'They, Too, in the Course of Time Must Die'

This week I interviewed a mechanical engineer who has received a sizeable grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop a rapid diagnostic test for that intractable disease, HIV – something like the COVID-19 antigen self-test many of us have already used. I was surprised to learn one didn’t already exist. As a newspaper reporter I first wrote about HIV/AIDS forty years ago – casually, from a distance, at first; later, up close, sadly close. I associate the experience with an old Latin tag: Timor mortis conturbat me. “The fear of death troubles me.” I see the verb variously translated as “distresses,” “disturbs,” “confounds.” That was my reaction and the reaction of many I interviewed who soon after were dead. 

Some of us know the Latin from the Scottish poet William Dunbar’s “Lament for the Makers” (c. 1500). Each of its twenty-five quatrains is followed by the phrase, which is drawn from the Catholic Office of the Dead: “Sinning daily, and not repenting, the fear of death disturbs me. For there is no redemption in Hell, have mercy on me, O God, and save me.”

 

Tom Disch (1940-2008) was a wonderful poet, one of the wittiest, but his anti-religious sentiments occasionally grew tiresome. No poet was as death-haunted in his work and life as Disch, who committed suicide. He was the poet laureate of death. He concludes “In a Time of Plagues” (About the Size of It, 2007) with Dunbar's Latin phrase:

 

“Deer reck not of the hunting season.

Sheep can’t imagine shepherd’s pie.

Smokers scorn the voice of reason.

No one knows the day he’ll die.

 

“Gays there were who never heeded

All the headlines about AIDS.

Drinkers drank, and still they speeded.

Every color finally fades.

 

 “Power lines are thought to kill

People who live too close by.

Look at your electric bill,

Then think about the day you’ll die.

 

“No life’s secure: oaks may defy

Death for a century, but they,

Too, in the course of time must die.

Timor mortis conturbat me.”

 

Reck is an old English word meaning, according to the OED, “to take care or thought for or notice of something.”