'The Most Noteworthy Action of Human Life'

I dreamed my late brother was here in Houston, a city he never visited. He was phobic about flying and traveled by air only twice in his life, when very young. We were seated across from each other, on the couches by the front window. What I remember of the dream is brief, little more than an image without duration. He looked as he always looked – plaid shirt, blue jeans, Whitmanesque beard. The atmosphere was mundane, free of revelations. We didn’t talk though I sensed I had unformed questions. He offered no reassurance or profound knowledge from beyond. 

When I woke the dream mingled with Montaigne, the writer we often talked about during his final weeks last August in the hospital and hospice. Montaigne’s father became ill with kidney stones in 1561 and died seven years later. The essayist’s closest friend, the poet Étienne de La Boétie, died of dysentery in 1563 at age thirty-two. His brother Arnaud died in his twenties. His firstborn died at two months, the second survived but the subsequent four also died as infants. In “Of Judging the Death of Others,” Montaigne writes:

 

“When we judge of the assurance of other men in dying, which is without doubt the most noteworthy action of human life, we must be mindful of one thing: that people do not easily believe that they have reached that point. Few men die convinced that it is their last hour; and there is no place where the deception of hope deludes us more. It never stops trumpeting into our ears: ‘Others have certainly been sicker without dying; the case is not as desperate as they think; and at worst, God has certainly worked other miracles.’”

 

For almost a week preceding his death, my brother was unconscious. The only sound he made was softly moaning when the nurses moved him. Before that, he never seemed frightened. I’ll never know what he knew or when.

 

[The quotation is from The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, Stanford University Press, 1957).]