A thread of reflection and lively conversation in my community — the experience of living and dying is of a piece, death is not proud though some have called it mighty and dreadful. Mystery surrounds us. Aging and dying and living surround us, evoking a wonderous array of sense and some nonsense too, laughter and tears, illness and healing, turning toward endings and beginnings.
We talk also of Embracing Israel/Palestine, of our need for caring, love and generosity toward the Other, the stranger, each of us truly hearing each other's stories, walking in his or her shoes so thoroughly that we will embrace and be reconciled. Prodigal child returned home a woman or man. Begin with ourselves, in our own community, then joined with the Other, no longer stranger but neighbor whom we love. Let's say, if we are Israel and Palestine, we will have regained the moral compass we have lost. The next chapter in our stories, then, can be one story, not two. Shalom. Peace be with you. And also with you. With all our short comings and goings we can be true friends. Perhaps there is nothing greater, no other answer to our riddle.
This year Good Friday coincides with Eve of Passover, and both with the beginning of Shabat. All devoted to celebration of the cycle of life, death and rebirth, sunset, sunrise. So we all may say with John Donne, any man's or woman's death diminishes me. And we needn't send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for us.
So what of the nonsense and the laughter? Dustin Hoffman as Little Big Man, would-be Indian shaman, hiking up his mountain. When he gets to the rock at the top, he lies down deliberately on it and draws death into his heart and mind. Only he didn't account for the rain falling on his eyelids, which begin to flutter. He kvetches, feels humiliated, then just maybe genuinely humble and even thankful. Who knows? It's possible, maybe even probable. He learns he has a lot more to learn before he's really wise, the beginning of wisdom.
Perhaps God, clearly not reluctant to adopt others' words, whispered in his ear, "Son, do not go gentle into that good night.... At least not yet. You've still got work to do."
Sort of like another parable told by another John Dunne. A man is ascending the mountain seeking God, while God is descending the mountain in search of man, so they pass each other in the fog, continue on their own ways, oblivious to their separation. God, I imagine, remains devoted to her search but she may kvetch if we keep calling her a man. I hope man, finding the mountain top and all caves along the way empty and increasingly cold and inhospitable, turns around, chastened, to search for good work for his fellow sentient beings on earth. Does he find it? Many have, many stand ready to help.
My father spoke to me before he died. My mother did not, imagining I'd ask when I was ready. Nor did she give me the note my father addressed to me. It took me 25 years and a lot of help to get ready. Would that I'd been able to speak to either of them. I was eleven.
I would like, in retrospect, to have told my father the Hasidic tale of Rabbi Zusya who, when he was an old man, said, “In the coming world they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya?’” My father probably wasn't ready for that punchline, but even if he went ahead and jumped, I would have felt less responsible for his death.
I know my mother meant well and didn't know better. She had a lot to do caring for three kids, being a single mother making a living for us all. She told the truth as she knew the truth, no small accomplishment, and she had a great sense of humor. I knew her and her love better and longer than my father, but I took the nearly the same 25 years to reconcile, when she was dying in her tiny room on the oncology ward of Montefiori Hospital in the Bronx. I remember her wistful look as she listened to the sounds of Kaddish prayers being sung nearby. I remember many visits, then not arriving in time for the last one, so she was dead, her jaw held with a winding cloth, when I finally said goodbye. I called her Mama, over and over, a name I'd never said when she lived or after that leavetaking.
So I say their names in prayer and practice: my father John, my mother Anna, her husband Jim, my four grandparents, Franklin and Eleanor and Dora and Adam, my wife Leigh, my brother Curtis and sister Ellie, my son Adam, his wife Carrie and their four children, Jordan, Casey, Sean and Christian, my daughter Sara and her three children, Ernest, Sophie and Max, my great-granddaughter Camila, my son Joshua, his wife Vanessa and their daughter Paloma, my son Paul, my dear friends, all men, women and children who knew or come to know their names, if not before they were born, then when they were young, and in their time with love would learn their questions and some of their answers, for we answer with our lives every day. Yearning, longing for the dance when there is only the dance and the pilgrim soul, loving the light and shadows of your face, the sorrows of your changing face.
William Butler Yeats with his passion of memory, alchemist of soul, speaks to another he loved —
When You Are Old
When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face among a crowd of stars.
~ W. B. Yeats
Five years ago, in 2007, I wrote these paragraphs:
I shall never forget a gifted hour with Grandmère—my grandmother Eleanor—three years before her death in 1962, an hour wonderfully reflective of her spirit, her sensitivity and love. I was an undergraduate at Amherst College and lived with her in New York City that sticky, lonely summer. I came home late at night and found her in her study, the only light that of a small gooseneck lamp above her desk and the softening red grey coals of a fire in the grate.
