`To Live On and On with Our Wounds'

We envied, admired and feared older kids, boys and sometimes girls who had not quite graduated into adulthood but who would frustratingly remain forever our seniors, proof of Zeno’s paradox. The first older kid I remember lived next door to the house we moved from when I was not quite three years old. We often returned and they visited us, and I nursed my hero worship.

By the time I was a senior in high school, Robbie was in the Army and serving in Vietnam. He was killed early in 1970. At the funeral home, in front of his casket, Robbie’s grandmother suffered a fatal heart attack. When she fell, her false teeth rolled across the floor. Death is agony, yes, and the wounds it leaves never heal even with the proverbial aid of time, but it’s also grotesque and often in appallingly bad taste, and despite our best manners it can even be funny. Beckett said it: “Birth was the death of him.”

Beckett was neither cold nor cruel. He accepted death and its untidiness without palliatives. He wrote in a letter to his friend Alan Schneider when the latter’s father died:

“I know your sorrow and I know that for the likes of us there is no ease for the heart to be had from words or reason and that in the very assurance of sorrow’s fading there is more sorrow. So I offer you only my deeply affectionate and compassionate thoughts and wish for you only the strange thing that may never fail you, whatever it is, that gives us the strength to live on and on with our wounds.”

Long before Robbie’s death, I knew something about death’s weird gaucherie. I was five when my maternal grandfather died. At the funeral home, one of my mother’s older brothers, Virgil (suitable name), pulled me to the casket and touched my hand to my grandfather’s cheek. I recognized the feel of wax fruit, which my grandmother kept in a bowl on her dining room table. Wax fruit, a fortunately waning fashion, still reminds me of Tom Hayes’ funeral. In the presence of death, meaningless details – false teeth, wax fruit – assume inordinate significance. I have other similar stories but they are probably too offensive, even for me.

Writing about one of her funniest, most celebrated poems, “Not Waving But Drowning,” Stevie Smith wrote in 1956:

“I often try to pull myself together, having been well brought up in the stiff-upper-lip school of thought and not knowing either whether other people find Death as merry as I do. But it’s a tightrope business, this pulling oneself together, and can give rise to misunderstanding which may prove fatal [suitable word], as in this poem I wrote about a poor fellow who got drowned. His friends thought he was waving to them but really he was asking for help.

“Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much farther out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

“Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

“Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.”