I had been thinking of several ideas to write about—Bilingual education, which I have been doing some research in lately. CAPT, which many of you have been dealing with, and which I have been grappling with as I work with the English department faculty at a local high school. NCLB. Did you all see the report that says that 82% of all public schools would be listed as failing this year under the guidelines established by the Bush-era law that the Obama administration has yet to alter?
Anyway, I actually had some really nice ideas about death. Or about death and literature, I should say.
To the chagrin of my students in American Literature, I have a fondness for the high modernist poets, like William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens. One of my favorite poems of all time is Stevens’ “Sunday Morning.†It’s essentially atheistic, so my apologies to the religious among you, but what I like about it is that it demands an appreciation for life in the here and now.
In the fifth stanza, Stevens writes, “Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,/Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams/And our desires.†He proceeds to describe the way death makes us appreciate the ephemeral beauty of nature, or the way “obliteration†makes us appreciate even the smallest things in life, like the smell of ripening fruit, the look of a blue sky, the sound of music, or even the feel of clothes upon our skin.
I thought of this poem many times during the week. I especially thought of it throughout the services for my step-grandmother the previous Friday. My father and step-mother were married for about nineteen years—three more than my father and mother were married—and I have always been and have remained on very good terms with my step-family. But whereas I had once been very close to them, especially to my step-brother, in the wake of our parents’ divorce, we had slowly drifted apart. No animosity, no bad feelings, just a gradual drift, just succumbing to distance and the demands of careers and children.
My step-brother has three children, all boys. The oldest is a few months older than my son, and the middle child and my daughter are almost the exact same age. His youngest is about fifteen months old. My step-sister has a daughter who is three. Before we sat shivah together in the days following the burial (my step-family is Jewish, and shivah is the period of mourning that follows a burial), I had not seen the two oldest boys in three years, and I had never met the youngest boy or my step-sister’s daughter. I don’t think my step-brother had ever met my daughter, or at least not since she was an infant, and she just turned four.
So on the Sunday following the Friday burial, Amy and I brought the kids to my step-mother’s house, and all the adults fawned over the children, and our six kids paired off and played nicely together. The two little girls at one point late in the day were snuggled up together on a couch in a finished basement playroom, all wrapped up in a blanket watching cartoons. My son and my step-brother’s oldest played various games together all afternoon, and the middle boy went back and forth between the two older boys the two slightly younger girls. They all asked to have play dates again some time soon, and gave one another hugs and kisses goodbye when it was time to leave.
The Saturday after my step-grandmother was buried, I was reading stories to my son at bed time when the phone rang and we learned that our friend’s mother had died. She was only fifty-seven and had been suffering from lung cancer. Her two daughters are former students, and the younger of the two in particular has become a dear friend. And so once again we geared up for a wake and a funeral.
At the church, I sat with another former student who has become a close friend. The mass was terribly sad. Afterwards, however, we all met at a local restaurant for buffet dinner and drinks. Old friends and family members laughed and embraced. The deceased’s ex-husband went around taking photos of tables, as one would expect at a wedding. Children ran around playing tag and other children’s games. I sat at a table with several friends I knew but also with several friends from Vermont I had never met before. One young woman was especially fun and funny, just full of life and personality. There was as much laughter, even from the two young women whose mother had died, as if we were at any other dinner party.
I had to step outside of myself at times and pay attention to what was happening. It was beautiful in its own way. It was beautiful to come together with family and friends I had not seen in years. It was beautiful to meet new friends and see disparate pieces of my friend’s life come together and cohere. It was beautiful to see children playing and snuggling, and crying when they had to part, even though they had only just met hours before. It was beautiful to see the elderly smiling at the children. It was beautiful to see my friend wearing her mother’s jewelry. It was beautiful to see my step-brother sweep my daughter into his arms and kiss her cheek. It was oddly beautiful to think that two deaths had made this possible.
Comments
Post a Comment