. Almost thirty years earlier I had gone two thousand miles away, not knowing exactly where I was going, on direct marching orders from the Lord of Hosts. Then after many years of service I ceased believing in the Lord of Hosts, but the distance remained in place. My father did not get unstuck from the notion that the Lord outranked him, until the very end. Then, when it was clear that he didn't believe that stuff either, he was able to say what he'd wanted to say for decades: "I want you to move back to Pennsylvania, soon and permanently." But by then it was ridiculous, and so he was left with, "Goodbye, then."
For me it was the final release. You can't please him. You will not ever please him. So leave off trying, and drop it. "What do you want to be when you grow up, Harry?" the therapist asked me once, when I was in my thirties, old enough to know better than to live my life trying to please Daddy.
It's a tough one. Jessie once told me that Ann was an extension of her. I didn't please her by stating, "Oh, that's too bad. When does she get to be herself?"
Jean Pierre Rampal's mother wishes that the greatest flautist in the history of our species would quit tootling on that darn thing and get serious and go to medical school and become a doctor.
"Goodbye, then."
When I left him in the nursing home, I did not smell Death near Dad. I had been a clergyman long enough to become familiar with that smell, and it was absent. When I left Pennsylvania, I did not believe that he would die soon. He was strong, and contrary. I was sure that his care would take what money there was, and that life would be very difficult for Sue, the only one of the three of us who lived nearby. The cash on hand would last four months. If the house hadn't sold at a fair market price by then, he'd go on Medicaid and stay at the home, with a tally running. When the house sold, the bill at the home would be paid, and the home would continue chewing up the balance. When it was all gone, after two years, more or less, he would stay at the home, with Medicaid picking up the tab.
One week after I arrived home, Sue called. The nurses found Dad in the bed dead at 5:30 in the morning. For my sisters' sake, to make it "clean," I flew once again to Pennsylvania.
What happened as he died? How did my father go? No one knows. I for certain do not know. My journal says that I was restless that night. Sue's call woke me at 5:30 a.m., our time.
Life is like hang-gliding, I notice. You can glide for a very long time. You can catch updrafts and find yourself higher than you were for a while. You can soar and soar. But, finally, you must come down. You can't glide forever. You can land gracefully, before you're exhausted, or you can simply let gravity defeat the exhausted mind and muscles. Either way, you must come down.
Did he crash? I wondered. Did his willpower finally give way before the crushing weight that pulled him down?
I do not know. I'd like to believe that he finally did let go deliberately, and that he knew a moment of surrender and peace as he did it.
More and more I see deliberation in my mother's dying. She knew what she was doing. She quit. She gave up the ghost. Found a way out, and demonstrated at the same time her strange personal fearlessness. Her method seems very abrupt, because we were all concentrating on the long, slow agonizing process of our father.
I had asked Ann, "He hasn't refused to eat?" This was at the time of Mom's funeral.
"No."
"You don't force it on him?"
"Oh, no! But I offer it."
"And he eats."
"A little."
But, then, in the nursing home, for all those old fussy reasons that revealed how spoiled he was all his life, what with that incredibly long list of things he had refused to eat all his eighty-eight years, he did, I'm sure, refuse to eat what they offered him, and thus he did, in ten days, die. I just hope there was a willingness in him.
Remembering all this and recording it, and thinking about it at great length, is doing a strange thing to me. I remained young a little long, that is, psychologically attached to parents. Now I feel that I am turning old a little early, thinking all these heavy thoughts, working on it, chewing on it, like a dog with a bone.
I've had people ask me, "Why are you so concerned about Death?" Or, "Do you think there's any significance in the fact that you're always thinking about dying?"
"These plays of yours, the novels, this myth book -- all about Death. What are you doing, Harry? Have you had a personal medical report you aren't telling us about?"
