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The Valley of the Shadow
It was just an afternoon ski, up the
A narrow valley, and the mountains to either side go up so
steeply to the sky that the low winter sun doesn’t linger long in
the afternoon.
I’d thought I might ski up to the old Pittsburg townsite, not
because there
would be anything going on up there but just because it’s a kind
of a marker, a
former outpost of mostly human culture in otherwise mostly omniscient
nature;
it’s a good place to go to and turn around if you’re just
out for exercise, or for
the beauty of the day. It’s also where the road doubles back on
itself and
starts to seriously climb out of the valley toward Paradise Divide; you
don’t just
start up that part of the road in the late afternoon in December unless
you’re seriously
prepared for something more than a little leisurely mucking about on
skis.
But I was still a couple miles down from the old townsite
when I realized the night was coming down the valley faster than I was
going up
it. There it was, just ahead: not exactly a hard line, but a very
distinct
transition. I was gliding down a slight slope in the bright (if deeply
slanted)
sun, and ahead was a deep blue twilight. Far up the valley—really
far—the sun still
lit the tops of the distant peaks, but filtered as it was by the deep
twilight
below, it was not a warm light. Beautiful, all of it, achingly
beautiful, but
cold, cold.
So I glided to a stop that afternoon, in the penumbra of
the coming night—went into the deep orange-violet light where the
sun was
visibly dropping down behind the high southern ridge. And was
immediately
chilled—got out the windbreaker, got my gloves out of my pocket.
The sun was still
on the steep north slope just above me, but I could see its not-so-slow
withdrawal up the slope. And I thought, that day: a good place to turn
around—go
with the shadow back down the valley.
And it all of course made me think about dying.
*
While I don’t consider myself to be an especially
morbid
person, I’ve been thinking about dying often, these days.
I’ll hasten to add
that this is still a largely abstract preoccupation with me. I have
friends for
whom it is less abstract, friends who are going to die within the next
year or
two or five, and who know it and know why. Some of them younger than I.
Me—at 65, I am still (knock on wood) getting a
pretty
clean bill of health when I get around to going to the doctor for my
more or
less annual checkup. Blood pressure up but kept under control with a
daily five
migs of some comparatively inexpensive drug; bad cholesterol creeping
up but
not yet in the danger zone; minor arthritis in various joints,
noticeable in
the morning but nothing disabling; eyes probably being gradually
destroyed by
too much time staring at this screen; hearing in one ear mostly
surrendered to
a growing tinnitus that I’ve gotten used to—et cetera.
Getting old, in other words, but nothing that our very
capable medical establishment can’t handle without even thinking
about it. Barring
better planning, I might last to 80 or 90, like too many of my
peers—and
therein lies my problem, our collective problem.
I know that one of these years, I’m going to go to
the
doctor for a checkup and he is going to find something he doesn’t
like. Or I’m
going to wake up realizing I’ve been putting off asking the
doctor about a
nagging something or other that, instead of going away after a few days
or
weeks, seems to be getting a little worse.... And then I am going to
have to
make the kind of decision about myself that I’ve had to make all
my life about
my automobiles: should I fix up the old hulk one more time (even though
there
are noises and rattles indicating other incipient breakdowns on the
horizon),
or is it time to just trade it in? Except that, with me (other than the
parting-out of organs), there’s no trade-in value.
Junking it, is what it amounts to, and what I wonder,
fear about myself, is whether at that point I’ll have the courage
of my
convictions—whether I’ll have the gumption (and today, the
necessary guile) to
stand up to the heroic health industry and the perfervid Christians and
conduct
myself through a reasonably dignified process of dying. That’s
what I think of these
days, when I think about dying: whether I will be brave enough to carry
out a
decent death as a final obligation, a last but by no means least gift
to my
children, maybe to the whole earth, but certainly to myself: to die in
a timely
and dignified way.
*
This is of course one of those conversations that
we’ve
made to be culturally inappropriate. Like belching and farting, dying
is something
thoroughly natural about ourselves, and therefore something to be
suppressed in
our civilized and unnatural world. Bring it up, and everyone is faintly
embarrassed; someone else starts talking about the weather, or how
it’s time to
get dinner on the table.
But the topic is here, more and more. My partner and I
have begun to talk about it—quite a lot, in fact, because she has
just finished
going through what most of my friends today are going through: the
death of
parents. Or to say it as it really is—the long, slow, and often
painful death
of parents who know they have outlived their productive years, who know
that
every additional year of their poor excuse for living diminishes what
they have
to leave to their kids, who have ceased to really enjoy life and are
horrified
at the looming prospect of the Happy Golden Years Managed Care
Facility, but
who are too polite to object to the strenuous efforts of a health
juggernaut determined
to keep them alive forever or at least till their annuity and other
assets are
milked dry. That, coupled with the fanatical contradictions of the
aggressively
religious, who claim to believe in an afterlife but so aggressively
fear death.
