There are only so many memoirs written specifically about the experience of losing a father. Philip Roth's Patrimony is one. Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude is another.
Since my own father was diagnosed with brain cancer at the start of the year (he died on Memorial Day weekend in May), I've read them both.
They describe fathers very different from my own. Roth and Auster have far more in common with each other—right down to the Newark upbringings, the Weequahic setting—than either does with me.
Auster describes his fumbling attempts to establish intimacy with a man uncomfortable talking about himself or his feelings. I never had that barrier with my dad. He was always an effortlessly warm and loving father.
Really, the only pain of losing him was that I lost him. I never felt the sense of missed opportunities or of "issues" left unresolved or of conversations we needed to have but now would never be able to have that many people experience when they lose a parent.
Our relationship was always on a good footing. The sadness for me is not that I feel it ought to have been something else. The sadness is just that it ended. The sadness is that he ended.
This is the more universal element in grief, and it is the one on which I can connect my own experience to Roth's and Auster's.
One of Auster's refrains in his book is "It was. It will never be again." One senses here an echo of Rilke: everything, only once. Once and no more. And we, too, / once. Never again. (Kaufmann trans.)
That is the real, unacceptable, intolerable, unimaginable substance of the grief. The fact that his life is over. He's in the past. He is gone, and he is never coming back.
For both Roth and Auster, this leads to a frantic effort at remembering. You have to get it all down on paper, they both feel, lest a whole person vanish into oblivion.
This is the fear Auster expresses at the beginning of his memoir—and it is one we have all known. "My father is gone," Auster writes; "If I do not act quickly, his entire life will vanish along with him."
"... a short period of mourning," he writes, "and then nothing. Eventually, it would be as though he had never lived at all."
Does everyone who has lost a family member experience this dread?
The other night my sister observed to us around the dinner table that it was Dia de los Muertos, and that this was a night when people tell stories about the loved ones they've lost.
I immediately froze. Put on the spot, my mind was a blank. I've never been capable of telling stories on demand. I have a poor sense of narrative, and to come up with anecdotes at all, I have to stumble upon them through some other chain of mental associations. I have no inner repertoire at my fingertips.
But in this moment, that fact suddenly felt intolerable. It was a betrayal. How could I not remember anything? And if I can't remember, then what happens to all we have left of dad, which is memory?
We then proceeded to watch the Pixar movie Coco, which of course did not make me feel much better. The whole premise of the film is that the dead are never really gone so long as we still cherish their memory.
But what if that was exactly what—in that moment—I was struggling to do? What if I do lose the ability even to remember? Does that not mean he will "vanish" forever?
In one of his more haunting poems, Thomas Hardy imagines the voices of the "to-be-forgotten" speaking from beyond the grave. As if it were not bad enough that they must die once—now, as even the memory of them fades, they confront the prospect of another and a deeper death:
... our future second death is near;
When, with the living, memory of us numbs,
And blank oblivion comes!
[...]
"They count as quite forgot;
They are as men who have existed not;
Theirs is a loss past loss of fitful breath;
It is the second death.
[...]
"We here, as yet, each day
Are blest with dear recall; as yet, can say
We hold in some soul loved continuance
Of shape and voice and glance.
[...]
"But what has been will be —
First memory, then oblivion's swallowing sea;
Like men foregone, shall we merge into those
Whose story no one knows.
It is not given to all, or even most, Hardy goes on, to live in the minds of many generations. There is many a "mute inglorious Milton" lying unknown and unwept below the soil, as Thomas Gray put it.
And even the famous and published Miltons—given time enough—will eventually fall into oblivion too.
I first read Hardy's poem about the "To-be-forgotten" years ago—long before I had lost any immediate family members. But already, it terrified me.
It was the horrifying yet inescapable verdict of Ecclesiastes, the preacher:
"For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know not anything, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten."
One can say—as the speaker in Hardy does at the beginning of the poem—that at least the dead are beyond the reach of further pain.
But this, as Philip Larkin wrote, is precisely the horror of it:
this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, [...]
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
Oblivion. Final and beyond all appeal.
I tell myself that I haven't really forgotten Dad. All the stories and memories come back to me under the right conditions, with the right chain of mental associations.
But to Hardy's point—someday, I will be gone too. Taking my memories of him with me. And so on.
There is no reprieve from the truth of ultimate oblivion—no matter how long delayed. And even if there were—Qoholeth implies—that too is no answer. For the dead will not even know if they are remembered or not.
"The dead know not anything."
This is the unfathomableness, the incomprehensibility of death.
As Arthur Schopenhauer observes, each of us carries the entire world with us in our minds. We know the world only though ourselves. And so, when the mind dies, a whole universe vanishes with it.
Perhaps this, too, because it cannot be changed, can only be accepted. Perhaps we have no choice but to accept that being once—once and never again—must be enough.
To pass away, to "vanish" utterly, is the eventual fate of every one of us. So we must find a way to live with the thought that merely to have been is sufficient; that being once still means something—even if it must come to an end.
Perhaps this is even how it should be.
Auster quotes Marina Tsvetayeva: "It may be that a better way / To conquer time and the world / Is to pass, and not to leave a trace..."
I think too of Archibald MacLeish's reminder: "they also live / Who swerve and vanish in the river."
And I think, at last, of D.H. Lawrence—in another poem that meant a great deal to me in my twenties, when I was grappling with the most acute stage of my own fear of death:
If there were not an utter and absolute dark
of silence and sheer oblivion
at the core of everything,
how terrible the sun would be, [...]
and if there were not an absolute, utter forgetting
and a ceasing to know, a perfect ceasing to know
[...] 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment