Charles

I just found out that my friend Charles, about whom I've written twice before, died on Sunday. Recurrent pnemonia apparently finished the process that was inevitable anyway.

Death is the strangest thing. How can a person simply cease to exist?? If a tree is cut down, there is a wood pile, or sawdust, or rotting trunks on the ground. And of course the physical body of Charles still exists. But the spirit - the voice, personality, ideas, experiences of his life, his memories - all have suddenly vanished without a trace. We will never know anything more of what it was like to be Charles than we know at this moment, and even that will fade over time.

Here I can see the essence of spirit quite clearly. Don't talk to me about the personality just being a very complex set of neural connections, or that everything is ultimately arrangements of molicules - that does not explain what has happened here. Something spiritual has happened; something we call a spirit is no longer there. It is not a "thing" that has gone - it is a capability, a capacity to touch my life, to teach me from years of experience and from a bank of wisdom accumulated at great price. I no longer can stare into his eyes and feel the thrill of words coming from a person with very different life experiences than mine. I can no longer have my vision expanded by his particular point of view. I can no longer listen to him disrupt the chapel service with his long passionate speeches.

And some day, I will die. How can I fathom that I, not my body, but the thing that feels, experiences, weeps, laughs, thinks - that that thing will be gone? That all I have experienced and today hold as so important, will disappear? That the desire for life itself will no longer be? Who will I be, when I am no longer I? Who was I, before I was me?

I am forced once again to face that great paradox of meaning - why am I here? I have struggled with this question since I started counting the years left instead of the years lived. The task now is, to cease hiding, to cease pretending, and to wrestle with what is, allowing the dance between this thing we call reality and the thing I call me, to shape me and my philosophy as it will.

Comment posted by Heidi
at 6/9/2006 8:04:00 AM
Gene,
This one so much touched me especially with knowing several people pending death and also Charles now gone.

I think I feel like this especially when I am in the heart of getting the very thing I have longed to receive -- I feel so inadequate when it is gifted to me.

This poem makes me feel less alone in my struggle.

Heidi


[Panhala]
Life While-You-Wait
Wislawa Szymborska

Life While-You-Wait.
Performance without rehearsal.
Body without alterations.
Head without premeditation.

I know nothing of the role I play.
I only know it's mine. I can't exchange it.

I have to guess on the spot
just what this play's all about.

Ill-prepared for the privilege of living,
I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands.
I improvise, although I loathe improvisation.
I trip at every step over my own ignorance.
I can't conceal my hayseed manners.
My instincts are for happy histrionics.
Stage fright makes excuses for me, which humiliate me more.
Extenuating circumstances strike me as cruel.

Words and impulses you can't take back,
stars you'll never get counted,
your character like a raincoat you button on the run ?
the pitiful results of all this unexpectedness.

If only I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance,
or repeat a single Thursday that has passed!
But here comes Friday with a script I haven't seen.
Is it fair, I ask
(my voice a little hoarse,
since I couldn't even clear my throat offstage).

You'd be wrong to think that it's just a slapdash quiz
taken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no.
I'm standing on the set and I see how strong it is.
The props are surprisingly precise.
The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer.
The farthest galaxies have been turned on.
Oh no, there's no question, this must be the premiere.
And whatever I do
will become forever what I've done.

~ Wislawa Szymborska ~