Image: I go strange places in my dreams (2) by me (inspired by the tree in space in Aronofsky's "The Fountain").
There's always a feeling driving what I write. Sometimes, like when I wrote the piece on madness, it's anger, sometimes, like with the piece on flow and boundaries, it's fondness and fascination, sometimes, like now, it's a slowness as I reflect and feel and write.
Anyone close to me knows how often death weighs in on my mind. Mortality, my own, that of close ones, and of everything around, is a weight that often sits within me, coming to colour much of what I see and do. Sometimes I love deeply because I feel the transience of life intensely, sometimes I don't for the same reason. And then there are large parts in my life when I am living, carrying the awareness of mortality in some hidden corner of my being, until a moment triggers it to the forefront again. No matter how much I believe otherwise, I cannot get used to it. But too often I think I know death, I know that I am dying, like everything else, and that I know how to live.
This paragraph is going to contain some spoilers from Aronofsky's "The Fountain" and I don't think that spoils the movie at all but if you think it will, skip to the next part. The first ten minutes of the movie introduces you to six characters, all of them played by Rachel Weisz and Hugh Jackman. One of them is a tree but that's Rachel Weisz, hold on. The movie moves between three timelines where three pairs of lovers exist. The movie is centered in present time where Hugh Jackman has the part of an obsessive doctor/researcher and Rachel Weisz plays his wife dying from an incurable disease. The scene that rises up in context of love and mortality is this: present time Hugh Jackman is in a reverie floating in eternal time, remembering the tree which sustained and healed him. It's apparent that in Jackman's eyes, Weisz is the character that pulls him through time. She is the tree and the Queen in another time. He is floating when she appears through the door, in present time, breaking his reverie. He is short with her and asks her what she is doing there and she answers joyfully that it is snowing outside and she was wondering if he would join her. Jackman is swallowed by his inner world and his desires and the massiveness of what eternal love means, and dismisses her, saying he has work. Weisz disappears, eternal love appearing and thwarted in present time. Jackman's character carries the makings of so much of the modern romantic, if not the modern human. When their deepest longings are met and when they see echoes of their desires reflecting in the real world, they cannot reconcile the meaning of their love and mortality within the hand of eternity. So they work and they distract themselves through language and structures, losing real, finite time. The God of Death, Inevitability does not listen to bargains and pleas. It comes for everyone. So while we live, should we not live with this awareness? It will change who we are drastically.
A few weeks ago, I came across a small post shared by an account that I follow on Instagram (the_art_of_the_end). Britt Keehn runs it and she wrote about a brief moment when she had the realization of loss as she returned home to find her dog not there. Her dog was at the vet where he was being kept for observation for an emergency; Britt knew this, and yet when she stepped into her house and saw his empty dog-bed and his toys lying about, it hit her for a tiny moment what it would be like when he was no longer there. And the grief was of course immense. I'll quote the rest from Britt's post before I continue,
"My dog is going to die some day, and with his diagnosis, that really could happen at any time. "Knowing" that, versus having an actual cognitive and emotional understanding of that fact have been two very different experiences. I am setting up support networks and making plans, because, this animal, who has been the Constant of my Life for the past 12+ years, will leave me reeling. I know that. And I know I can't stop it.
But I can prepare for it, so when the initial blows come, I'm able to BE THERE for him, not scrambling, not uncertain. I can prepare myself and start the grief work now and not stay in denial that it maybe won't happen (it will). And I can adjust my life, his life, our routines, my interactions with him to nurture every beautiful, blessed moment we have left, however many they may be. He is getting all the treatos, let me tell you!
This is why we plan. Planning is an act of love.
Extra heavy on loving your loved ones today, y'all. Our time is always too short together."
I wrote to her after reading it, talking briefly about the preciousness of love and life and we moved on. I knew what she was talking about, having been hit by that realization many times in other contexts. But I moved on, swept by other things in life. Some weeks later, life repeated itself, as it does, through me to deliver the same lesson. I sat with our dog on my lap at the vet's and asked the vet if his diagnosis meant his life was going to be shortened. I expected to hear a yes, a certainly. I was so sure I was prepared; after all I knew everything was mortal and thought about death so often. I knew Berko was sick. I knew what the words meant and I knew the conclusion... what could a confirmation do? The vet responded with a certainly, as I had expected, and it hit me with force and immediacy and my knowledge and certainty didn't matter. I felt my throat tightening and tears well up in my eyes and all my knowledge turning into pressure in my arms as I squeezed Berko just a little tighter. Back home, over the next few days, I often looked at him and wondered how long. Sometimes I would find myself asking him, senselessly, where will you go? Don't go no. But he will go, as we all will and all I can do, all any of us can do is love while we are here presently and deeply. I have had many crying sessions with old friends, lovers, therapists about the fact that they are going to die someday, that I am going to die, and everything is dying all the time. Most of the time, I've been met by knowledge. I've been met by the part of me that was sitting at the vet's office asking the question, not the part that followed. If we understood how incredibly fragile each of our relationships, to other humans, to the world, to animals and trees and birds is, would we be so careless? Would we wait for diseases and DEATH to appear as calamities and pandemics to live more wholly?
This is my hill to die on as they say, mortality and what that means for the feeling and act of loving. There isn't more to say for me on this. Will end with two beautiful poems on love, life and death and hope if anything, you remember to love whom or what you love keeping mortality in mind.
(From "Poems of Gratitude" edited by Emily Fragos)
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Feel Me
BY MAY SWENSON
“Feel me to do right,” our father said on his deathbed. We did not quite know—in fact, not at all—what he meant. His last whisper was spent as through a slot in a wall. He left us a key, but how did it fit? “Feel me to do right.” Did it mean that, though he died, he would be felt through some aperture, or by some unseen instrument our dad just then had come to know? So, to do right always, we need but feel his spirit? Or was it merely his apology for dying? “Feel that I do right in not trying, as you insist, to stay on your side. There is the wide gateway and the splendid tower, and you implore me to wait here, with the worms!” Had he defined his terms, and could we discriminate among his motives, we might have found out how to “do right” before we died—supposing he felt he suddenly knew what dying was. “You do wrong because you do not feel as I do now” was maybe the sense. “Feel me, and emulate my state, for I am becoming less dense—I am feeling right for the first time.” And then the vessel burst, and we were kneeling around an emptiness. We cannot feel our father now. His power courses through us, yes, but he—the chest and cheek, the foot and palm, the mouth of oracle—is calm. And we still seek his meaning. “Feel me,” he said, and emphasized that word. Should we have heard it as a plea for a caress— a constant caress, since flesh to flesh was all that we could do right if we would bless him? The dying must feel the pressure of that question— lying flat, turning cold from brow to heel—the hot cowards there above protesting their love, and saying, “What can we do? Are you all right?” While the wall opens and the blue night pours through. “What can we do? We want to do what’s right.” “Lie down with me, and hold me, tight. Touch me. Be with me. Feel with me. Feel me to do right.”
(from the Poetry Foundation)
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