Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
- Shakespeare, Macbeth
Aug. 18, 2002
From time to time I realize how temporary everything is. How nothing, even the things we take for granted or hold most sacred, is ours to keep. It's a scary thought, that everything we hold dear can disappear or be taken from us, by monumental catastrophe or human error. Even our bodies are not safe; they, though remarkably resilient and utterly amazing, are also entirely fragile. This is the essence of our mortality, which we all must face.
I was just talking with someone the other day about this, musing about how abruptly things can end, how life can throw you curve balls, how you can't really plan for anything, not really. Then, last Friday, a friend of mine put it all in fresh perspective for me again, gave me a jolt, made me view it from another angle:
She died.
She was a waitress at the club - one of those workplace friends; you know the ones. You never see them outside the job, even though you think you might like to sometime. Still, they're there every day, and fun to be around. You get to know each other, enjoy each other's company, listen to stories, commiserate and congratulate. She worked there for two and a half years, and used to come in as a customer before that. She knew little intimacies about my life, saw small, peripheral moments of a drama or two.
Another girl from the club called me to tell me the terrible news. I was shocked in that way that the really nasty injuries have, where you don't feel it for a little while before the pain really sets in.
Later, though, it hurt much more than I would have thought. She wasn't my best friend, or closest confidante; she was just a really nice woman, one who I had come to know and like, whose face I had come to think of as familiar. Once she was gone, I realized how much I had come to expect her presence, and how much a part of my life she really was.
I saw her the last day I worked before Summer Shakespeare started -- I was playing the role of Regan in King Lear. She was excited for me and wished me luck; we chatted for a moment or two. She told me that she really hoped she could get away and see the show, she had always wanted to see me act, but never had. Then she turned away, carrying a tray full of drinks. I went off to play a game of pool, and that was that.
That was that.
The next time I saw her she lay in a coffin, surrounded by her children. She didn't look like herself. They never do, I know, but I've never seen a pretty woman dead before. There's something different about it, something that disturbed me terribly. It was her hands, her delicate hands that were familiar, and her thick, beautiful hair. It all seemed like such a terrible, terrible waste.
I watched her youngest daughter standing by the coffin, leaning in to be as close to her mother as possible. I watched her eldest son, who looked like he just couldn't figure out why or how this could have happened. He was so hungry to hear how wonderful his mom was, to know that we had known her, that she was alive in our memories too. I watched her ex-husband weeping for her, holding their children close, his long arms spread wide around them. Her boyfriend said, in his eulogy, that he was proud to have been the last man she ever loved.
39 years was all she got. She had plans, big ones and small ones, lots of them; she was looking forward to the next Sunday at church, when she was going to dedicate one of her sons. For a while after someone dies I keep looking back: she was here last Friday, she was fine. Last week at this time, she was…
I've been surprised as I've gotten older to realize how actively GONE people stay when they die. Though the pain dulls and life returns to a new normal, the things you miss about them, the things you wish you could say to them, the things you experience that you know they would enjoy, never go away. The hole they left in your life just keeps showing up, sometimes when you least expect it.
Pictures of the dead always give me that haunted feeling; they're so alive in the picture, and yet they're no longer here. I kept looking at her youngest, the little girl, realizing that from this day on, for the rest of her life, pictures of her mother will give her that same feeling. She will look at them and her soul will ache to reach through that two-dimensional image to the warm, flesh-and-blood woman in the photograph, the one that went home from that frozen moment to fix her children dinner and kiss their faces. I was standing in one of the most momentous instants of that child's entire life: the last time she ever saw her mother's face.
I could barely bear the weight of it. I felt that I would burst, or disintegrate, trying to grasp the magnitude of it, of this experience, which is both as old as existence and entirely, agonizingly new each time it is endured.
Those who knew her were invited to stand and speak, to share a memory or two; we try, I think, in sharing memories, to make them concrete, insuring that they will live on, that others, too, will be their custodians. It's our way of holding on to people and things we cannot keep. I wanted to leave something of comfort where there was no ease to be had, in the hearts and minds of her dearest ones. I wanted to say that the sum of our lives is not what we take with us, but what we leave with others. I was choking on tears.
I gave them the words, mixed clumsily with my own, of Kahlil Gibran:
For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
Renee is dancing now, I think.
I hope I'll see her again; I like to think I will.
