When old age does not bring further stupidity, it can at least bring clearer perspective; for I have lived, since my divorce, in a long and settled relationship with my much younger partner, Alasdair MacLean, an established classical composer. I like to believe that even now, in my eighties, I might go on growing into more of who I am.
Dear E.,
Alasdair is now in Newfoundland, and I go there this next weekend to join him for a couple of days. So, I think of him far away, and I think of you far away, and I think of Carol far away; but, of course, none of that is true, because none of you is far away. Don’t you feel increasingly that what you carry within is far more important than what may be happening to you in some more obvious outside world?
Last night I went to hear a talk given by Sister Elaine MacInnes, Canadian born, who began a career in music (violinist at the Juilliard School) before she decided that all that wasn’t enough, and an inner restlessness took her deeper within. She became a Roman Catholic nun, and later went to Japan where she studied Buddhism for years and eventually became a Zen master and was invested as roshi (old teacher). Years followed in the Philippines, working with prisoners, teaching them Zen, showing them how to be free, even when they were confined by concrete walls. In 1993, she was invited to be director of the Phoenix Trust in Oxford, and retired from that just two years ago when she turned seventy-five (my age!). She has the Order of Canada and has written a couple of books, one of which I bought last night. Her talk was a bit rambling and casual and not as gritty as I might have liked, but I did get a sense of how remarkable a human being she is, and I look forward now to learning something more, by reading her book, about how she marries Zen to Christianity.
I liked what Carol had to say about having friends in for dinner and cooking a chicken. It was the observation of very small things that helped Lear back to sanity on the heath, you will remember, so that he could ask forgiveness of his daughter Cordelia and say to her, “We two alone will sing like birds in the cage;” and so long as both you and Carol can continue with some of life’s little rituals, even the very small ones like cooking a chicken, you are likely to move further towards grace and acceptance. But how little I know, when I’m not going through what you’re going through! Please forgive my fumbling and awkwardness. You know I think of you, both of you.
Ever … ever … ever …
A.
Elma insisted, of course, that her own life go on, as best it could, even when she continued to be deeply interested in the cancer that was destroying her. She was grateful for all she still had, but, as she would soon write to Carol, she wanted to make “a good death” when the time came.
Recognizing that we all must die, I wonder what “a good death” means. Is it a matter of good, better, best?
For the person dying, is it “good” to die in one’s sleep, a quiet and final exhalation, “good” to die suddenly in a plane or car crash, when no goodbyes can be said to anyone, “good” to shut the door quickly, as if leaving a party, without even a thank you for inviting me? “Better” to die after a short illness, surrounded by family and friends and farewell speeches and tears, the inevitable known in advance? “Best” to die of old age, body broken but mind intact, a shining example of acceptance?
But what of those left behind? What is good, better and best for them? Dying, after all, is the last living thing we have to do, and one would hope to get it right.
John Donne, supreme among seventeenth-century metaphysical poets, dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, a great writer of sermons and obsessed with death, arranged for a painting of himself, wrapped in his winding sheet (reproduced later as a sculpted marble effigy for St. Paul’s, where it can be seen to this day), to be set before him as a proper subject for viewing long before he died in 1631. It must have focused his mind wonderfully.
Donne and the Worm: If my soule could ask one of those Wormes which my dead body shall produce, Will you change with me? that worme would say, No; for you are like to live eternally in torment; for my part, I can live no longer than the putrid moisture of your body will give me leave, and therefore I will not change; nay, would the Devill himself change with a damned soule? I cannot tell.
Neither Carol nor Elma went to the extreme of contemplating images of themselves in death, but they were learning what Tibetan monks had also to learn, which was how to “bring the mind home.” When the Buddha, who had long been searching for the truth, more than two and a half thousand years ago, sat down under a tree in northern India, and stayed there all night, he achieved what he considered the final goal of human existence—enlightenment. There came then such a feeling of bliss that the earth shuddered, and no one anywhere was angry, ill, or sad. Everything had reached perfection, and all was quiet. He had brought his mind home.
Dear Carol,
Like you, I wish there were some way to reach systemic or metastasized tumours better and more directly! My sense of balance is certainly not what it was a month ago, and I wish they could zap that part of my brain again. But I can see why they are a little cagey about messing around in there, and I never was a well-balanced person at the best of times (in all senses).
I had a salutary experience just over a week ago, when I was totally flattened (and I mean that—I couldn’t even crawl—I certainly wouldn’t have cared if I had died) by a flu bug for twenty-four hours. The next day I felt much better, and realized that it is possible to survive feeling that awful and come out the other side.
I understand also how one can feel rotten without being in pain. In fact, so far, apart from basically manageable headaches, I have been virtually pain-free, amazingly. The primary lung tumour is giving me no trouble at all. What I feel is weak as a limp dishrag often, but that too varies in degree.
