Topic: Decline of the West
On the high side of sixty intimations of mortality come upon you thick and fast. Parents, uncles, aunts and those of their generation begin to pass from this world. On your Internet home page the death notices of public figures and celebrities who cast long shadows over your twenties and thirties begin to appear with depressing frequency. You remember people from your past—a fellow student, a soldier with whom you served, an old girlfriend—and the thought occurs that they may no longer be alive. As you age—as you live—your past is progressively erased by implacable death. And in the end death will erase you also.
Sounds depressing, doesn’t it? But human beings, it seems, have been spiritually conditioned to live with these increasingly clamorous intimations of mortality. Mostly, when death strikes down a parent or an old friend, we grieve but go on. The very inevitability of death is a kind of balm. That a beloved mother should die at the age of ninety-three is a sorrowful thing for her children but not really a cause for regret. Our anger, as opposed to our grief, is reserved for those occasions when death jumps the line.
“Tis a vile thing to die, my gracious lord, when men are unprepared and look not for it,” Catesby tells Lord Hastings (with sly foreknowledge) in Shakespeare’s Richard III—a vile thing indeed and not only for the deceased. Mothers and fathers who’ve lost sons and daughters to disease, accident, war, are conscious above all of a seeming reversal of the natural order: Parents are supposed to die before their children. To their grief, therefore, are added profound feelings of unfairness and anger. A cancer diagnosis is bad news at any age but the earlier it comes the more it seems like a cosmic con job. If one were handed to me today I wouldn’t be thrilled about it but at least I’ve seen my children into adulthood, become a grandparent, enjoyed the blessings of an exceptionally happy marriage of thirty years and, on the whole, have had a good life.
Last year a young lady of my acquaintance—we used to work together—was diagnosed with breast cancer. I’ve followed her fortunes via Facebook and am glad to report that she successfully completed treatment (surgery, radiation therapy, chemotherapy) and was recently pronounced cancer free. But imagine getting news like that in one’s early forties! Looking back she recalls being “terrified and overwhelmed” by her diagnosis. I have no doubt that she was angry too. Angry at whom, though? At what? In a short story I wrote a couple of years ago I imagined that a dying young woman’s anger would come to focus on the living, who would still be here after she was gone. Her rage eventually turned her into a monster. I thought then and still believe that we romanticize those felled by an untimely death, endowing them with a possibly unmerited nobility. Not everybody dies well. But on the other hand our expectations may supply the courage a dying person needs to meet the end calmly. Such are the labyrinthine mysteries of human nature.
Personally I hope to be felled by some bolt from the blue—no hurry, though. I may owe God a death but “Tis not due yet; I would be loath to pay him before his day. What need I be so forward with him that calls not on me?” Thus Falstaff according to Master Will and I echo the former's cry: “Give me life!”
