Notes on Death and Being

On Tuesday I sat on the unsympathetic seat of a subway car and slowly read Dreams of My Russian Summers (see Current Book I’m Reading sidebar). I say slowly because that’s the way I have to read this book. The language is rich, layered with mystery; the vague narrative takes its time to unfold through the memories of a young Russian boy’s summers with his French grandmother, transplanted from her homeland to the vast steppes of Siberia. It’s a read I don’t want to rush – each word is momentous. Reading a passage about the boy finding a picture in an old suitcase of a sullen soldier leaning on a pike, contemplating his inevitable death, I couldn’t help but think of dying. The topic’s been on my mind these past few months as my mom slowly, with a glorious Swedish obstinacy, succumbs to her cancer-riddled body, giving every ounce of will not to accept it, becoming a walking miracle in the annals of allopathic medicine. Medically speaking, she shouldn’t be alive. If the doctors were correct in their prognosis, she should have died six years ago. Death is on my mind a lot, but it’s not something to be shunned or pushed away. Death is an equal part of life, and vice versa.

The train crossed the Harlem River and I glimpsed a far-off singular industrial crane, its heavy steel ball hanging motionless. I thought about death and my fear of it, then about a memory of someone telling me that he wasn’t afraid of death. If someone now said to me, “I’m not afraid of dying,” I would check his pulse, feel his forehead, and then pat his hand like a loving mother consoling her young, saying, “There, there,” all the while thinking, I don’t believe it.

I have a dear friend, a therapist, ninety-four years old. His belief is that when he dies, it’s over, he takes nothing with him, that’s it, finito, sayonara. He says there is no proof of an afterlife and that it’s foolish to hold onto the belief that we carry our consciousness with us when we die. He contends that this philosophy lets him live completely in the present moment and appreciate each day because that’s all he has; there is no past, no future, only now. I believe there is only the now, the past is a memory and the future is an imagination. He relates this to his patients and gets through the bullshit of their pasts, telling them that it doesn’t matter what their mother did or didn’t do, what their father said or didn’t say, to stop blaming people for the past and take a new step from the present and create your desired life. I concur, I just don’t agree that when I die the lights flicker out, the curtain goes down, and all is dark on the stage of consciousness.

You don’t have to believe in a personal soul or spirit to look at the scientific fact that you are made of energy. Energy cannot be created or destroyed – it just is; it transforms into something else. I believe this energy is our soul and it merely changes into something else when we die. Jung would say it would find its home in the collective consciousness. I won’t deny that. We’re already a part of that, so there is no leaving or going. Bear with me. I’m not asking that you believe in a soul, or even some semblance of a god, but only that you are more than your body and mind.

In The Soul’s Code, James Hillman speaks of the individual spirit choosing its parents, place of birth, the circumstances in which it incarnates. It does this to fulfill its lifetime’s purpose, what it wants to learn, experience. He gives examples from Beethoven to Madonna and how the circumstances in which they were born helped them live their purpose. You might cry out that this is a Calvinist version of the soul, but within the framework of what we come here to do, there lies infinite freedom for creating the life that we want to lead; like a sonnet it has form, but sumptuous liberty to create lies within that poetic form.

Some will profess that it’s all a fairy tale, but I believe it because it only strengthens my resolve to travel on my life’s path each day as if it were my last. I don’t always do this, but when I wake up in the morning and remind myself of this, my day is fuller and richer. My nonagenarian friend would say that believing in a consciousness after death precludes the possibility of living in the now. On the contrary, it makes the case even stronger.

I grew up in a family that went to the local Baptist church. I was terrified of burning for eternity in hell lest I accept Christ as my savior. I did accept him. Many times. I think I asked Jesus into my heart about nine times, thinking that if a cat had those many lives, I shouldn’t take any chances. What I realized when I grew up, went to college, and became aware of other possibilities, was that Christ, God, Buddha, Krishna, the Big Kahuna and the Wizard of Oz were a part of me whether I accepted them or not. As an infinite soul I was already a part of creation, of light, of love, of the source of my Being. It’s all there. The acceptance of this is what I think Jesus was really talking about – that we, too, can do as he did.

