Chariots of Fire

Rainy, cold, London-feeling days. The last light of the day flares low and golden, striking the tenderly-budded trees in the park, turning their chartreuse to lurid orange against a dull slate sky. A gull maneuvers deftly through the trees -- flash, flash -- and in the foreground, shadowed but intense, the yellowish-green of new leaves shines against dark, wet trunks.

Then, just as quickly, it all fades to dun, grey, olive, then monochrome. Apollo's chariot disappears beneath the unseen horizon.

--

A Gabrielli mass today at the cathedral, for Ascension Day, with the "Majeste du Christ" and "Transports de joie" from Olivier Messiaen's "L'ascension" as the organ prelude and postlude bookends. Our cathedral is establishing a "sister" relationship with the Anglican cathedral in Havana, and many of the regular helpers were in Cuba on a first "official" visit there. So J. and I served as ushers, greeting parishioners as they arrived, welcoming visitors, handing them hymnals and the Book of Alternative Services. I talked to a couple from Yorkshire who were trying to see all the large churches of the city, and to a young man, fresh from Oxford but originally from Sri Lanka, in Montreal now for a month of special study in his field at McGill. "I'm finding it hard to navigate in the French language," he said, apologetically, in perfect English. "I didn't expect all the signage to be in French, and I find I make mistakes in transportation, buy the wrong things...but that is to be expected. I am also a musician and an Anglican...what can I do during this month to be involved, to find out about life in this parish?"

Ascension. Resurrection. We heard today of another fifty-year-old about to die; if it's not people our age stricken with unexpected disease, I feel surrounded by older friends and family beset by the ravages and indignities of age. Thoughts of mortality do not arise and flare out like the sunset, but are these days ever-present, like the very air. And yet - and yet ... I'm not depressed. The immersion seems to be moving me toward some sort of greater acceptance; even, strangely, an emotion I recognize as gratitude. Gratitude that I'm learning to become more present; learning, perhaps, to be able to help a little; gratitude that these dear ones are showing me how to be less afraid of growing old and ill and alone, a little less afraid of that boundary we call death.

--

My aunt, 80, had a knee replacement last Monday, and I drove over to the seacoast of New Hampshire to be with her for an afternoon. Her face on the pillow, as I walked into the hospital room, was my father's face, just as it is, and will be, mine. We are a small remnant now, my father and his sister the only immediate relatives I have left. Beyond them: cousins, and cousins' children; photographs in albums; memories. Like my father, my aunt and I are cut from a similar bolt of scratchy New England homespun. She is a musician and actress; a reader; articulate, determined, sharp-edged, often funny, critical; she's lived alone for most of her life. We haven't spent a lot of time together but there's always been an ease and affinity that erase some of the lack of common experience. We were easy with each other in the hospital room, too, in spite of the unusual intimacy presented by recent surgery, wounds, dressings, gowns, examinations, bodily functions.

In the quiet of the mid-afternoon she rested for a while on her side to ease the discomfort. I reached over and took her hand that lay on the sheet - something I've never done before - and we sat quietly together, as she closed her eyes to drift into sleep, waking now and then to talk a little more.

As the daylight began to fade I told her I loved her, and she told me the same. I left her sitting in a chair, starting to eat the dinner they'd brought on a tray, and then I drove back west with the sun in my eyes until it gently dropped behind the forest of white pines.

 

Comments

[dale]

(o)

[leslee]

I was going to say that an Englishwoman in my walking group on Saturday said the same thing about the weather here - "just like home." But now you've brought tears to my eyes. It's been a tough run for you. Glad you're finding grace in it.

[beth]

Thank you Dale, Leslee. I know you've both been there yourselves.

Looking for grace feels like my only choice. A while ago I was feeling exhausted and defeated and J. asked me, "what do you want to do?" "Run away," was my immediate answer. "You can't do that," he said - meaning "even if you run, it will follow you - this is life." The truth of it sank in deeper than it has before when I've said it to myself, and it's meant an even-more-deliberate return to meditation and reflection on "now", on being present both to others and to myself. Part of that is knowing when to say "no" and when to pull back and take time for self-preservation, otherwise I'm no help to anyone.