No, nothing like that. But Old Death sits on my shoulder, watching it all. And he hangs around, and makes a formal call, from time to time. A brother-in-law. The butcher next door. A dear friend. My friend's father, and then her mother. But sometimes he wanders off and we think we can forget him. Sometimes he seems several decades early, what with wars and murders and epidemics and what are euphemistically called "accidents." And sometimes it seems he's a little overdue -- why all this lingering, in utter uselessness and weakness?
Thinking like this is having an effect on me. I can't get everything done in one day, and I suspect that trying to do so too frantically would bring Old Death into the picture sooner, but I do keep him in my mind. I'm trying to keep life clean and open and honest. He'll interrupt, when he will. I do not intend to let fear of him hinder, or even affect in any way, what we do meanwhile. We'll continue to seek the Heart's Desire.
Meanwhile, it is not morbid to think of Death. It is cowardly and stupid not to.
"So, what do you think?" someone could ask.
I don't like it, some of it. I don't like not being in control of it. I don't like the indignity that is common with it. I don't like the insincere hoverers.
But I do like the infusion of honesty that comes with it. I do like the grim reality of it. I do like Truth.
I felt very little loss at the time of the deaths of my parents. What was to lose had already been lost. Lost and gone forever. I was detached from it all. I was doing all that flying for my sisters' sake, and I think they were glad of it.
My mother's death had come as a surprise. I had done for my father what his pastor might have been expected to do. Helped him die, or tried to. Read Scripture to him. Reminded him of his faith. But I did not baby him. "Be a man, my father." I had no regrets in that regard.
Nevertheless, the philosophical implications of the grim fact of Death itself up close, in the gene pool sense, are heavy anyway. Life is short, even when it's eighty-eight years long. Life is fragile. Life can be squandered, and is spent, on one thing or another, a little at a time, at all times, whether we pay attention or not. And then it is all gone.
Tempus fugit. Time flees. "Time flies" doesn't tell it all. Time flees, hurrying away, hastening away from our impotent attempts to grasp and hold it. Time flees. You don't have to kill it, ever. Inexorably it marches quickly on, on and gone. Each new moment is a gift.
I wrote poems and recorded memories on the flight east. They lost my luggage on the way -- I saw it on the tarmac all by itself as the plane pulled out of a connecting airport. I wrote, in the middle of a heavy page: "Lost luggage is low on a philosopher's list of worries. So cool it." My daughter, Mary, and I had another pleasant four-hour ride together in her van, and we arrived after dark.
The funeral next morning was almost perfunctory. Very few townspeople attended. "It was Mom they liked," I thought. I was struck by what felt like untruths at the church services. The pastor spoke of "Harry's faith," meaning my father's. Maybe he had to. I would have steered clear of that topic myself. I'd have been inclined to emphasize the sovereignty of God, maybe, or the inexorable, undeviating, overarching Justice, wishing a little wistfully, maybe, that I could believe in it myself and consistently act accordingly at all times.
I was feeling heavy. What kind of old person will I turn into? How dictatorial are these genes? Can I do anything about traits in me, that I didn't like in them? Jessie's rant and Harry's thoughtlessness? If I intend to do something, I don't think it should be put off. Old people turn into what they've been all along. Take a good look at this, Harry. Pay attention.
They were singing, "Count Your Blessings." Yes. Excellent idea. I did so, while they sang:
[1] My wife, Adela. I am luckier -- doesn't that mean "more blessed?" -- than I ever could have imagined, to have her to share the work with, and to find together tenderness and meaning and even cosmic purpose.
[2] My children, who are excellent human beings without having to strain to live up to my expectations.
[3] Health and intelligence.
[4] A kind of caring, or passion, or something, which draws me to people and which they respond to.
[5] Work to do, lots of it, more than I can finish in a normal course.
When I returned home, people here startled me, telling me that my father had done what I told him to. He let go. It only took him twelve days to do it. He got through. He crossed over. Perhaps the process was not as long and drawn-out in reality as it seemed to me to be.