So far I have not had time to feel depressed. I still feel so lucky! The way people have responded to my illness astounds me. The love and thought-waves are palpable. Over and over friends say things like, “You know I really do love you, but I’ve never actually said those words to you, or to so many others. Why don’t we tell people what we admire about them and how much they mean to us more often? We let all these chances slip by.” And we do, indeed! Well, if I can at least help to impel a few others to appreciate and voice appreciation to their families and friends, then I am grateful.
I would like, if I can, to make a “good death”—to do something positive with this part of life that comes to us all. (Goodness, but I sound pompous!)
You ask what I do in the middle of the night. Now, Carol, take a look at the times of my e-mails! I am free to be the night person I always was for the first time in my life! I can also sometimes manage a bit of basic housework, since that’s my high-energy period … I watch TV for the weather forecast, and that’s about it … I tape CBC broadcasts to listen to at appropriate times, and that has the advantage that I can erase whatever turns out to be a bore and go on to something else. What do YOU do at night? Are you still writing in the day?
Love,
Elma
On the same day that Elma wrote specifically to Carol, she wrote specifically to me, commenting on what I had said in my letter the day before.
Dearest A.,
Yes, of course what we carry within is what is real. You were one of the first to teach me that, though I need reminding. I am about to start reading the draft of your other novel, What’s Remembered, by the way, and am so glad I am finally able to concentrate enough to read it properly, though I have skimmed bits already.
Stop undervaluing yourself, you wretched man! You are neither fumbling nor awkward. And if anyone knows about the importance of life’s small ceremonies, it’s Carol, and how they move one towards grace and acceptance. Her celebration of such ceremonies is the best thing about her writing, to my mind.
Don’t put yourself down. You are one of the most important people in my life. You support me always and I love you immensely.
Ever … ever … ever …
E.
It was Elm
a’s comment about Carol’s celebrating life’s small ceremonies that sent me back to her short stories, savouring again their insights and wisdom, vignettes that can haunt you for days. There is Wanda from the bank, for example, ill prepared for life’s carnival, sent by her boss, the bank manager, to push an expensive new pram, “majestically hooded, tires like a Rolls-Royce,” to his home for his new baby son, because there was no room in his Volvo to transport it there himself. Wanda, “an awkward girl with big girlish teeth and clumsy shoulders,” who would obviously never have a baby of her own to push in any pram, stops her journey at one point, “leans over and reaches inside. There’s no one about; no one sees her, only the eyes inside her head that have rehearsed this small gesture in dreams. She straightens the blanket, pulling it smooth, pats it into place. ‘Shhh,’ she murmurs, smiling. ‘There, there, now.’” Who but Carol Shields could conjure up, in such a small incident and with so few words, the sad-sweet life of a lonely woman whose only joy was in imagining what she would never have?
I carried with me this awareness of Elma’s love when I joined Alasdair, visiting schools in Newfoundland as composer-in-residence for Debut Atlantic, a touring organization for classical artists. The few days away included November 11th, a day that had long held special significance for me.
Remembrance Day had always been a time for reflection, even when I was a child, growing up in Bermuda, an idyllic and peaceful place in the 1920s and ’30s, when the rest of the world shuddered its own dark way from one world war into another. I first reflected seriously on death at the age of seven, when pleurisy kept me in bed for three months and out of school for one long year—those were the days before antibiotics—and I wondered then if I would live. My parents must have wondered, too, but I learned to walk again and returned to school, though not to play soccer or cricket for yet another year.
I went with my parents to the Cenotaph on Front Street in Hamilton, Bermuda’s capital, every November 11th, and standing there during a long two minutes of silence, I waited to hear one particular name read out—my own, though it was that of the first Arthur Motyer, killed in a muddy field in France. A big, tall, handsome man, a Rhodes Scholar, an engineer, and my father’s only brother, he had been shot by a sniper’s bullet in 1916, just as he stepped out of a trench to connect a telephone wire, before an assault the next day. “A prince among men” was how his batman, writing a letter of sympathy to my grandfather in Bermuda, described the man whose name I have carried since birth, always wondering if I was meant to be someone else, though never compared with him by parents who loved me. “He died for freedom and honour” were the words on a bronze plaque engraved with his full name, ARTHUR JOHN MOTYER, sent by the government to comfort my father and grandfather, who grieved without understanding or forgiving the world’s stupidity. Was his “a good death”? The plaque hangs now from a mantelpiece in my Sackville house, reminding me of a death before Elma’s and Carol’s, and of my own to come.
