'For a’ the Life of Life is Dead'

“Coleridge, why are we to live on after all the strength and beauty of existence are gone, when all the life of life is fled, as poor Burns expresses it?”

 

My father-in-law, J. Michael P. Wood, died early Saturday in a hospital not far from his home in Fredericksburg, Va. In March he would have turned eighty-four. He spent the last six weeks hospitalized with multiple insults to his resilience, including blindness in his left eye and diminished vision in the right. He was a reader, solver of crossword puzzles and a formidable Scrabble player. Compromised eyesight would have made his life difficult.

 

Born in Nova Scotia, raised in Peru, he had a degree in electrical engineering from McGill, was a pilot and owned a marina, and for decades worked as a commercial realtor. I had the privilege of writing his obituary several weeks ago.

 

In the passage quoted above, Charles Lamb is writing to his childhood friend Coleridge on this date, February 13, in 1797. His Aunt Sarah, his father’s oldest sister, had recently died. Less than five months earlier, his sister Mary had fatally stabbed their mother. He writes:

 

“This afternoon I attend the funeral of my poor old aunt, who died on Thursday. I own I am thankful that the good creature has ended all her days of suffering and infirmity. She was to me the ‘cherisher of infancy,’ and one must fall on these occasions into reflections which it would be common-place to enumerate, concerning death, ‘of chance and change, and fate in human life.’ Good God, who could have foreseen all this but four months back! I had reckoned, in particular, on my aunt’s living many years; she was a very hearty old woman. But she was a mere skeleton before she died, looked more like a corpse that had lain weeks in the grave, than one fresh dead.”

 

Lamb refers to Robert Burns’ elegy for a friend, “Lament For James [Cunningham], Earl of Glencairn.” Here are the pertinent lines:

 

“In weary being now I pine,

For a’ the life of life is dead,

And hope has left may aged ken,

On forward wing for ever fled.”