But of course, the fact of my death, sometime, and sooner than once was likely when I was many years younger, is original to me. I always get a little nervous when I get on one of these "thinking about death" kicks. I worry that I am having some kind of premonition and I'm just not aware of it. But that's all that troubles me about thinking or talking about it. I am in no rush to go. And in a strange way my closest friends will never believe, it doesn't come from a morbid place at all. I perceive what the St. Benedict said makes sense, "Keep death ever before your eyes." This spurs the praying monk or the lay oblate to live a good spiritual and practical life, to waste none of the very little time we realize, well into its brevity, that is left to us. I don't think I am sufficiently spurred, which may well be because I am fitful at prayer, and I do consider that I waste a great deal of precious time in worry about what happens in this world to me, when as Teresa of Avila noted, "All things are passing."
All right, you might say, "What's causing today's "Thinking about death" kick?" First, if only because I spend a fair amount of time visiting someone at a nursing home whose entire memory of her life is mostly lost to her by virtue of her dementia, I see lots of people to whom I have become attached, and had rather illustrious lives before they were the needy charges of sometimes dismissive staff, die. The turnover of residents is pretty stark. Corporate heads. Artists. Members of first families of California. All of that, call it, "achievement" or "fame" becomes less than a pinprick in the universe. I have two, not necessarily consistent reactions to this fact. The first is the hope that their memories get preserved, by their families, where they have any remaining, in tangible form, on this temporal plane, with photos, and archives (which I have been lately very interested in) so that they do not fade from the generations. The second is holding tightly to the idea that death is a door to Eternity where there is an exquisite clarity that earthly memory is moot, except in so far as their lives stood as models of the best of us. I guess those are the ones we call saints in religious circles.
The second thing that has gotten me on this subject, this time anyway, is that the other day, as I was leaving St. Victor after serving Mass, I noticed one of the guys who had been Monsignor Murphy's assistants and finally one of his caretakers before he died, was watching some workmen remove the motorized elevator chair that, before Monsignor stopped walking all together, because of his disease, being removed. I was surprised that as I momentarily watched taking some screws out of the marble that had secured the chair, I found myself tearing up, not because of Monsignor's death per se, but because this item was the last physical one that marked his presence during the 12 year struggle that was his illness in which one could say, he heroically continued serving as our pastor. I felt a moment of utter rebellion, and nearly a forgetfulness that, I believe, that many believe, he is safe in Divine Hands. It was a rebellion, for him, but also for me. Life goes on here without him. Without each one of us who dies, famous or infamous, or invisible to others, or deeply loved and desperately needed, here and now, it is the same. All that stuff we have painstakingly gathered sold or donated.
When I was young, about 17 or 18, and in one of my earliest depressive periods, I read a poem by another much more advanced teenager, named William Cullen Bryant, about death. I was afraid then, among many other things, that I would make no mark on the world, that I wouldn't even manage to get out of the Bronx, or the over protection of my well meaning, but wildly cautious parents. His poem, which equalized every soul in humanity because of that death that is not to be avoided, assuaged my fear in some peculiar, and not particularly altruistic way. I hadn't read it in a while until today, and I noticed that there is no religious sentiment in it at all. I had only just lapsed from my faith afraid to talk about things that troubled me so I guess in some subconscious way, comfort without resort to religion must have attracted me. But today I went back to refresh myself, if ever I knew, what Bryant's religious affiliation might have been, if any. He was a Calvinist, and as I should have remembered, he wrote other poems in which God and faith were prime. One of them I had forgotten was also a favorite, "To a Waterfowl". Maybe, I didn't look at his biography in any detail, he was having a crisis of faith when he wrote his early poem. I think I noticed that somewhere in there he lost someone and questioned his faith. I hadn't yet lost my mother when I was immersed in the poem. She might have been diagnosed with the cancer that killed her at 48, a year and change later. I don't remember.
Anyway, somewhere along the line I went back to my faith. The way I look at it I am becoming more and more sure of God and Eternity. I like cemeteries. I think now I realize that it is more than the bucolic park setting. It is that as I walk by each rectangular plaque with the name of someone who was just here, on this earth, yesterday, I am seeing a door to Eternity, to Heaven if all things go well. Those of you, many I know, who think me and others like me a fool, saying "Nope, not happening. Ain't nothing to aim for beyond the ground or the furnace", well, here's how I look at it, and a greater thinker than I already mentioned it in more articulate, also poetic terms, said something like it, "If I was wrong about God and Heaven,I won't know, and it won't matter to me. And, as for me, if I'm right, I am not looking to say, 'I told you so!'" I'll be breathing a sigh of relief in my Resurrected body which I hope is about the size 10 it was just around 1992. Or maybe I'll lose weight in Purgatory. And I'll get to see people I miss very much, and meet a few with whom I have always hoped to chat.
Meanwhile, if only I can finally conquer that variety of fears that have lessened over the years, but still raise their ugly heads from time to time, I will finally live more fully before I die and cross the threshold.
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