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A Final Word

Dark, I ran into an impasse that became a spiritual crisis, until a memory of my grandmother came to the rescue. I was looking at the consolations we offer each other in the face of death. I could not accept traditional religious conceptions of the afterlife, especially a perfect heavenly existence in an endless, cloudless, and—to me—joyless eternity. I was not about to exchange my banjo for a harp. So, with heaven more than a sin away, I needed a backup plan. I tried on the idea that we keep our spirits alive in the minds of others,glowing forever in their memories. As soon as I jotted the idea down, though, I began to have second thoughts. Such an afterlife would be strange indeed. Plastered into the brains of my loved ones, I could not have a new idea or utter an unexpected word. My loved ones would shave off my rough edges, leaving much of who I am behind, and my enemies—who knows what they would do to the voodoo doll of me that glared from the dark recesses of their minds? So I turned to the great secular consolation of Wallace Stevens, the poet who in the absence of heaven created an earthly paradise of words. “Death is the mother of beauty,” he declared famously in the poem “Sunday Morning.” The fruits of life—gathered on the platters of our days—are brought to us by death. Death reddens the rose and sweetens the peach, clearing out the old and ushering in the fresh, the panting, and the delicious. It may be true, but, I wondered as I wrote, is it really a consolation? It means that every moment, as Stevens says in his poem “Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu,” we are waving goodbye, offering a bittersweet salute to its passing as we enjoy it. So what happens when the last goodbye arrives? According to the archbishop of Hartford, Stevens chucked his secular views and asked for last rites at his deathbed.