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If we don’t learn that simple, devastating, and redeeming detail of being alive—that
what we do, all the jangle of our declarations and defeats, lasts longer than we ourselves do, that the past isn’t over—then the parade of our days stands to indict much more than it bequeaths.
This belief in autonomy and mastery is imported whole and mostly unawares by dying people into their dying time. The expectation that this illusion of autonomy and mastery be protected from the vagaries of dying is to me the principal cause of intractable suffering as people begin fingering the symptom rosary of the end of their lives. It is a sad thing that this goes witlessly on and on, but it is an understandable thing given the culturally endorsed mania for autonomy and mastery.
This lie, a lie perpetrated on the eve of his death, a lie that was bound to degrade the awesome, solemn act of his dying to the level of their social calls, their draperies, and the sturgeon they ate for dinner, was an excruciating torture for Ivan Ilyich … He saw that the awesome, terrifying act of his dying had been degraded by those about him to the level of a chance unpleasantness, a bit of unseemly behavior; that it had been degraded by that very “propriety” to which he had devoted his entire life …. Nothing did so much to poison the last days of Ivan Ilyich’s life as this falseness in
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living, not to be gone, not to be lost. They were whispering something of why it is that we fear dying as we do.
am saying that the belief in a single omnipotent
history
Push this
a little, and you can hear plainly the belief that when you die you graduate from any ensnarement in human affairs, and this includes the ensnarement of reciprocal need or yearning.
Without it being said aloud you can hear the defiant refrain of the rational enlightenment anthem: There are no dead. There is only how we feel about the dead. I think some recognize without wanting to that because of training and education and acculturation and attrition The Dying are people to them, and the Dead are ideas or notions or propositions or personal
Dying people as a rule are not traumatized by dying, but, like Lazarus, by having to do it and do it again.
When a hard time is upon us, being hard is not required. Being supple in your understanding, keeping your willingness close to your memories and your skills, asking your eyes to stay open and wondering what is needed of you in that time is some of what is required. Whatever side of dying we are on, being willing to see things for what they ask of us is something to work at. That is a human skill.
She knew that her culture could survive starvation, as it had done times aplenty in the past. That was in her culture. And she knew that there could be enough memory and enough hunger for true things among her people to survive forced relocation, which didn’t have to be the end of anything. But she also knew through practice what linguists and anthropologists know through study: The culture lives in the language. When there is a rupture in the teaching and speaking and praying of a language that lasts two generations, when the memory goes the way of the lived experience, it is the real
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No
He knew—
probably he knew this from a young age—that remembering means gathering back together again something that was once whole and has been scattered, and that the human heart was built to break, and that feeling that heartbreak each time is remembering again the deep things of life that need remembering. He knew that heartbreak is something like the orphaned or disowned sibling of love. So he was willing to know sorrow, that older brother of love, and he prayed for it, so that no passage of time would heal over his memory and his ability to love how life is. He was my first teacher and still the
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