`Each Breath You Take is Breathtaking'

Thinking about death while gratefully immersed in life doesn’t feel like morbidity. Each day is a memento mori that spikes the sweetness. An anonymous reader derides recent posts about L.E. Sissman’s poems, and the poems themselves, as “depresing” [sic] and “real downers” before moving on to stronger stuff. The thought of death remains powerful medicine. In his second book, Scattered Returns (1969), here’s Sissman’s opening lines to “A Deathplace”:

“Very few people know where they will die,
But I do: in a brick-faced hospital,
Divided, not unlike Caesarean Gaul,
Into three parts…”

Sissman had been diagnosed with Hodgkins disease in 1965. His comedy is grim and clear-eyed. Was this “therapeutic” for Sissman? Would he have written differently if cancer had not ambushed him at 37 and killed him at 48? It seems almost indecent to ask. As a reader and fellow human, I’m grateful for his cancer poems and death poems, and find consolation in the hope I will conduct myself with comparable grace.

The poet was an accomplished prose writer and wrote a column, “Innocent Bystander” (think of that title, its onion layers of irony, in the context of Sissman’s life), for The Atlantic Monthly. Some were collected in 1975 as Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the 70s. (Go here.) The column from January 1975 is titled “Extreme Mercy” and amounts to a love song for nurses (a sentiment that mirrors my hospital experiences). Here’s the final paragraph:

“It could be said, in a way, that these nurses, to their extreme mercy to their morituri, make their patients -- me included -- want to live for them, want to make them right in their high, unfeigned, audacious hopes for us.”

By this time Sissman could no longer write poetry. He died 14 months later. Does a dying man, even the strongest, most stoical and realistic, look for hope wherever he can find it? Do we? The poet Samuel Menashe, now 83, was born more than two years before Sissman. In 2005, Christopher Ricks edited his New and Selected Poems, published on the occasion of Menashe’s 80th birthday, and some of us discovered a major poet in our midst. Their styles are radically different but I like to think Sissman would have enjoyed “What to Expect,” among others:

“At death’s door
The end in sight
Is life, not death
Each breath you take
Is breathtaking

“Save your breath
Does not apply –
You must die.”