She was working her way through a pile of correspondence, adding personal handwritten lines here and there, Gregorian chants on the phonograph. I’d written an article on the United Nations, and had given her a draft to read that morning.
When I came into her study, she got up from her desk and drew me over to the two comfortable chairs before the dying fire. She said she had read my essay and admired it. “Your writing,” she said, “reminds me of your father’s.”
She went on to speak of him lovingly, telling me that he always began his letters to her, “Dear LL,” for Lovely Lady. She’d been amused and touched, and began to sign her replies to him with the same initials. She wished, deeply, that she could have done something to save my parents’ marriage, to prevent his suicide. It was nine years later, and the first time someone who loved me and loved him had spoken with me about him.
In the countryside of Vermont in my early twenties, I was driving a motor scooter and the greens of summer were lovely. I imagined he could see through my eyes, and I moved my head slowly like a camera panning, hoping the beauty would give him pleasure, wondering if he would know where I was.
A therapist told me, when my children were young, that one day I would bury him. I thought that unlikely, but gradually, slowly, and only in the sense my therapist meant, I have done so. For years, until after the last of my four children was born, I lived with the experience of my father's death so marked in my consciousness that there was no room for his life, and not enough for my own or those I loved who loved me.
If I still bear some remnant of his violent death, it is more in my blood and brain than in my heart.
In the mid 1970s, I finally met and came to know his last wife Virginia as gifted and generous, a romantic like my father, herself burdened with manic depression. Our first contact was strangely fortuitous. Jung would have called it an instance of synchronicity.
I was on sabbatical leave from teaching, living in an old house my wife and I had rebuilt on the Maine coast, starting to write A Love in Shadow, a story of my parents and their families. I was thirty-seven. I’d been to the F.D.R. Library in Hyde Park, and was full of knowledge of my mother’s Roosevelt family, the family I’d known as my own while growing up. I had virtually no evidence and precious little memory of the Boettigers and my father’s life before he left us. I didn’t even know his mother’s name.
One evening during those sabbatical months in Maine I received a telephone call. The voice I heard was quiet, ethereal, as if in coastal fog: “Johnny? This... is Virginia.” It took me a few moments to realize who she was, a voice and a woman I had not known but there was no other Virginia who would call me Johnny.
She told me she was living in Key Biscayne, and wanted to find me so she could give me the cartons of my father’s papers that had been stored in a Phoenix warehouse for all of those twenty-five years. “Your father wanted you to have them when you were old enough to understand.” I came to realize that she still loved him deeply, but I never learned how she had determined that I was old enough.
I did not believe I would live beyond the age of fifty. As it was, when I was fifty, half-aware that it was the anniversary of his death to the day, I found myself chairing a panel on suicide at the graduate school in which I taught. (One of my students had taken her own life the week before.)
Emerging into the parking lot after that event, I was unexpectedly beset by excruciating pain. Curtains, I thought. My wife drove me to the nearest hospital. I had a small and well embedded collection of kidney stones. Like Dustin Hoffman's eyes fluttering in the rain, except my visitation hurt more.
I have asked myself: could my father have survived the call of his own destruction, forgiven himself, found again a path he had lost years before, the path of his own life? That is, of course, a natural question for a son to ask, and it is unanswerable. Like all fathers and sons, his legacy lives in me, and I have lived beyond his years in ways I know and some I will never know.
It has occurred to me that the way my father chose to die had everything to do with the way he had come to live: from high up it is far down. He knew where he was in Chicago as a reporter during the 1920s: on a beat, on the ground, at home. After that he rose to heights he had not imagined, and he never felt again truly at home, in himself or in the world.
My father ten years before I was born, ca 1929, in Chicago
Remember. The green fuse that drives the flower. Summer is late, my heart.
Stanley Kunitz died in May of 2006 at age 100. Robert Pinsky said on that occasion,
"The drama of resisting fate, a sardonic joy in embattlement and retrenchment, clearly appealed to him. He was a richly formal, incantational, sometimes epigrammatic poet early in his career. The later poems are more terse, less formal. At every point, in every mode, he maintained a bardic intensity about the poet's calling. Even his description of stripping down to essentials has some air of high drama, along with the comedy":
The Summing Up
When young I scribbled, boasting, on my wall.
No Love, No Property, No Wages.
In youth's good time I somehow bought them all,
And cheap, you'd think, for maybe a hundred pages.
Now in my prime, disburdened of my gear,
My trophies ransomed, broken, lost,
I carve again on the lintel of the year
My sign: MOBILITY—and damn the cost!
Growing up for a century without the father his mother —
never forgave for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
And, conversant with Yeats,
Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that's late,
it is my song that's flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it's done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.
