Circumventing mortality

William Maxwell and Alice Thomas Ellis weigh in on some sadness in my life

The hardest thing I’ve had to write is my younger brother’s obituary, which I did two weeks ago. He was twenty-nine years old. He had brain cancer. It was a swift and cruel illness that, in the eight months from his diagnosis to his death, took away his movement in both legs and his right arm and, in his last weeks, made him hardly able to eat or speak or open his eyes.

I’ve been hesitant to write about it, knowing there’s a chance I’ll emotionally hemorrhage on the Internet, but one aspect of wading through grief is that everything seems to meaningfully arrange itself in light of what you’re going through. My mom saw symbolic significance in the birds that arrived on my parents’ property after my brother’s death. I was caught up short last fall reading On the Banks of Plum Creek to my children when I stumbled over these lines from a folk song:

Uncle John is sick abed
What shall we send him? 
A piece of pie, a piece of cake, 
Apple and dumpling! 
What shall we send it in? 
A golden saucer.

My kids’ Uncle John was in fact sick abed, and there was nothing we could send him—nothing that would restore him to health.

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The worst thing, maybe, is that I keep thinking of his body alone deep in the earth.

I’ve seen the dead bodies of loved ones laid out for viewings before. And I love cemeteries actually. The cemeteries where both sets of my grandparents are buried are places of peace to me. My favorite memory of visiting Paris in my early twenties is of wandering in the Père Lachaise cemetery despite the day being icy and hail bouncing down on my companions and me as we searched for the graves of Chopin and Oscar Wilde.

But the day we buried my brother took place not even a week past the day I had held his trembling hand, telling him again and again that he was such a good brother. Now his hands lie still in a pinewood coffin sealed up in a concrete vault in the earth. Some people call the rite of burial closure. I call it awful in all senses of the word.

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My reading life has, understandably, been poorly organized lately. But even with a mind crowded with both grief and tasks like buying Easter basket fillers and signing the kids up for swim team, I’ve still found odd pockets of time to read. And my recent reading has, as with On the Banks of Plum Creek, presented passages that seem written for me right now, which perhaps might be meaningful as well to anyone else who has been down this path before.

In the days before my brother passed, I had been dipping in and out of a collection of William Maxwell’s writings, The Writer as Illusionist.¹ In his acceptance speech for the Brandeis Creative Arts Award and Medal, he touches on writing autobiographical fiction:

Mostly what I have wanted to do in fiction was to defend what I remember. The fate that any individual creature and most things can expect is oblivion. To go against this is, if you take the long view, simply perverse. But I find it emotionally unacceptable even so. And have tried, in a small way to circumvent it.

This I feel agonizingly: the unacceptable fate of oblivion; the desire to circumvent it in the small way of fidelity to memory. As resonant as I find Maxwell’s words, though, his and my beliefs are at odds with each other. It’s that emotional unacceptability of oblivion that pushes me over the edge and makes me believe it can’t really be so—that while decomposition and nothingness seem terrifyingly irrefutable, they go too far in contradicting the reality of the person as he or she was in life—a ensouled body so alive with hopes and dreams as could only fill eternity. Even after receiving the most terrible of diagnoses, my brother still dreamed of becoming well again.

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A few days ago, I was reading Alice Thomas Ellis’ second volume of Home Life essays and I came across another passage on mortality that takes up where Maxwell leaves off in my mind. Ellis begins the essay wrestling with the meaning of the universe and then shares an anecdote about her daughter’s not wholly successful attempts to save a nest full of abandoned pheasant chicks. She concludes by writing:

Everything starts in the egg and ends in death. I think it’s called ‘the heartbreak at the heart of things.’ But then perhaps our very mortality is an egg and the moment of death our souls will emerge like damp chicks. If this is so then everything is all right and I doubt there’ll be any need for us to be dried off on top of the Aga. ‘All things are well and all things will yet be well.’ I think that’s called optimism. Optimism is the last resort of those in deep despair. There can’t be any optimists in heaven.

I like this homely image of the barrier between the sensible and the spiritual planes of existence being as thin as an eggshell and of the soul emerging out of death and into eternal life like a damp, awkward chick. Sometimes I marvel over how my children were once not here and now they are. And here with such solidity, spiritedness, humor, and beauty that add a dimension of meaning to my life I never could have foreseen. More than any argument, this makes me an optimist about the immortality of the soul. More than anything else, it makes me hope that all things will yet be well.

Epitaphios icon (the burial of Christ). More information can be found here.

1. This is an excellent book, by the way, if you’re interested in the working methods of writers. As Maxwell himself says, “I don’t think you can be a writer at all and not take delight in what other writers do.”