My favorite agnostic Episcopalian writer is Madeleine L’Engle. I read the Wrinkle in Time series when I was in sixth grade. I remember walking through the school library looking for something new and different. Wrinkle almost fell off the shelf into my hands. Madeleine melded science and spirituality and quantum physics into a book of exquisite relevance to my life at that time. (I recently reread it, and it was even more poignant.) I didn’t want to share it with anyone. I felt like I was the only one on the planet that had ever read it. I was the clandestine reader and it was a secret – a lovely, sublime secret.

The reason I call her an agnostic is because in her non-fiction book, a journal called Circle of Quiet, a young student asked Madeleine, “Do you really and truly believe in God with no doubts at all?” Madeleine’s response: “Oh, Una, I really and truly believe in God with all kinds of doubts.” She based her life on this belief. It’s important for us to question Being in all its incarnations. Doubt makes us stronger.

Madeleine died last September at the age of eighty-eight. In the Fall, F. emailed me that he was going to her memorial service at St. John the Divine. Did I want to go? he typed. I had to tutor that day after school, but I also knew I had to go to the service, so I cancelled and met him on the steps of the cathedral. I didn’t go because I had ever met her, because I had coffee with her, because she came over for dinner and was a trusted friend.

The summer before she died, thanks to F., I discovered her non-fiction work, her writings on what it was like to be an artist, a writer, and commit to one’s art because it had to be expressed. She evinced this eloquently in Walking on Water. She connected art with the spiritual, something I knew was possible, but wasn’t able to articulate. After that summer of insatiably reading her work, she was gone. I knew and appreciated her thoughts and felt like she was a good friend I had never physically met. I had to, and wanted to, attend her memorial service as much as I will have to and want to go to my mother’s. (I don’t know about want to, but I’ll write that for now.)

In Circle of Quiet, Madeleine writes about Red, a seventeen-year-old boy who lived in her building in New York City. He was a frequent guest and asked, “Are you afraid of death?” She turned around and said, “Of course, Red.” He exhaled and said, “Thank God. Nobody’s ever admitted it to me before.”

For Madeleine it came down to an inestimable fear of the dark. Aren’t we all really afraid of the dark and the monsters that hide there? But for her, and more and more for me, it is a fear allayed by faith, doubt, and joy. Yes, I am afraid of the dark, of death, but what transports me beyond this, confirms my belief in art being the answer to the dark, to the fear of death, are Madeleine’s perfect words: “And if I ask about this fear, do not offer me pie in the sky or talk to me in the narrow world of logical proof. Answer me, please, with the St. Matthew Passion; with Twelfth Night; with Guernica; with simile and metaphor, image and icon. There isn’t any other way to express or to understand anything which transcends material facts.”

Albert Schweitzer echoed this when he wrote that he was tired of theologians getting in the way of faith with their simple conclusions about God. Schweitzer didn’t care about answers, he committed himself to ask the questions. Why I write, why I doodle on the bathroom walls with a sharpie (F., God bless him, encourages me to do so), why I listen to Brahms’s Requiem and don’t feel sad, but like I’ve touched the infinite in myself as reflected in this crazy German’s call to God, is what lights the darkness.

All of this has risen in me like extracting metallurgy, sifting off bubbling iron ore not necessarily because of a passage from a Russian author’s book, or a solitary crane on the Harlem River, but because of my mom. She was given two days to two weeks to live just before Christmas. She’s still alive and determined to live as long as she can. It was a terrible and wonderful holiday of trapped emotions finally revealing themselves, but since then I feel like I’ve fallen back into a malaise about her cancer, not wanting to think about it because, “Hey, she’s feelin’ good, why worry, why think about it?” But the other day when I made my daily call, she was weak, tired, sick to her stomach, and that reminded me once again that my mother is going to die.

She’s on morphine daily. My dear dad unknowingly gave her too much morphine yesterday – a pill in the morning and liquid morphine in the evening. It immobilized her today. The drug takes away any discomfort, but more and more it’s bringing a haze of lethargy upon her mind. When I speak with her on the phone, she repeats herself more than usual and her words are a bit slurred. My dad told me that she dropped three glasses of water today and almost fell in the bathroom. The graceful, but strong hands that used to play the piano, with me watching mesmerized, now shake so that the food falls off her fork. The once indefatigable mother is now the worn out urchin of her disease. Somehow she keeps pressing on...no matter what.

Part of me loves her dignity and determination, another part skulks away in grief, and yet another part throws up its hands and says, “Get it over with and die! I’m tired of going through this every day.” And then I think I’m selfish, I’m a monster, I’m a thoughtless, uncaring son who only thinks of his own fear of death and the mother dying as a daily reminder of it.

