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Published on 07/28/1997 All articles from this issue

Of slings and arrows

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By Mary Cristy

A View from the Hills

My Austrian friend Susi says sagely, "Nobody dies of good health." My sister Viola confides, "I don't mind dying, as long as I'm not there when it happens."

Broach the subject of dying. And watch your audience recoil and drift away. Looking about nervously as if the Dark Angel already had his hand on her shoulder, someone will say, "Let's not talk about it. Think positively."

Positive thinking is invested with the power of Joshua at the Battle of Jericho. We say our prayers each day. We give thanks for our many blessings, and we eat right. But time furrows our faces to remind us of our mortality. We rush to plastic surgeons for collagens, face lifts, and fanny lifts, but like Cosmo, the philandering husband of "Moonstruck," we're reminded, "No matter what you do, you're gonna die."

In l969 Swiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross published "On Death and Dying," a book that gave impetus to a nationwide hospice movement. For 40 years Kubler-Ross "spoke of a God who helps people, who knows what you need and how all you have to do is ask for it." Yet, at 70, felled by two incapacitating strokes, she recanted, saying, "Well, that's a bunch of baloney! Don't believe a word of it."

One can only guess at the depth of this unfortunate woman's misery as she promises to end it, by suicide.

"Why me?" is a normal reaction to catastrophe. And so is anger. Irish poet Dylan Thomas immortalized his dying father with the words, "Do not go gently into that good night. Rage, rage, against the dying of the light."

And yet there are those who, faced with equal challenges, knowing virtue guarantees no exemptions, understanding that no one walks through life unscathed, accepting that, soon or late, grief comes in turn to each of us, respond, "Why not me?"

Inevitably, (and understandably) some, like Kubler-Ross, grow bitter. Those who manage to maintain grace and serenity in the face of death fill us with wonder, humility, and the hope that when we confront the mystery (which so many valorous friends have already plumbed) we may match their courage.

Death inspires poets and prophets and that in itself may be a

redeeming feature, since it gives rise to so many lyrical conjectures regarding its nature. According to Longfellow, "Death is the

chillness that precedes the dawn. We shudder for a moment, then awake, in the broad sunshine of the other life."

Author George Du Maurier wrote nostalgically, "The touch of a vanished hand, the sound of a voice that is still, the tender grace of a day that is dead, should be ours forever, at our beck and call, by some exquisite and conceivable illusion of the senses."

Cris professes patience with treatises and poetry on death, any discussion he dismisses with, "T'heck with that! I'm not going."

Like William Saroyan, who succumbed in spite of himself, Cris entertains the serene conviction that "God is going to make an exception in my case."

Mary Cristy is a Los Altos Hills-based free-lance writer and longtime contributor to the Town Crier.