Jump to the current version of this note (at my new address!) by clicking here...
How Donne Missed the Point.
"Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee etc. etc." Yes, but that's not the worst thing. If its tolling for you, you can't hear it and you don't care about it. It's when it's tolling for someone you care about, on whose existence you've shored your life, that you experience the reality of death. You don't know the hour of your own death, but you also don't know the hour of anyone else's. In my opinion
You’re going through your life, under the illusion that things can’t change much and perhaps even that you have some control over whether and how they change. Then your spouse, lover, mother, sibling, best friend dies. A huge hole opens in reality. An essential piece is swallowed up in the voice. You can believe what you want about meeting them again or about their happy reunion with God; they're gone. How do you cope with that? Having someone you love just disappear feels like a form of insanity. You tell yourself it can't be true. You didn't authorize it; they didn't ask you first; you weren't given any notice and nobody cares how strongly you object. The person is gone. Why? How? How can someone be there one minute and gone the next? How can there be no answers to something that fundamentally changes reality? How can there be no controls?
The greatest superstition in contemporary American culture is the illusion of control. And we hold fast to it. Our first response to seeing or hearing something to remind us that the case is really otherwise is to look away as quickly as we can.
On television when we see death happen, we see only the moment, with perhaps a glimpse or two of the chain of events leading up to it, followed by another glimpse of the aftermath. But even the worst agonies of the bereaved are limited to them tottering at the grave after the funeral, being held back from leaping in after the recently departed perhaps, or waking up to cry in the night. Most often, we see them surrounded by friends in family; if we do get a glimpse of their private pain, that’s what it is: a glimpse. You very seldom get a sense of the main feature of grief: that it goes on. And on.
And we find the spectacle of that limitlessness appalling. We haven’t got a program for it because we can’t bear to acknowledge that it is certainly in store for us. We want people who are grieving to stop. We want them to get over it, to pull themselves together. We don’t want them to talk to us about it because empathy with the grief of someone whose friend or lover or family member has died is too terrifying. Stop being wrecked! Recognize that you have no choice but to go on! Stop moaning about something you can’t change!---or at least be decent enough to protect others from the sight of it. Which is exactly what people do. In my volunteer work for an organization that deals with people in Crisis, I’ve spoken countless times to the bereaved who cry to me----a complete stranger----because they can’t cry to the people who ought to be comforting them.
It is a mystery. Do those other people who can’t or won’t help their own friends or family through the bereavement following a death imagine they are exempt from that same annihilating pain?
Some of the most callous people on the planet are those in the medical professions. They’ve seen it before. It happens to everyone. They know you’re upset, but they don’t want to know you’re upset. They can ignore the family members waiting outside the ICU because it’s not their job, not their business, not their problem, to reach out.
We don’t want to know about pain or suffering first hand for the same reason they don’t: if you witness it, you tend to feel that you ought to be doing something about it, and we don’t want to have to do anything about it, because the more you do, the more you see.
It’s basically no one’s business, generally speaking. Though FYI, if you are really desperate you might consider hiring (for a substantial fee) a ‘grief counselor’ or a thanatologist.
Why are Americans so unable to deal with mortality? Clearly, that hasn’t always been the case, but it has throughout my lifetime. Do we all secretly hope that someone is going to make an exception for us and the people we love? Do we think that since we can’t do anything about it, there’s no use thinking about it?
Nothing could be further from the truth. Learning to face death and cope with it is an independent branch of knowledge in some cultures. People train for it. They study it. They learn how to deal with both the time preceding and the aftermath.
It seems to me that we’re like children about it----hide your head under the covers and maybe Mr. Death won’t take any notice of you. Why do we spend so much time distracting ourselves with stupid diversions and wasting our time instead of preparing ourselves to deal with reality? Why don’t we reach out to the bereaved as a way of educating and preparing ourselves for our own inevitable encounters with death?
