The Shades

 My family and I just got back from a week in Michigan, where we were mostly insulated from the daily reminders of the tragedy we had just been through, as my dad died from cancer. 

Now that I'm in Florida again, though, I'm definitely back in the presence of the shades. Every place I go in the house or the neighborhood reminds me of some awful, or sometimes sweet, scene from the last four months. 

The one that came back to mind most strongly this afternoon was one of the sweet ones: the time dad and I were walking to a restaurant one block over, and he turned to me to say that he thought our family would be okay, when all of this was over. 

"Of course, we'll miss each other," he said. "And I don't want to miss each other. But perhaps we'll meet again someday. In eternity." 

Of all the horrible, sad, heartbreaking, and touching things I saw and heard over the last five months—that one interchange remains the only one that brought literal tears to my eyes. 

I've been trying ever since to figure out why.

Perhaps it's just because I wanted it so much to be true—that we would meet again someday. And in that moment, somehow, the sheer strength of the wish made it seem like it must be true. 

I imagined that dad and I really would meet in some impossible future and impossible land—perhaps in "The End, that great god," as W.S. Merwin called it—

 in the black garden

And its court, with the Dodos and the Great Auks. 

But I know that's not actually how it will go. Intellectually, I am not a believer in a literal definition of personal immortality. 

And having witnessed dad's death and seen his body taken away, I agree too with David Plante's heartbreaking but profoundly true realization after the death of his partner of forty years: 

"Death unites no one with no one and loves no one."

But, as I said in a previous post, I think it's important that my dad didn't say we'd meet again at some specific point in the future; or even in the next life. He said "in eternity." 

And in Spinoza's understanding of the universe, I think this is true. In the sense that we all can be thought of sub specie aeternitatis, dad's life exists and will exist always; he belongs to all that "having been must ever be" (Wordsworth). 

On a related note, I was reading Walter Kaufmann's book about existentialism and death the other week. 

One of the essays in that volume, about "Death without Dread" had held a great meaning for me in my early twenties, when I was wrestling with my own fear of mortality. 

Revisiting it now in my thirties, I no longer find it to be quite the final word in wisdom that it seemed to me at the time.

Kaufmann in many ways just channels and redirects the fear of death into a fear of dying—he plainly still dreads the loss of mental and physical capacity that comes with age. His worst fear is becoming "a vegetable" (his term). And who can blame him? 

And so, he endorses a pragmatic approach to assisted suicide. 

One imagines Kaufmann would agree with Hunter S. Thompson's suicide note: "67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. [...] 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt."

It's not an attitude one often sees defended in print. The only people we hear from, after all, are the ones who haven't yet decided suicide is preferable to living. 

And both Kaufmann and Thompson are surely right that one shouldn't hold such a stance in contempt—still less morally judge or shame the people who are forced to it. 

Rather, I think Schopenhauer had it right: suicide is not a crime or a wrong—but it may be a futility. 

Kaufmann disagrees. He thinks it is a perfectly rational response to certain conditions of life.

Kaufmann's view is that the point of human life is found in work—in achievement. Once you can no longer write your great works, found your world-altering organizations, etc., you should sign off. 

It's a very forbidding Thomas Carlyle "show me thy work!" kind of attitude. And it made all the sense in the world to me when I was twenty-three. 

Dad's process of dying, though, made me realize that this attitude to life leaves a few crucial things out. Like: how are you to know when your work is behind you? 

Dad for one kept up his ministry until his last breath. Even when he was struggling to find the words and string sentences together, he was still touching people around him with his smiles and his talk of "a warm heart brimming with love." 

Kaufmann's attitude is one natural to an intellectual in the prime of life, who can conceive of nothing worse than losing mental capacity. 

But anyone who has lived with someone with dementia or a deteriorating mental condition knows that the value of human life—the value of what people can contribute to those around them—is not reduced to zero just because they are losing IQ points. 

Thompson's cut-off age of 67 was indeed the age Dad reached when he died. But I would not have traded a single one of those years, or wished his death to come a day sooner. 

It was in his last twenty-four hours, after all, that he turned to me with a smile and said "Hi Boon" for the last time (using his nickname for me). 