F. has gone through his own horrors with the deaths of loved ones and the one thing that he told me that made me stop and ponder the ramifications of my mother’s inevitable death is the adamant belief that you can’t deny the experience of the death of someone you love, just as much as you can’t deny the seemingly easier experience of life. It’s not fair to the dying or to oneself.

I’ve recently finished the rough draft of a novel. In it, a mother is dying of cancer and the protagonist, an eight-year old boy named Bubby, is doing his best to confront the situation. (You write what you know – I truly believe that.) In the story, the grandmother, who has been a bit of a curmudgeon, holding back, scolding the children most of the time, sits down with the family and relates her experience of her little boy dying many years ago:

Grandmom leaned forward and rubbed her long bony fingers together. “Death is a part of life, the two are inseparable, and by denying that Mary is sick, that she might be dying, you’re all missing out on the experience.”

“She’s not dead, Mom,” Dad said bluntly.

Grandmom raised her head and sat up straight. “I didn’t say she was, Kenny. And I’m not saying that she is going to die any time soon. We’re all going to die, so can I just say what I want to say?”

“Go ahead, Mom,” Mom said.

“When death does come, you’ve got to look into its face and not deny it. If you do, it only makes it harder. I know. When little Orville had the fever, it was getting worse by the day, and then by the hour. There was no hope. We knew he was dying. His body was failing and he was racked with Scarlet Fever, and I denied it. I wouldn’t accept it, I wouldn’t look death in the eye and say, ‘I acknowledge you because you are a part of life.’ It wasn’t fair for Orville for me to do that. It wasn’t fair to me because I didn’t want to admit it. I should have been there for him through that experience by talking openly about it, sharing his thoughts, his concerns, his fears with him. It was selfish of me. I’ve forgiven myself and I think Orville has, too. I learned that a family has to love as much as it can. In this time you have together don’t deny the inevitable, if it comes to that.”

Bubby vaguely understood what Grandmom was saying. Izzy looked completely confused. Cindy stared blankly off into space. Mom nodded her head. Dad took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh.

Grandmom stood up and pushed in her chair.

Bubby piped up, “What’s inevitable?”

She looked down at him and said simply, “It means without a doubt, something is going to happen.” And with that she said she loved them and walked out the door.

My mom edges closer to death and this reminds me of my own future one, but the more I cogitate, meditate, and truly feel what I’m feeling, the more I want to be there for her. We’ve talked more openly about it recently, especially over the Christmas holiday. There was a moment in her bedroom when she was looking for an old letter in her drawers. I walked in and held her and we both cried. We didn’t need to speak, but after the tears I told her that I knew she was going through this for a reason, that I loved her, that she was the epitome of unconditional love and the perfect mother.

The words we needed to say to each other were said during that time home in Pennsylvania. Since then, once in a while we cry, but we’ve moved back into that mirage of time when she was living healthfully with her cancer, when she could get around without her walker, without being tired twenty-four hours a day. It’s a time of passing conversations once again and the next time I’m home I want to move back into the more meaningful ones about life and dying. The unspoken needs to be said.

I don’t want our conversations to be idle. I’m tired of that with people. The things I want to talk about are the things unsayable, the ideas that can’t be verbalized, expressed, only felt. How do I talk about them in passing with a colleague? Is it possible? For now I’ll try writing and see what rises to the surface.

When I leave a glass of water out overnight, in the morning the sides of it are covered with little bubbles. This is the chlorine that has separated from the water, along with whatever other impurities have settled out. I then pour the water into the fern in the living room and the bubbles are still left on the side of the glass. That’s what I want to talk about – the bubbles that remain.

There’s a scene in the film Amadeus when the young titular upstart says: “I’m fed to the teeth with elevated themes! Old dead legends! Why must we go on forever writing about gods and legends?” To which the Baron Van Swieten replies, “Because they do. They go on forever. Or at least what they represent. The eternal in us. Opera is here to enoble us.”

Art is here to enoble us. If it doesn’t, then I don’t resonate with it. I went to a show at the Guggenheim where a mishmash of tinfoil was thrown on the floor and called art. Sorry, not for me. It didn’t reach down into the depths of my Being and transcend the mundane. True art lives on, music does, as does writing. I think Madeleine might agree that art allays the fear of death, although it doesn’t prevent it, and reminds us of something that we are connected to – perhaps the collective creativity if you cringe at the sound of God. She wrote: “Art is an affirmation of life, a rebuttal of death.”

