Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Fifteen Seconds of Grace

In the last week, two people I know have lost their father: one of them, a young man in the 10th grade here at KA, and another, one of my friends of longest duration, my mate and one-time academic rival, Dawn. I never even met the father of our student, and Dawn’s father I saw intermittently over the 30 years she and I have been dear friends. But still…I have kept them close to my heart this week as I imagined their emotional unrest at their loss.

One summer day in 2006, just a short while after I lost my mother, I was walking in
Spring Grove Cemetery, and of course I noticed over and over on tombstones the familiar inscribed saying, “Rest in Peace.” I imagine most headstones in any cemetery bear these weighty words.

I had an unusual epiphany that day: those words cover a multitude of situations, don’t they? They signal release from a wasting disease, or escape from unresolved estrangements; they remind us of the simple wisdom that living well is both a gift—and an uphill battle. “Rest in peace”—the words stand as our final blessing on the dead.

But, I wondered, perhaps we misread our inscriptions. I prefer to think these aren’t words we speak to the dead; but rather they are words the dead speak to the living, and that “rest in peace” sums up their final counsel to those of us left behind. Imagine what these bones would say if they could speak: We have seen it all, and we know peace is the only worthwhile goal. Resist violence; reconcile with your enemies; love without measure. Those last words of the dead to the living challenge us to spend our days making peace.

But—it is hard to find peace—not just the larger “peace” between nations, or the abstraction “peace on earth,” but sometimes just peace of mind. I am reminded of a CD my sister gave me just a few weeks ago at Christmas, a CD by a New York performer named Victoria Clark, with the title, Fifteen Seconds of Grace. This title song is about the difficulties in living life, especially in finding peace. But—sometimes we experience these little gifts, moments that can be so short, maybe only fifteen seconds, that remind us that we are forgiven, or that we are loved, or that we are lovable—reminders that keep us humble, and pure, and whole. And bring us peace.

I can’t begin to comment on what these two fathers meant to their children, their wives, their colleagues, their neighbors. But I understand loss, and I understand healing. Often over the last 20 years I have found myself going back to Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town, and his reminder that life demands grappling with Time. And Change. And Loss.

Naturally, the passing of time has loss and death woven into it: each new moment kills the moment before it, and its own death is implied by the moment that comes after. There is no way to exist in the world of change without accepting loss, if only the loss of a moment in time: the way the sky looks right now, the motion of the air, the number of snowflakes, or camels, outside your window, the temperature, the placement of your body, the position of the people in the street. It's inherent in the nature of having moments—you never get to have this exact one again.

And a good thing, too! Because all the things that give life joy and meaning—music, conversation, eating, dancing, playing with children, reading, thinking, traveling, all of it—are based on time passing, on change, and on the loss of an infinitude of moments passing through us and then behind us. Without loss and death, we don't get to have existence. We don't get to have Rembrandt, or Grey’s Anatomy, or five-spice chicken, without allowing their existence and our experience of them to come into being and then pass on. We don't get to listen to Louis Armstrong without letting the E-flat disappear and turn into a G. We don't get to watch Casablanca without letting each frame of it pass in front of us for a twenty-fourth of a second and then move on. We don't get to walk in the forest without walking by each tree and letting it pass behind us; we don't even get to stand still in the forest and gaze at one tree for hours without seeing the wind blow off a leaf, a bird break off a twig for its nest, the clouds moving behind it, each manifestation of the tree dying and a new one taking its place.

Imagine, for a moment, stepping away from time, the way you'd step back from a physical place, to get a better perspective on it. Imagine being outside of time, looking at all of it as a whole—history, the present, the future—the way the astronauts stepped back from Earth and saw it whole. The time that you live in will always exist, even after you've passed out of it, just like Paris exists before you visit it and Paris continues to exist after you leave. And the fact that people in the twenty-third century will probably never know you were alive…that doesn't make your life disappear, any more than Paris disappears if your Aunt Audrey never sees it. Your segment on the great historical timeline will always have been there. The fact of your death doesn't make the time that you were alive disappear. And it doesn't make it meaningless. Yes, stepping back and contemplating all of time and space is daunting, can make you feel tiny and trivial. And that perception isn't entirely inaccurate. It's true; the small slice of time that we have is no more important than the infinitude of time that came before we were born or the infinitude that will follow after we die.

As I attended the father’s funeral today, I wondered how, and when, we feel most alive. Perhaps we are most alive in those moments, perhaps those fifteen seconds, when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.

I remembered a card given to me last summer as I packed up and left my life in New York. It had the simplest sentiment, yet perhaps the most direct from which to derive some restful, some peaceful, thoughts:

You are with me in my heart.
The distance between us is just geography.

2 comments:

powellsa74 said...

Your closing words are so true John.
It was a year ago last week that I lost my Papa Enszer. We sent my grandmother a card to say that even though he is gone, we still remember.
I miss you!!!
Sarah

dancerdawnky said...

Thanks for the BLOG entry mentioning my dad's death.