What Kaufmann seems to have left out is that losing the ability to think does not mean losing the ability to love. And dad was still giving and receiving love into his last days. 

The other thing that Kaufmann was perhaps underestimating was that death always comes in the end. We are entitled to ask: does the one inevitability in the universe really need any help from us in hastening its arrival? 

And so, having been through this process with my dad, I am now less likely to agree with Kaufmann's essay, and much more inclined to side with Louis MacNeice: 

... oh my friend,

Can you not take it merely on trust that life is

The only thing worth living and that dying 

Had better be left to take care of itself in the end? 

Kaufmann quotes Heine's bitter concluding words in the poem "Morphine" (which themselves echo the wisdom of the ancients, including Sophocles and Job): "sleep is good, death is better/ best of all is never to have been born."

This too seemed about right to me in my early twenties. 

Now that I have seen more of life, though—how short it can be and how little outside assistance death needs in keeping its appointments—MacNeice again makes more sense: 

For to have been born is in itself a triumph 

Among all that waste of sperm

And it is gratitude to wait the proper term

Or, if not gratitude, duty. [...]

And while I sympathize 

With the wish to quit, to make the great refusal,

I feel that such a defeat is also treason, [...]

A fire should be left burning 

Until it burns itself out;

We shan't have another chance to dance and shout

Once the flames are silent. ("Autumn Journal")

One thing that Kaufmann observes that still sounds exactly right, however, is that death does impart a value to life that it would lack if it really did last forever. 

Kaufmann observes repeatedly in these essays that a life—any life—that went on without end, for all time, would be a living hell. 

As D.H. Lawrence put it: 

[...] if there were not an absolute, utter forgetting

and a ceasing to know, a perfect ceasing to know

and a silent, sheer cessation of all awareness

how terrible life would be!

how terrible it would be to think and know, to have consciousness! [...]

But dipped, once dipped in dark oblivion

the soul has peace, inward and lovely peace.

And so, as powerful as that wish of mine was and still is to see my dad again someday—in some "black garden" or Hades or wherever the shades congregate—I couldn't actually wish that on him or me. 

I wish him peace, now that he has it—though, again, I would not have wanted it to come a moment sooner than it did. 

But I do still think there is another sense—the Spinozan sense—in which we will exist and meet again "in eternity." 

And I find that Kaufmann too is open to this way of seeing it. Of the many powerful poems he quotes in these essays—several of which I still cite regularly to this day—one in particular took on new meaning for me in light of my dad's comment. 

To quote from Kaufmann's essay and his own translation of Rilke's Ninth Duino Elegy:

“Why,” he begins by asking, “have to be human…?” Not, he replies, for happiness or “for curiosity’s sake. . .” But – and I shall cite only some few passages from this poem ­

But because being here is much, and because apparently

all that is here needs us, all the fleeting that

strangely concerns us. Us, the most fleeting. Once

everything, only once. Once and no more. And we, too,

once. Never again. But having

been this once, even though only once:

having been on earth does not seem revokable.

Indeed. Each of us "having been must ever be." We exist sub specie aeternitatis. Having been once on this Earth, we become irrevocable, as Rilke puts it. 

The snowflake is "now and hence forever," to quote Archibald MacLeish. 

In this sense, if only in this sense, we will indeed meet again "in eternity," as dad said. 

Whereas if we really had opted for Heine's "never to have been born"—we would be denied this form of immortality, this eternity, which comes only—as Rilke puts it—from "having been this once, though only this once."

There's also a lesson in that passage from Rilke that Kaufmann may have paid closer attention to, as he quoted it. 

Kaufmann, as we've seen, seems to tie the value and dignity of human life to work and accomplishing great deeds. 

Yet Rilke suggests—like MacNiece—that the value of living is a little more mysterious and harder to pin down than that—but is not the less real. 

It is because life and the people we meet in life "strangely concern us" and "all that is here needs us," he said, that we should choose living. 

It's not always easy to say wherein lies the value or meaning of human life. If you say the answer is "great works and deeds" you merely delay the conundrum. One next has to ask: and what is the value of those? 

The only true answer to the riddle, it now seems to me, is closer to the one Louis MacNiece offers—in words that ring none the less true for being tautological: 

"Life is the only thing worth living."