Last week, as my fiance in England had finished eulogizing his just-deceased father, I drove home from a consoling dinner with friends at exactly the right moment to watch a deer hurl itself straight against a passing car.
I watched paralyzed as the animal poised and then seemed to choose the precise instant that a lone car passed on the otherwise deserted stretch of road. I raced to a phone and reached the animal shelter, which sends a dispatch for ending the suffering of injured animals. I lay awake that night a long time, saddened and shaken.
Next evening I watched the television news channels interrupt regular programming as the car-crash death of Princess Diana made itself horribly and repeatedly real in the dawning consciousness of the world.
This series of unrelated, disparate deaths arrived like an alignment–a bizarre, ghoulish one–but one of those during which, as a friend puts it, “all the doors between worlds are temporarily open, and there is some eerie commerce.”
Reader, our country’s not at war just now. Most of us no longer have to go down into coal mines to scratch out a living, nor sit at the dangerous mass-production machinery of the turn of the century. I do not live in a bad neighborhood: cars usually remain where they were last parked unmolested, and people in my town can walk around in their homes and on the streets without much fear of getting shot. Yet with this particularly odd series of random strafings, deaths of animals and relatives and famous strangers, little blurts of doom with no apparent timing or even intervals allowing an exhale–I begin to feel overwhelmed; as if living becomes more perilous than we can assimilate.
That night I went to bed unable to rid my mind of the visions of the large-scale suffering of a bewildered population. That’s when the closeups take over, of what has most recently been flashed on television or newspapers or magazines, and it is impossible to expunge the images. It doesn’t seem feasible to grasp the idea that we must go to sleep with loss, final and forever, whether of beloveds of animals or amicable public figures–then wake to that same finality, living with it until with time, it fades back to a context like furniture or wallpaper.
I rose next day, a clear, brilliant morning, took a cup of coffee outside, and commanded myself to feel every inch of the budding day. The cool air smelled like a clean baby. Sunlight blazed behind the leaves, coffee warmed my throat and belly, birds quarreled and the breeze stirred scents of grass. So real, so ordinary, so precious. I tried for the zillionth time to “get inside” the blackness for those who would never wake to this blissful awareness again. I have been trying to do this since I was a child.
And of course I fail each time.
Each time I can only come as far in my stretched imagination as a blank screen, a no-sound and no-feeling like that of going under anesthetic before an operation. Grainy vision, then black, then no-consciousness, “no-I”. Again I find myself stuck, cornered by the problem of accepting the no-I, mindful how family and friends will go crazy with grief, creating elaborate ceremonies and services for the memory of that vanished entity. From the long view, this ancient process seems primal, rhythmic; a never-ending set of waves that flush and ebb. At close hand, there is bottomless sorrow in it.
How do we keep sorrow from claiming more and more of our identities as we age, I wonder, as life seems to teeter more precariously at the edge of disaster, as death seems to close in and be ever just-at-hand, like circling sharks? Deaths, in fact, lately seem to stack up around us, and whether peaceful or grotesque, timely or stunningly early, humble or high-profile, what they all have in common is a cold breath on the bared backs of our necks. The longer we live, inevitably, the more we witness, and the sadder, and perhaps more fearful, we may grow.
Scholar Carolyn Heilbrun, in her book of reflections on aging, “The Last Gift of Time,” passionately warns us to take pleasure in the living and concentrate on what is before us, rather than allow ourselves to be subsumed or downtrodden by memory. She muses candidly about death, reviewing her own regrets, fears and yearnings, yet for me she never quite touches the pupil of the eye of the mystery–though of course, men and women have pondered that dark unfathomable center since they could think. A poem I was taught in grade school catches some of our anger at being denied the insider knowledge: Life goes on, though good men die. Life goes on–I forget just why.
So in a few days my fiance will come home and resume work, phoning his mother more often. The deer will have been mercifully destroyed–perhaps a warning sign can now be installed along that stretch road. And the media will comb itself in every direction for its best ideas about what the death of the princess means; her bereft family will begin its long, slow struggle to heal. Conscientious people who recognize the terrible dangers attendant upon life will continue to worry for their parents and mates and children–for the world’s children–trying to walk a tightrope of sensible action. And we’ll have come full circle to the limits of our knowledge as a species.
For all that we lack of certainty, death may simply serve to push us again and again out of complacency. All roads lead to the inevitable, almost infuriatingly simple existential compact: to cherish what we have while we are here.
Before the news of Diana’s death flooded the television stations, I had been watching a concert by the gentle, aging James Taylor, a benefit concert to raise money for a camp for disadvantaged kids. Balding, smiling wryly, he looked like a man who had been through a few things, but who had found a way, a reason, to shun bitterness. (Blessed be the musicmakers.) The song that seemed to light him up most as he sang had to do with seizing love during our lives; its chorus something like, “Wasn’t it a lovely ride.” He ends with the amused refrain, “The secret of life is (to enjoy) the passage of time.”