Dear A. and E.,
It’s good to hear from you both. Elma, I’m hoping this next chemo is accompanied by the wonderful golden (expensive and gold- coloured) anti- nausea pills. About hair: I think I’ve finally realized that the hair issue is germane only to the hair loser, though I grieved and continue to grieve about it. It is not vanity, but rather the integrity of the body broken—added to all the other indignities. We have done three things this month, and we’re ticking them off. We’ve gone to the Giller, gone to Calgary for convocation, and gone to Vancouver for a PET scan (results to come). We have one more thing to do—leaving Sunday for Paris where my play Thirteen Hands will open on Tuesday night. We’ll be home on Thursday and will stay in the nest here in Victoria forever. This is where I really want to be at the moment. I am thinking of you every day and hoping you are ever your bright and wise self.
love,
carol
She rightly thought that to grieve over the loss of one’s hair should not be interpreted as vanity, compared with the greater indignities of a body broken. But the comment for me had special resonance, for the thick head of wavy hair I had in my youth I began to lose in my twenties, and I grieved about it for years. My body, all the while, had not been broken, and I was in good health. Only now, therefore, do I realize how much vanity there was in this superficial grieving, for my only wish was to be admired. “You have the most marvellous head of hair I have ever seen on a man” was the comment I got frequently in the 1940s, and when I was seventeen, cast as the romantic lead in a university production of Romeo and Juliet, I let my hair grow even longer, in the hope of being admired even more.
Vanity, vanity, was the sole root of my grieving. Bald now since middle age, I might have benefited earlier from Carol’s wisdom, that “the hair issue is germane only to the hair loser.”
Carol had said she had done three things that month, when she was so ill: one very private (the PET scan); one more public (a university convocation); and the third, an event open to the world on television (the Giller awards in Toronto). She had not published anything that year, and was, therefore, not up for the prestigious literary award, when Richard Wright won for Clara Callan. But the warm response she got from everyone present at the gala was her own personal award.
It was especially because Elma’s daughter, Beth, was living in Paris when Carol wrote about going there that Elma got back to her immediately.
Dear Carol,
How wonderful that you are going to the opening of Thirteen Hands—at least, I hope it is wonderful for YOU, though I can well understand why you want to stay put thereafter. I’ll see if my daughter can get tickets and tell me all about your success.
I had the “gold pill” last time, and no nausea at all. It was the three days sitting on the toilet that got me down (or rather up).
I’m getting floods of lovely tributes from the literacy field as people gradually learn about the fact that I am not absent from events because of retirement. I must say it’s nice to hear some of this before the funeral. A bit of basking won’t hurt, I hope.
Life at the moment is golden—and if you’ve been tracking the weather here, you will know how incredible it’s been.
Love always,
Elma
More than ten days elapsed before I felt able to make any sort of reply. Sometimes I found it truly difficult to know what to say. How could two such people possibly need me? What could I offer? Words, words, words. Are they ever enough?
Dear Elma and Carol,
I know that you, Elma, have had friends and family with you just recently, and I hope it has been a happy time for you. As for me, I have been here and there with Alasdair for these last several days, but always I have taken you with me. Carol, you, too, I presume, are back from Paris, taking Elma with you on that longer trip, which must have been tiring for both of you, so get extra rest now.
It might cheer both of you to hear that I was at a concert last night in Rothesay, when one of Alasdair’s works was performed by the wunderkind cellist Denise Djokic, on her six- million- dollar Bonjour Stradivari cello, on loan from the Canada Council. Really stunning, both the music and the performance! At the intermission, I was introduced to, and had a lovely long chat with, Gordon Fairweather, a couple of years older than I and now retired from politics, a real delight, unpretentious, droll, and wonderfully human. A lawyer originally, he was, in his time, chairman of the Immigration and Refugee Board and then the Human Rights Commission. When I commented that, in my career, I had met few academics who were large, generous spirits, he smiled softly and said that years ago he had been on a search committee to select a new president for the University of New Brunswick, and had never before witnessed such vicious in-fighting as he saw then among the professors, though he had spent twenty-five years in the Conservative caucus! Lester Pearson had been his favourite prime minister and had taught him one of life’s more important lessons, which was ‘Learn to say no!,’ though that was, unfortunately, also a line from a temperance hymn about the evils o
f drink!
Enough chatter for now. I think of you, both of you.
Ever … ever … ever …
A.
In the weeks that followed, Elma began expressing thoughts that were more sombre than when she mentioned “a bit of basking” before the funeral. It would prove a roller-coaster ride of lengthening shadows and sunshine. But lines from Hopkins would always be there:
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day
What hours, O what black hours we have spen
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
TWO
But Fay’s noticed something she’s never
noticed before. That love is not, anywhere,
taken seriously. It’s not respected. It’s the one
thing in the world everyone wants—she’s
convinced of that—but for some reason people
are obliged to pretend that love is trifling and
foolish. … It’s possible to speak ironically
about romance, but no adult with any sense
talks about love’s richness and transcendence,
that it actually happens, that it’s happening
right now, in the last years of our long, hard,
lean, bitter and promiscuous century.
—From The Republic of Love
The Staircase Letters Page 3