I continue to question it all, not looking for definitive answers, but simply asking in the hopes that amidst all of the glorious daily madness, my connection with Being will become stronger. God conjures up too many Biblically-induced images for me from childhood, so I prefer calling it Being. When I say Being and think of my own death, I don’t see a benevolent old white-bearded grandpa sitting on a throne, surrounded by a blinding light, opening up a voluminous book and asking in a voice á la Orson Welles, “So, how’d it go?” Now that is worse than the fear of death, so what do I have to be scared of?

Mr. Steffen! Mr. Steffen! Mr. Steffen!

Besides being a writer, I currently teach second grade at a private school here in this city of synchronicity and infinite possibilities. I love teaching. Truly. I call myself an educator rather than a teacher. It evinces a broader context than one confined to the physicality of a classroom. However, right now, I am a teacher in a classroom. I have been for four years, but now I’m getting ready for the curtain call, the final bow. The countdown begins with the number of school days – not weekend days – remaining, and that number is: 62.

Every weekday morning, being careful not to pull something in my back lest my chiropractor berate me for taxing my sacro iliac, I use my right arm to push myself up into a sitting position. Shih Tzu, Gio, immediately seizes upon the opportunity and darts for my pillow, nestling into a downy comfort that can only be supplied by goose feathers. Although I often slide my gluteus maximus, minimus, and medius up from the warm flannel sheets with a sigh that sings a discordant note of reluctance, I never think, Oh sweet Buddha, I hate my job. On the contrary, it’s a joy to be with twenty-one children each day.

Actually, sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. I think I just wrote that because it sounded like the right thing to say. In fact, it’s often quite grueling to be around the cacophony of high-pitched voices, the swarming nature of the creatures around one’s legs. It’s so very strange to think that I’m surrounded by these tiny people all day who are constantly pulling at me: “Mr. Steffen this, Mr. Steffen that. Mr. Steffen what should I do? (Have a lobotomy?) I don’t get it. (You never will.) Huh? What? My ankle hurts, I think it’s broken. (You can walk. It’s not broken. Get back in line.) Can I go to the bathroom? (I don’t know, can you?) Can I get a drink of water? (I don’t know, can you?) I’m tired, but I have to go to my country house in the Hamptons this weekend. (Life bites the proverbial big one, doesn’t it, kiddo?) I sneezed, what should I do? (Uh, wipe your snotty nose?) My tummy hurts (No it doesn’t. Siddown.) She called me a name! (What? A toffee-nosed heap of parrot droppings?) I have a playdate with Whosawhatsit, but I forgot to bring a note from my parents. (Boo-hoo.) Somebody farted! (Gas is natural.) Open a window! (They’ve been painted shut.) Mr. Steffen, Mr. Steffen, Mr. Steffen!”

There are other times, however, when teaching’s a pleasure. The Latin quote at the top of this page sums it up perfectly for me right now in my life: I learn by teaching, think by writing. My students teach me something every day about myself. The biggest thing I’ve learned from them is that I’m quite an impatient little bugger. They’ve taught me to be in the moment all the time – the now; to play make-believe without inhibitions; to slow down and take my time; to draw, paint, create with a sense of wonder and spontaneity; to write stories with no beginning, middle, or end, but simply to write for the pleasure of writing.

Although television, movies, and video games (Krishna, I hope I’m not sounding like an old man saying, “It ain’t like it used to be.”) have accelerated children’s knowledge of things I didn’t know when I was their age, their eyes still light up every year when I read them a Tall Tale like the larger than life adventures of Paul Bunyan. In an aura of awe that draws across the room like a thick velvet curtain, they listen to the story of Paul and how he cried a river a tears when his parents abandoned him in the woods of Maine, how he made a frying pan the size of an ice skating rink, how Babe the Blue Ox was so big that Paul needed a telescope to see from one end to the other. The look on their faces when they discover something new, something I might take for granted, is a lesson in itself every day.

