Gone Forever

Grief comes by strange and circuitous byways. I've written before on this blog about how I broke down in tears the night my dad went into the E.R. after the seizure that racked his body in the final weeks of his battle with brain cancer. But from that day to this, no other tears passed my eyes. I didn't even cry the day he died and they took his body away in a van. Sad as I would inevitably feel at odds moments of the day, I was denied the relief of tears. For months now, I've felt only a strange numbness. 

Until this morning. Seemingly for no reason at all—perhaps just because there was no reason, and nothing else was going on—I suddenly started bawling. 

I guess if I had to reconstruct it, the chain of association was as follows: reading Arthur Koestler's The Gladiators made me think about Stalin and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. That in turn made me think of Joe Glazer's parodic protest song about the agreement, "My Darling Party Line"—set to the tune of "My Darling Clementine." But then that set me inwardly singing the lyrics of the original song, and my brain got stuck in the loop of those awful words, "you are lost and gone forever..."

And all at once, to quote D.H. Lawrence, "my manhood is cast / Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past." 

"Gone forever." That's what really got me. Sometime over the last few months, perhaps, I've gotten inwardly used to the idea of being parted from dad. But I think I've treated it on some subconscious level as a temporary absence. As dad himself put it, in the line that first made me crack into tears months ago—the night of his seizure: "we'll miss each other; and I don't want to miss each other; but perhaps we'll meet again somehow—in eternity." 

And I was realizing all over again this morning that we'll actually never meet again. I'll never see him again. He's gone. Forever. 

I struggle to fit that fact into any kind of tolerable scheme of the universe. And indeed—as William James put it—"it may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever, and that, in respect of such evil, dumb submission or neglect to notice is the only practical resource." 

For James, the terrible fact of death was one of those radical and irremediable evils: the fact, as he described it in an unforgettable image, that we are all, as it were, living in a doomed city on a melting glacier. "[M]ankind is in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake, surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will disappear," he writes. 

There is a great deal that is impossible to accept about this. But one aspect that was particularly haunting me this morning was that dad, of all people I know, ought to have had the gentlest death. He was the most positive, warm-hearting, optimistic, loving, and emotionally mature and resilient person I will probably ever have the privilege to meet; and I say that not just because I'm his son—everyone who came into contact with him would admit the same. 

But even dad, as the cancer ate away at his mind, had his inevitable moments of denial, frustration, and petulance—times when he simply would not acknowledge what the disease was doing to him and preferred to blame anything but the obvious cause for the loss of his capacity. 

Nurses and caregivers would tell us, the family, that this is of course to be expected. It's hard for anyone to accept that they are losing ability and autonomy with age. 

I think back to that moment in The Way of All Flesh, when the elder Mr. Pontifex throws a tantrum at the dinner table about being coaxed into eating mutton chops. "[Y]ou forget, my dear Christina, that you have to deal with a stomach that is totally disorganised," he snips; "and he pushed the plate from him, pouting and frowning like a naughty old child," Butler records. 

"Writing as I do by the light of a later knowledge," Butler adds, "I suppose I should have seen nothing in this but the world’s growing pains, the disturbance inseparable from transition in human things. I suppose in reality not a leaf goes yellow in autumn without ceasing to care about its sap and making the parent tree very uncomfortable by long growling and grumbling[.]"

And so it is—this is what the nurses and caregivers were trying to say as well. My cousins, when they visited, too. They had recently buried their mother—my aunt—after she also died of cancer a couple years ago. They had seen it all before. "Oh yeah, we know that look," they told me—after my dad had gotten impatient and confused about one of those minor changes of plan that the brain cancer made it harder for him to process or accept. 

Perhaps I too had no right to be surprised, then—should have seen in everything that happened—the times dad lost his temper or patience with his situation—nothing but "the disturbance inseparable from transition in human things." 

But when told these things, I always wanted to protest back: "You don't get it! If anyone else lost their temper—if I lost my temper, for instance—that would be normal. But this is Dad we're talking about! The person most able to weather any possible emotional setback. And if even he in his final months is having his petulant moments—what hope is there for the rest of us?" 

I'm not saying I resent him for it or am disappointed or anything like that. My point is rather to note the cosmic horror and sadness and existential absurdity of it all—the wórld-sorrow, as Hopkins would call it. Here was someone who lived the definition of the good life—a life of meaning, purpose, accomplishment, and loving-kindness all. But even if you live your best possible life, it seems, you end up the same way. You too are reduced, diminished, and finally extinguished in the end; turned back into a second childhood. 

"The last act is tragic, no matter how happy all the rest of the play"—as David Markson quotes Pascal in The Last Novel.  

