"Mortality"

 Another beautiful wintery day, with light snow falling in this part of Connecticut. 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Mortality”

February 17, 2024

 

“As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming

closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragility.”

                                                                                                                                Iris Murdoch (1919-1999)

                                                                                                                                Nuns and Soldiers, 1980

 

Perhaps it is because of a recent birthday and a growing consciousness of age, but I have been thinking of mortality. I scour obituaries each day, feeling a little like George Burns who allegedly once said: “I wake up each morning and read the obituary column. If my name is not there I eat breakfast.” Perhaps it is because death has been a more frequent visitor in the households of those I know and love. Living in a retirement community, where the average age is in the mid to late 80s, that is not a surprise. But I want to be clear – these thoughts on mortality are not morbid. Memories bring joy.

 

As Charlotte said to Wilbur about the life of a spider: “We are born, we live a little while, we die.” And, while people don’t trap and eat flies, life has a natural sequence. The other day I walked through the Residents’ Garden – a fenced-in half-acre holding a dozen or so small garden plots, now in winter slumber. The garden sits in the middle of a field, and as I meandered along I was reminded of “Sadie,” a Cockapoo owned by a neighbor and who died about two years ago. She was a delightful and friendly little dog who used to love to be rid of her leash and run around that field. As I stood on that cold but sunny field, I had the eerie sensation she was still there, running her heart out.

 

Walking back I passed a small nook, warmed by the sun where a friend, a victim of Polio but who lived into his 90s, would sit in his wheelchair on sun-filled chilly days, getting his dose of Vitamin ‘D.’ I thought of our conversations and remembered my maternal grandmother’s admonition that people don’t die as long as they are remembered, a sentiment George Eliot expressed in Adam Bede: “Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.”

 

On my desk are family photographs: Caroline and me on our 50^th wedding anniversary in 2014; our ten grandchildren on the beach in Seabright, New Jersey; a photo taken from behind of me and our lab “Dakota” looking out on the Mystic River; one of my paternal grandfather with his ever-present pipe; another of my great grandmother Washington holding me, with my older sister sitting nearby; and a lovely one of Caroline in Bermuda on our 25^th wedding anniversary. There are photos and drawings on the walls and in albums of siblings, parents, grandparents, other family members and friends. Each recall a person, an incident, or a time. In Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” That is true, so long as the past remains in our memory.

 

Whether walking alone through fields and woods, or lying in bed waiting for sleep, my thoughts often turn to those now gone whom I was fortunate to know. We are mortal; that cannot be denied, and there is no question of the truth in Ms. Murdoch’s quote about our fragility, but memories keep us from the void, and there is comfort in the thought that remembrances of us will stay with our children and grandchildren.