But I'd like to hear from anyone who's been in a similar situation: what's helped you cope?

[Dave]

FLOODED

The creek is flooded to river
with water, swollen like a fresh bruise.
Bodies float down, uninterrupted
with faces turned down
and arms outstretched
like Christ's.

I am like this: flooded to river
with death, death my subject
as water is the creek's,
death the beloved we can
never know though
we are swollen with the waters
of wanting, death, the past,
death, my relative, my father
and mother, the face of my brother,
death's blood in me,
death flooding me
filling the valleys, rising
in the hills of me --

I do not know why we are not crazed,
all of us, at the death of just
one person. I do not know
how we have survived all these
years, all these deaths
that flood us like music or breath.

The creek is beautiful like this,
terrifying or mesmerizing
as fire gone wild.

--Sheryl St. Germain
from *How Heavy is the Breath of God*
(University of North Texas Press, 1994)

[Bill]

Aw Dave.

We just went on a spring float on an out-of-its-banks river. We camped in a woods where there were no great beasts and I woke mad from having no meaning in my fear. I think myself more mad from the absence of death, my predators hunted to extinction I live in oblivion. In the morning as we packed to leave, high in a bare sycamore, a sharp shined hawk devoured the flagging silhouette of a king bird while another king bird lofted and fluttered. The day before, in haste, I grabbed ropes that backed the clutter of nest of wren newborns on my shop shelf. I held a child high to see the chicks craning for food. We came home to find them dead, perhaps abandoned because I had disturbed the nest. So I regard nature as diorama from which I excluded, reading it artfully, thinking of harms I have caused, with none to harm me, with forgiveness.

Whoops, I'm looking down a long road I want to take, but not today. I just stopped by to say I like the fuzzy fotos. I think they connote grace. You are taking what the camera affords, and not asking it to be other than what that is. They are "walking the walk". Thank you Beth.

[beth]

Thanks a lot for this, Dave, I feel like you probably looked to find exactly the right thing to send me. Pretty visceral - it reminds me (literally) of descriptions of the Euphrates during the Armenian death-march, but metaphorically, of course, it's pretty close to how we feel sometimes. I think we don't go crazy because we aren't in the water ourselves. And it's interesting what it elicited from Bill.

Who is Sheryl St. Germain, and what is this book? Is it all poetry?

Bill - thanks for your story. I think you and I are on the same wavelength - there's all this dying in the world, but we're surviving, we're still walking on the bank of the river. Thanks too for noticing the fuzzy photos. It's deliberate; that's how things feel right now and I was trying to somehow express it.

[-s]

I too contemplate my uncle’s recent death, my own aging parents who may or may not live much longer, as well as my own old age without children. Yes, loss … for those who pass away and for paths not taken. The meanings that this holds for me varies depending on how close it feels and the season within which it is felt.

I would like think that the way that we live illness and old age, the meanings that we create in the living of it, is the final gift that we give to those around us. It is the gift that my own grandmother gave me at the end of her life, after many strokes had taken away her ability to either read or paint. At these moments I envisage life as an intensely creative process, where meaning is produced through the small gestures of everyday life. If we become more intensely who we are with age, I would like that to be both creative and loving.

Yet I know that the other side of this are those moments of fear and despair, the long journey into night, that haunt me when I am alone. I too know depression – my familiar as I call it – that returns in the dead of winter or in moments of uncertainty. I therefore know that I cannot live up to my own ideals.

I do not know how I will live illness and old age. I only know that it will not be a choice between creativity and despair, but rather both. Both, because I swerve between the two, moments of insight and periods of despair following close on each other. Both also because they are part of the same process, each is only possible with the other, and only has meaning through the other.

I am left with the question of how, blind, I might write a life with these fragments.

[Lucy]

(O) I am dumbfounded, by the post and so much in the comments that follow.