One of my friends had the trauma this past spring of
losing both of his parents within a matter of weeks—both through
the relentless
accumulation of natural causes, but with the second death undoubtedly
facilitated
by grief at the impossibility of imagining life without the partner who
left
first. But traumatic as that was for my friend, I think he was luckier
in a way
than my partner because the same process took a decade for her.
Her father died in his eighties, a brilliant, energetic
and creative man who lived long enough to see the juggernaut of
civilization
trundling away from—and in some ways, over—the ideas to
which he had dedicated
his life. His wife (my partner’s mother), who had dedicated her
life to him and
his work, lived on beyond him a decade without really wanting to at
all, or so
she said. She said she wanted to be dead; she started to wear the
“Do Not
Resuscitate” bracelet—but at some point, for whatever
reason, took it off, and
so was resuscitated once from what was apparently just a minor (but
sufficient)
stroke. After that, she survived a couple other incidents through
nothing more
nor less apparently than her body’s habit of being alive. She all
but stopped
eating—took in nothing, my partner said, but coffee and
chocolate. She became
so physically emaciated that it was literally dangerous for her to try
to go
out on a windy day. But until cancer came to her pancreas finally, her
heart
kept thumping away in a low-pressure way, pushing enough blood through
a
relatively functional system to keep her brain and body alive. My
partner made
half a dozen trips to
I escaped this thing that so many of my peers are
experiencing; both of my parents left when I was still in the decades
between
being part of their responsibility and being able to take them on as
part of my
responsibility. My father died in his mid-60s, my age now, of a
prostate cancer
that didn’t get diagnosed in time and spread to his bones—a
couple years of
pain, including the pain of chemo and every other all-out treatment to
fight
the inevitable. My mother died much younger, at 48, of the
complications
associated with lupus, when I was
still in my early 20s—a long, lingering, sad death from one of
those mysterious
auto-immune diseases in which the body essentially turns against
itself.
Both of them were robbed of a sense of completeness to
their lives—I remember my father, when he called to tell me about
the diagnosis,
saying he had hoped for a few years after retirement to “sort
things out.” And
my mother—I just think about an easel up in the attic with a
half-finished
painting on it. A kind of a Norman Rockwell picture of a young girl
with ballet
slippers slung over her shoulder looking at a ballet poster. And a
drawerful of
stories and poems. But mostly, had she been unladylike enough to
mention it,
her sense of incompleteness would have resided in not getting to
see—for better
or worse—my sisters and me grown and out in the world.
But they—and I—were at the very least spared
this strange
situation facing people today, moving into their eighties and beyond,
and their
grown children, confronted with a ridiculous paradox: a society that
seems to
appreciate nothing but youth and its follies on the one hand (go Brad:
get’em
all), but on the other hand seems to have a fanatical will to keep the
aged
alive for as long as possible, in diverse situations of cultural
irrelevance
and even disrespect, culminating in the “nursing homes”
where they are treated in
the same patronizing and demeaning way we treat slow children.
And this in a world that so obviously needs, more than
anything else we can or at least could actually deliver, fewer people.
*
So I’m thinking about this; my partner and I are
thinking
about it. We are, in fact, working with a lawyer trying to draw up a
“medical
power of attorney” for each other so powerful that would, in
effect, let us
each be the other’s “executor” in the most basic
sense of the term—help with
the syringe, the overdose, the pillow, whatever works. That’s
just the ideal,
of course, and of course it’ll never fly in the current
political/medical
environment, enforced by strange inconsistent politicos who focus their
mercy
on human vegetables but can’t extend it to healthy Iraqis and
Afghanistanis
whose bad luck it is to get in their way, or for that matter, young
Americans
who also get in the way of something thrown back.
But the afternoon ski up the
It made me think, for example, of one of the books by a
great nature writer who was doing nature-writing before nature-writing
was
cool. Farley Mowat, The Snow
The title essay—“The Snow
Walker”—was a terrible story, a
sad story, of a tribal band of far northern native Americans who were
starving
to death in an unusually severe winter when the animals that nurtured
them
didn’t show up where and when expected—possibly because the
far north was still
in the process of adjusting to the efficiency we had brought to the
region in
the form of the repeating rifle. The band finally headed south to try
to find a
trading post where they could beg or borrow some sustenance. It was a
literal
death march. But periodically, through that terrible journey, one or
another of
the elders would just leave in the night—go to “meet the
Snow Walker.” And when
one of them would do that, almost invariably it seemed, the next day a
lone fat
buck or some other animal would amiably show itself, close enough for
even a
starving hallucinating hunter to draw an accurate bead, and the people
would
eat again.
