"DYING, WE BLOSSOM." WHO AM I TRYING TO KID?

"We think we know everything; we don't know shit." 

Eighteen years ago a drag queen used this line in a play I attended. She might well have been speaking for me. I'd recently come out as a gay man and come out of a right-wing fundamentalist Christian worldview, one in which I'd thought I pretty much knew everything. I'd come to understand I didn't know shit.

I still don't. And life keeps reminding me of this. 

A few weeks back at a weekend writer's retreat I wrote a haiku poem. I was pleased with my effort:

Green pine cones stay closed.

Brown ones open like roses.

Dying, we blossom.

The retreat leader had outlined the basic structure of haiku. It consists of three lines with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five again in the third line. "It's good editing practice for writers," she said. "You have to pare down your message to 17 syllables."

Traditionally, haiku poetry deals with nature. We were instructed to focus on a particular object in the natural world, asked to describe it in two lines. By the time we reached the last line, we were to broaden our vision and address some universal aspect.

I wrote about a pine cone, yes, but really I was writing about my process of coming out as a gay man. The years I spent with my eyes shut tight, my emotions shut down, anger brewing underneath. The process of coming out to myself and others in my mid-30s. The way my marriage withered, as did many relationships, as did my roles as father, son and brother. At the same time, the way something inside me uncurled, unfurled; I came alive, began to breathe. 

Dying, we blossom. I like how these five syllables capture my coming out experience. I like how they speak hope into the mystery of the Beyond. Maybe our great, gray, gay poet Walt Whitman has it right, "Death is far different than we imagine. And luckier."

Maybe. Or maybe both he and I are full of shit.

This past weekend our aged black lab Maddie was severely injured when a car hit her on the county lane in front of our house. