...consider death

A Consideration on the Death of My Father

         (written after his passing on Jan 20, 2018)

Well it may be shocking to us, but he was ready.

The word is Thanatopsis: derived from the Greek 'thanatos, (meaning death) and 'opsis' (meaning view or sight), invented by American poet William Cullen Bryant, and meaning 'a consideration of death.’ The poem it was created for was a favorite of Walter’s, though I might say it was a more of a perseveration he had on death:

          

The graves, the pictures of graves, the coffin I helped him build, the poems upon poems about death, the gravestone designed, the Day of the Dead imagery and trinkets, the shelves of books on burials, rituals and perspectives on death, Poe’s ubiquitous presence over his project, and the passing comments in conversation.

“Someday I’ll be gone” he’d allude. “I could die any time.”  And we’d reshift in our seats, growing ever familiar with his Danteian obsession. But there’s something I grew to respect about it—something honest and unabashed, like a child unafraid to call the king naked. It was his opus, in a way. Death. His great Love. He celebrated her, he did not tuck her into a corner of the fearful mind, pretending she didn’t exist with her terrible scythe until those unfortunate times in life when she forces her presence upon you like a sudden dark, cold rain—an old friend passes, a family member. No, he brought her into the light and appreciated the beauty in that blink of time when eyes grow empty but hearts do not. As many poets did before him, like Bryant, like Poe, he spent time pondering that solitary moment, and what one was doing right before it, and what happens right after. “I hope I’m alive when I die.” He wrote.

Walter looked upon gravestones, these obvious physical markers—with epitaphs so poetically concise for a entire life lived--and he recognized life unfinished, because the people underneath them were unforgotten. There was some hope in that. He honored all those poets when he gathered us in mirth around marble and exhumed the words of sleeping linguistic engineers. He revived their legacies and encouraged us all to do the same. Has Edna St. Vincent-Millay’s life truly ended, or Margerie Frost’s, or any of theirs, if The Dead Poet Guy celebrates their words?

I spent six weeks in the Poemobile with this artist, traipsing around the American West where I now live, finding the graves of poets passed. D.H. Lawrence snuggled in his shrine in the mountains of Taos, New Mexico with his feline companion. Others in traditional plots. Some scattered to sea. And in that time, I began to see my father in a new way, or perhaps just more fully. See, I was no longer his child, I was his companion and co-worker, and saw him less opaquely.

Walter was a deeply passionate man. He had an energy that was always brimming, a kettle near-boiling. He was inspired each day, ideas like children at an amusement park. And this energy was infectious to those he pin-balled passed: the waitress at the truck stop restaurant; the motel clerk on some ghostly stretch of highway; the daughter of a poet she thought everyone had forgotten. His project invigorated people all over the country because someone didn’t forget. Because someone was celebrating “my favorite poet.” He was our Nation’s literary Vasco de Balboa and our Matthew Parris: discoverer and historian. Always seeking, finding and logging, a cartographer for the pilgrims of poetry.

But he was a pained man, too, a man I often watched trapped in some frustrating chaos of chords, bags, tasks, needs, equipment, plans, sleep, health, expectations. There was a darkness he could not shake, that haunted him like Poe’s “demon in my view”, and he lived with it for so long. It was a veil between intention and perception, a thinness of heart, a shackle to speech. In the hardest moments I saw in his expression the face of a prisoner, trying so hard to find the eye of the storm, to breathe easily, to sculpt his ideas into form. To find for once that everything was where it belonged.

But in a way it was. My father belonged where he was in life. He belonged in Dedgar, in China. He belonged in his chaos, his creativity. He belonged in his projects, his love, his quirky expressions and surprising visits. He had a lot to live for, and was not eager to pass, but when the time came he too was right where he belonged. He was ready, even if we weren’t. Thanatopsis: his perseveration on death. Perhaps, it was his perspective on death. His relationship with her.

 

I imagine, as he waited on his step last week for the ambulance to arrive, he knew what was coming. I imagine he recognized his old friend and her scythe and greeted her as he had so many times at so many cemeteries. They were old friends after 600 graves. But this time she removed her hood, letting her locks fall off her shoulders, and she looked at him with those clear eyes that saw him for who he truly was. Behind her stood the muses and Walt Whitman and his father and she extended her soft hand and Walter reached up and left his pain and his legacy, behind.