And if that's true, then what is the point of all this? What is the meaning of all that goes before? Why do we all go on with it—when we know that this is what awaits every single one of us in the end? 

As Philip Roth writes in The Human Stain: 

As the audience filed back in, I began, cartoonishly, to envisage the fatal malady that, without anyone’s recognizing it, was working away inside us, within each and every one of us: to visualize the blood vessels occluding under the baseball caps, the malignancies growing beneath the permed white hair, the organs misfiring, atrophying, shutting down, the hundreds of billions of murderous cells surreptitiously marching this entire audience toward the improbable disaster ahead. I couldn’t stop myself. The stupendous decimation that is death sweeping us all away. Orchestra, audience, conductor, technicians, swallows, wrens—think of the numbers for Tanglewood alone just between now and the year 4000. Then multiply that times everything. The ceaseless perishing. What an idea! What maniac conceived it?

What was hardest for my dad to accept was that there came a point when he could no longer offer strategic leadership to groups of people at the level he was used to doing. I think the rest of us in the family thought: "Well, that's inevitable from the brain cancer. Can't you accept it and just focus on spending time with us who love you? Can't you accept that you've accomplished so much in life already and that what you achieved was enough?"

This is always an attractive attitude when viewing a life from the outside. Looking back on my dad's life—writing his obituary, for instance—it was easy for me to see that his lost of capacity in his final months didn't matter, because he had accomplished so much before that. I think again of that observation from Stephen Spender, about "that single unity which we attribute to the dead." As H.G. Wells once put it: "So long as you are alive you are just the moment, perhaps, [...]but when you are dead you are all your life from the first moment to the last..." 

But dad from within the context of still living his own life—from the vantage point of marching forward each second along time's linear arrow—could only ask, as anyone would ask—what was coming next. 

And, in those final months, nothing about next was good. 

I know already that I'll be the same way someday. I'll probably be obsessing over my blogs in the last days of life, even as eyesight and consciousness are failing me. And the people around me will say: "haven't you written enough? Isn't it time to hang up your spurs and just relax?" And I'll say: "I haven't written anything today yet. I haven't written the next post. 

That's what dad was like. He couldn't or didn't want to step back and view his whole life as a unity. Up to his final moments, he was still focused on achieving the next thing. And of course he was. "When Freud heard of Franz Rosenzweig's unusual exertions to work to the end," writes Walter Kaufmann in one of his essays, "he said 'What else could he do?'"

Kaufmann elsewhere in the same essay writes: "[O]nce I have succeeded in achieving—in the face of death, in a race with death—a project that is truly mine and not something that anybody else might have done as well, if not better, then [...] I have won the race and in a sense have triumphed over death." 

But this solution is far too pat. Because how is one supposed to know when one's best work is behind one? How is one to know that the next project, the one just around the corner, may not be greater still—may not prove to be the one for which one was truly destined from birth? 

It may be true that we all often outlive the best in ourselves. That is the real tragedy and heartbreak of it all. As Gide writes in his Afterthoughts on the U.S.S.R., apropos of Romain Rolland: "The cause of my grief was that so few men reach the end of their life before showing the extreme limit of their greatness." Each of us lingers on after our best work is already behind us, in other words. But how are we to know that? 

The people who last after us will be able to tell. They will be able to regard our whole "life from the first moment to the last"; but we who are still in it—we are "just the moment, perhaps."

And then there is the thought too that I cannot renounce even those worst moments from dad's final life—that to betray even a moment of him would be to betray him entirely. That's why I can't just do what others have advised me, and "remember him the way he was before the cancer." Because I still loved him and he still loved me after the cancer too. And I would not reject even a day or hour of his life—even if it did come after his best "work" in Kaufmann's sense was behind him. Because his "work" was far from the only part of him that mattered to me—or even the most important part...

The solution—to the extent there is one, and we are not merely reduced to "dumb submission," as James put it—is of course the one that dad himself suggested, when he spoke of meeting again in eternity. 

I know, I know, that we will not meet again literally. I will never see him again in the flesh. He is "lost and gone forever"—"gone to feed the roses" (Millay)—no matter how much I cry about that fact. No matter how much I wish it were otherwise. "Nothing can bring back the hour / Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower." (Wordsworth). "The Moving Finger writes, and having writ, moves on / Nor all thy Piety nor Wit / Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, / Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it" (Khayyam / FitzGerald trans.)

But we can step back and see his life as a whole, in the way Wells described—"from the first moment to the last." Which is just another way of saying that his life exists and will always exist Sub specie aeternitatis, to use Spinoza's phrase. 

In this sense, if in no other, we do and always will have a rendezvous in eternity.