The Snow
But suppose the Snow Walker is actually—Santa Claus?
Same
neighborhood: a fat jolly spirit that opens a door out of the night and
welcomes one into another kind of warmth? Why couldn’t death be
as generous as
St. Nicholas, a gift to the living, when the gift is timely for both
the giver
and the gifted?
*
Timeliness, timing, of course, is the problem. When one
is young, it is easy to say, “Well, you won’t see me getting old and useless.” And there are
certainly “untimely”
deaths, moreso for people who hang out around mountains—falls,
accidents, the
mysterious heart failures that seem to strike vital and healthy men
between 45
and 55, the ugly systemic malfunctions that took my parents before
they’d had a
chance to see their works at work.
But for the rest of us—how will we know when it is
“closing
time”? Actually, I think my partner’s mother left an
inferential clue. Her
family had been typical enough of the postwar American
families—there was no
discernible reason for unhappiness, therefore no acknowledged
unhappiness. But
she had lived in the kind of strange estrangement from her two
daughters that
one often sees in once-ambitious women. She had wanted to be an
actress, my
partner’s mother, a serious classical actress (Checkov was her
specialty), but
she had married in college where she was studying acting, and had
become a wife
and mother instead, as women did in her time.
So—it is my hypothesis that she took
off her “Do not resuscitate” bracelet because she still had
unfinished
business; she wanted to make a kind of peace with her daughters. My
partner
basically gave her mother a year, and in that year they actually became
friends, as much so as parents and their adult children can. Her
mother’s greatest
role in college had been Sonya in Chekov’s “Uncle
Vanya”—stepdaughter of an old
discouraged professor too civilized to really complain—and the
morning she
died, my partner was there reading the last scene of “Uncle
Vanya,” where Sonya
promises her Vanya that “there, beyond the grave, we shall say
that we have
suffered, that we have wept, and have known bitterness, and God will
have pity
on us; and you and I, Uncle, shall behold a life that is bright,
beautiful, and
fine. We shall rejoice and look back on our present troubles with
tenderness,
with a smile—and we shall rest. I have faith, Uncle, I have
fervent, passionate
faith.... We shall rest!”
And that was apparently enough—that plus the year of
mutual atonement—to let her let go.
So—taking care of business, the business of making
the
best of the messes of life: maybe only then can we put on the bracelet,
really
decide to let go of life, when we’ve taken care of the business
of living. “It
is time I wrote my will,” said Yeats, somewhere in his sixties. I
think I’m
still trying to discover my will;
there’s still unfinished business.
*
But how will I know when it’s time? If I wait till I
think I’ve done my work, I’ve got so many “writing
projects” started that, were
I permitted to stay till I finished them all, I’d be about 125
years old. But I also know that many are
called to great
ideas, but few are chosen; many of my great ideas, maybe most of them,
probably
aren’t going to be done right (or at all) by me. Or I’m
probably not going to
do right by them. Probably. Unless, of course, in the process of
working on
them, they became infused with my peculiar brilliance, or, or, or....
Thus doth
consciousness make cowards of us all.
But there’s other unfinished business too. How long
will
it take me to expiate the life I’ve lived? Do
something—played back or played
forward—for all the damage I’ve done in the lives of those
I’ve encountered on
earth? An hour in silence for every cruel word I’ve said, a day
by the side of
a road for every hitchhiker I’ve passed up just because I
didn’t want to share
my 80 cubic feet of space with a stranger, a nickel begged for every
nickel
I’ve withheld from those who needed it more than I did if only
for the purchase
of forgetfulness, a hand-delivered apology for every stupid hurtful
thing I’ve
done without even the devil’s grace of intent, a year or so of
slavery for the
girl who got blamed for the china cup I accidentally broke in the
fourth grade display
about China the cup brought by the son of a mother whose husband had
been lost
in Korea, everything that whirs and flickers on the sky of the mind
when the
ironclaw owl comes to sit on my stomach at night.... If I’ve got
all that unfinished
business to take care of....
Do I, in other words, really think I can come to a place
where I believe that the earth is done with me—a place where I
believe I am
done with the earth?
I can only say I think about it a lot these years.
But that day up the
But do I have the courage of that conviction? When I look
up the ***
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