In regards to other half of the Latin quote, writing is a way for me to think. That’s one of the reasons I’ve started this blog. However, writing has often been diminished by my teaching. I’m not getting done what I want to get done because after waking up at five-thirty, five days a week, working tirelessly until three in the afternoon, tutoring on some days, attending faculty meetings on others, I don’t always have enough energy to muster my writing muse who waits patiently for me to call upon her. I can manage to walk up the hill on West 225th Street, drop my things, cook for F. and me, have a glass of wine, call my mom to see how she’s doing, read a little bit, and sometimes stay awake for half of a movie. By 10pm I’m ready to sleep (pass out) with that famous Native American princess, “Dances With Dreams”.

Yes, most nights I write. I try not to let a day go by that I don’t at least write something in my journal. It’s not enough, though, and the part of my soul that is the writer, Timothy, has had a nice rest and is ready to play, like a dog that’s slept too long and there’s no way in hell he’s going to curtail his desire to fetch. I think of my former kittens that lounged around for most of the night and then, when I went to bed, would suddenly awaken in a feline fury.

In his book On Writing, Stephen King writes about his teaching job and its affect on his creativity before his initial success with Carrie. He writes, “By most Friday afternoons I felt as if I’d spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain. If I ever came close to despairing about my future as a writer, it was then.” Teaching is exhausting. There’s a reason that we get two and a half months off in the summer: we need it.

Here’s one example of countless fatigue-inducing teaching experiences: The day before Valentine’s Day I explained to the children that if they are going to give a Valentine’s card to one person in the classroom, they have to give one to every classmate. (We are an equitable school with a philosophy of inclusion and fairness.) I added that if they want to give a Valentine’s card to a friend in the other second grade class they must also give one to everyone in that class. “That’s a total of twenty-one cards for this class, or forty-two if you’re giving to both classes.”

I recapitulated the aforementioned explanation of appropriate cupidic card casting in the classrooms using different words so that those who didn’t get it the first time might get it the second ride around the pedantic merry-go-round. I then reiterated the explanation a third way, making sure to cover the indelible tracks laid down by my words that had grown feet. On top of all this, I took the time to have the smartest, most perceptive child in the class echo what I had just said; he did it perfectly, actually stating it better than I could have.

I paused, took a breath, and then asked the question that every teacher fears after she or he has explained something: “Are there any questions?”

There’s an affable tot in my class whose perspicacity of life is that of a blind polar bear in a cataclysmic snowstorm. It’s almost as if I shouldn’t explain anything at all, that I should indefatigably refuse to divulge any hint as to what I want to teach and simply begin a lesson or discussion with: “Are there any questions?” Inevitably, as if her soul’s path has imbued her with waiting in eager anticipation to ask questions for the rest of her life, this blue-eyed cherub with the golden hair she is growing to donate to Locks of Love will raise her puffy paw of a hand and, on this occasion, ask: “If I want to give a card to someone in the other class, do I have to give one to everyone?”

At my yearly meeting with the headmaster last week I gave my notice that I would not be returning next school year. I told him that I had just written one hundred lesson plans for McGraw-Hill, made more money in one month than I do in two months of teaching, and was going to write for the educational book market. For me it’s a perfect marriage of two things I love: writing and education. I can affect more people and make more money. Perfecto. I can also dedicate more time and energy to my creative writing. Even more perfecto.

Every time I thought about quitting my job, my stomach dropped down to my Buster Browns, like it does when I’m on a rollercoaster, or like the times when I was a kid and my dad would drive really fast through a stretch in the woods that was riddled with steep hills. “Faster!” I would yell from the backseat. Someone appropriately named the road Breakneck Road. I would close my eyes so that I couldn’t see the drop or rise in the approaching hill. It had the same affect as a roller coaster.

Before going into the office to resign from my cushy teaching post, I thought, What am I doing? I’m leaving my comfort zone, my safety net, my health care, my retirement fund! But when I walked out of the meeting, I felt an invisible, but palpable, weight slide off my shoulders, hit the floor, and dissolve into nothing. The tension in my neck dissipated. I felt like I was standing taller. The mind was clear.

I want to wake up in the morning naturally, not when my alarm clock tells me to. I want to roll over and kiss the puppy and not have to get out of bed for another half hour if I want to. I want to go work out after everyone has left the gym to shuffle off to their jobs. I want to return, shower, eat a nice breakfast and by ten o’clock begin writing on whatever project has flown via gossamer wings to my Danish desk.

When I emailed F. about my decision he sent me two quotes that brought everything into perspective. The first one comes from Thoreau: If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours. And from dear old Joseph Campbell: If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are – if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.

That about says it all.