Shakespeare once referred to death as the “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns.”
Recently, I have been confronted by questions of mortality, my own, as well as those of some of my family members. These questions of death recently arose because I discovered my father is in need of triple bypass surgery, and at his age (he is now 76) such a surgery is risky, to say the least.
This revelation was followed in short order by another: that my uncle, my mother’s older brother, had been diagnosed with acute leukemia, and did not have long to live.
When confronted by these cold whisperings of mortality, I am often thrown back to my first understanding of death when my grandfather, a farmer from Saskatchewan, died many years ago. There was little comfort to be had at that time from psalms and hymns, or in the elegant words of priests spoken over his open casket.
It took many years to find someone who could put into words the things I had felt as that 13-year-old boy. It was the poet Dylan Thomas, who said: “Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means, time held me green and dying. Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”
Thomas perfectly summarized the feeling of permanent loss, lingering sadness and all encompassing depression that traps you and takes you over in that time of grieving. You do eventually emerge from that shell of sadness, but you are changed – metamorphosed into a being that now knows its time is limited, and there is a great clock ticking over us all.
“The right hand allows a trickle of sand,” says the poet Paul Éluard. “Every transformation is possible. Far off, on the stones the sun whets its eagerness to be gone. The description of the landscape matters little: Merely the pleasant duration of harvests.”
So what does one do? Seek answers among the philosophers? Consult with sages of wisdom? Fall on your knees within a church and pray for revelations? I have tried them all in my time, and have become no more enlightened.
“I have not lingered in European monasteries and discovered among the tall grasses tombs of knights who fell as beautifully as their ballads tell; I have not parted the grasses or purposefully left them thatched,” said Leonard Cohen. And maybe, just maybe, there is a hint in his words there somewhere.
There is something – a greater pattern which encompasses our lives, if glimpsed only feebly at times. Just seeing some of its tattered edges, and knowing it is there, is enough for me.
“The palm at the end of the mind, beyond the last thought, rises,” explains poet Wallace Stevens succinctly. “A gold-feathered bird sings in the palm, without human meaning, without human feeling, a foreign song. You know then that it is not the reason that makes us happy or unhappy. The bird sings. Its feathers shine."
These are some of the words which have helped me better understand being and mortality. Though these words signify and act as guideposts along the human journey I have undertaken, there is only so much understanding which can be gleaned from them.
Ultimately, we must screw up our courage and one day walk bravely into that undiscovered country all alone.