All that was twenty years ago. Since then I have been working on this book. It seems to me that it would be helpful if we humans thought more carefully and more extensively about death. My mother surprised us all by dying, when she did and the way she did. And my father's way of handling it indicated, to me at least, that the stories and myths we've been using need to be reconsidered.
At first I called my book, Myths to Die By, mimicking a title Joseph Campbell used, Myths to Live By. What stories and images and metaphors do we use among ourselves, we humans, to help us deal with the fact that we are mortal?
My original title would never do, I realized, since most of my intended readers would be put off by that. The majority of humans do not want to think about dying.
But life has a way of insisting sometimes, so I persisted. I began to list all the stories I could find, and then began to evaluate them. Some may be more helpful than others. I evaluate them from a humanist perspective. Science and reason, good sense, and common sense, rather than irrational authority, will be our guides.
Ernest Becker wrote a book back in the 1960's entitled, The Denial of Death. His thesis is that culture itself is created by psychological repression and that the content of that repression is refusal on our part to accept our mortality. He believes that this happens in all cultures. The purpose of the culture, primitive or modern, is to deny the fact of death. Those rare individuals who don't go along blindly with the lie which denies our mortality are out of step with whatever culture they are living in.
Becker, like many European and North American writers, may be extrapolating too much from our culture to "all cultures," but his book is extremely provocative, more so now than when he first wrote it. Our own culture, which is the one he is really writing about, is extremely confused, and the way we deal with death makes Becker's thesis relevant to our daily lives.
Jessica Mitford wrote The American Way of Death, which describes the funeral customs of our culture. Elizabeth Kubla-Ross wrote several books about dying, and "death and dying" has become an encyclopedia category, and a subject for many subsequent books, including this one.
The hospice movement has been revived, in which religious groups prepare individuals for the inevitable. This is a hopeful trend, reversing the denial which is typical of most religious enterprises. Indeed, denial hovers over almost every aspect of human existence in our culture.
A debate about doctor-assisted suicide rages in the media and the courts. This debate is totally inappropriate at this time, since we have not yet established a system of universal health care. Before that is done, cost accounting will inevitably take precedence over science, ethics, morals, fairness, theology or any other consideration.
As a culture we seem to be talking about death nowadays more than we did when Becker proposed The Denial of Death. Perhaps this is an illusion of mine, caused by my advancing age. Yet I suspect the falsehood he spotted is still alive and influencing how we think and behave. To a large extent we are still denying the simple fact of our mortality. Our culture is confused, on a grand scale.
There has never been a nation more obsessed with the preparation of instruments of death on a mass scale and at the same time so inadequate in the preparation of individuals for the experience. After sixty years of preparation for mutually assured destruction, our national leaders still prate about and plan for deaths in the dozens of millions, and argue among themselves as to how many such deaths are "acceptable." For a while there was no enemy in sight worthy of the quantity of hostility or expense involved in this effort, yet our government continued to prepare the materials and instruments which are enough to ensure the extinction of the process of life itself on this planet.
Now there is an enemy, but the new war is not aimed at an enemy but at a tactic. "Terror" is a tactic which appeals to the desperate and the insane. A "war on terror" will be never-ending, since there is no defined enemy to defeat, and no way to define victory. It becomes, then, a rationale for permanent war and an ever-escalating war budget. And yet only a tiny minority of our people participate in any real objection to this death obsession of the government.
For a short while the talk was that the budget would be reduced after the end of the Cold War, but it wasn't. The ingenuity of the vast majority of our scientists is still dedicated to weapons of mass annihilation. Upgraded nuclear weapons, and biochemical weapons as such, have not yet been denounced and scrapped, but instead consume an ever larger proportion of the national military budget.
Denial is widespread. Experimentation on unknowing citizens in the field of "nuclear medicine," in ways that remind one of Auschwitz, has been denied even in the face of exposure, and is still not being dealt with frankly. Denial has been the pattern in analyzing the effects of Agent Orange, and in even defining what is called Gulf War Syndrome and its possible causes.