To me, my own culture seems both shallow and strangely muffled. We put so many things and so many preoccupations between ourselves and the reality of human life. To keep from having to think too hard about the certainty of future pain (assuming we ourselves survive), we do our best not to know about the pain of others. We isolate the dying, trying to see and know as little about it as we possibly can.
Politicians like George W. Bush avoid the sight of the coffins coming home from Iraq and the tears of Cindy Sheehan not because they have no feelings about the dying, but because they do. A person who truly allowed himself to see the human cost of a war would have difficulty carrying on with it. To carry on with it---assuming someone who believes in the rightness or righteousness of doing so---you have to make up your mind not to see. Bush’s avoidance of Sheehan and the efforts to insulate the public from the cost of the war are necessary aspects of carrying it on.
They’re simply making use of our willful refusal to think too much about the consequences. I know I can’t bear to think about it. How many people have more or less said Cindy Sheehan should shut up and be satisfied that the U.S. is continuing to wage a war and to sacrifice other young men to ensure that her son’s sacrifice means something----and how many more, while expressing sympathy for her and indignation against George W. Bush, secretly wish she would? No one can easily tolerate the sight of a mother who just wants to hold her child again and who simply refuses to let go of her grief or her anger. We don’t want to think about it. It’s happening, we can’t control it, and so we try not to dwell on it.
This is willful ignorance. And I am sure it is the source of much of the anxiety in American life. We are constantly working to keep ourselves in a state of denial about death and its meaning within a community. We don’t even have communities. We stay closed off in our little individual cocoons, entertaining ourselves with electronic spectacles---sex, violence, and stupid pratfalls that are now ours and that we do not known----and we rigorously limit our actual experience of others to just the amount we feel capable of coping with at a given time.
We are so insulated, that something truly out of our control like the tsunami or some other random and seemingly pointless demonstration that the universe is basically indifferent to who lives and who dies shocks us to our core. Some people regard it as a sign of God’s wrath; others who find the view disgusting nevertheless can’t process the notion that from the point of view of the universe, the loss of hundreds of thousands is of no significance. Quoting the novelist J.G. Ballard, “How long would they have lived in any case? Lives as cheap as fish in the sea.”
I don’t think that the universe is troubled and I don’t think that the God I reluctantly affirm regards death as a disaster. It is not a disaster for the deceased, certainly, who either cease to be or get to move on to some unimaginable next stage. The disaster is for those left behind, those of us who build our fragile little ant hills in a universe of forces that could annihilate them in the blink of an eye and tell ourselves we’ve found some sort of safety.
But there is no safety in building your life around another, or any, human being. Though there would certainly be increased protection is in building up the broadest possible community of people who care for you and for whom you care for in return.
Instead, we are going in the opposite direction----toward further isolation, further insulation, further ignorance.
And I don’t know what to do about it or how to find any way out of it. I know that one might always turn to God, but in my view, God would be incapable of understanding the fuss we make. After my husband died, I had a peculiar dream in which I was complaining to him about the difficulty of carrying on. He shrugged and said, “Don’t make such a production of it. You won’t live forever either.” And actually, it was helpful to me to remind myself of that when I started feeling that my grief, anger, and fear would go on and on and on. And of course they didn’t---thank God for Nick.
But what if something happens to him? If he and I are separated for a few hours, he has to leave messages to let me know he is okay. If he is a few minutes late, I start to panic. It’s pathetic, but it is also the ‘realest’ and most tangible thing in my life---the awful, constant, metallic taste of fear in my mouth. Fear of it happening again, of being left to go through it again, and the sheer, mind-boggling recognition that sooner or later, it is going to. My mother. Nick. Certain close friends.
I can’t forget about it. But I’d like to find a way of preparing for it that consisted of something more than anticipating the pain (and undergoing it) in advance of the fact.
RELATED POSTINGS
Friendly and Unfriendly Ghosts.
The False Nostalgia Syndrome.
How Donne Missed the Point.
The Ghost in the Image: Photography and Memory.
Image drawn by Mr. Tenniel; painted by Damozel!
3:19:29 AM 
|
