As a boy I was spared most deaths. I've read of people who lose parents, siblings and close friends when young, and wonder how they adapt to unprecedented loss. They have nothing to compare it to. The death that hit me hardest was President Kennedy’s, a month after my eleventh birthday. He wasn’t much of a president but a touch of horror lingers, as does the sense that everything changed after Dallas.
With age the
losses accumulate and they are no longer abstract, as though I were reading history. Last month, in our neighborhood newspaper, I saw that a doctor who had treated me five years ago was dead. He had a military bearing and was strictly
no-bullshit. I liked him. He was my age and died horribly of amyotrophic
lateral sclerosis. What is it like for a doctor to die slowly and painfully,
while knowing exactly what was happening to him? Here is Charles Lamb on March 20, 1822 writing to William Wordsworth:
“Deaths
overset one and put one out long after the recent grief. Two or three have
died, within this last two twelvemonths, and so many parts of me have been
numbed. One sees a picture, reads an anecdote, starts a casual fancy, and
thinks to tell of it to this person in preference to every other; the person is
gone whom it would have peculiarly suited. It won't do for another. Every
departure destroys a class of sympathies.”
A world dies
with every person. September 26 will be the tenth anniversary of D.G. Myers’
death. It was no surprise but still a hard shock. We
knew each other for only six years but talked like lifelong friends. Terry
Teachout died on January 13, 2022. I knew him for almost twenty years, though I met him and David only once. Everyday I think of something that I wish I
could tell them. Lamb continues:
“One never
hears anything, but the image of the particular person occurs with whom alone almost you would care to share the intelligence,--thus one distributes oneself
about; and now for so many parts of me I have lost the market. Common natures
do not suffice me. Good people, as they are called, won't serve; I want
individuals. . . . The going-away of friends does not make the remainder more
precious. It takes so much from them, as there was a common link. A, B, and C
make a party. A dies. B not only loses A, but all A's part in C. C loses A's
part in B, and so the alphabet sickens by subtraction of interchangeables.”
2 comments:
This reminds me of my mother and her best friend, Millie. They met in high school in 1945 and were each other's best friends for 65 years, until my mother's death in 2010. Both women eventually married, so then it was Chuck and Millie and my mom and dad. Not long after the turn of the millennium, the deaths began. First, my dad died in 2002 and mom called Millie to let her know. Then, Chuck died in 2005 or so, and Millie called mom. Then, mom died, and my sister called Millie. Then, last of all, Millie died in 2015, at about 86. Someone, I forget who, let my sister know. Death is a relentless thing. . .
I started reading yours and Myers' blogs in 2008. One lead to the other, though I can't remember whose I read first. The two of you have shaped my views on literature as much as any book or author. It feels wrong to say I miss someone I've never met, but in the ten years since his death, there have been numerous instances - after a world or literary event - where I wish I could read Myers' opinion on the matter. I regularly feel the absence of his intellect. RIP D.G. Myers, and condolences to all those who knew him personally.
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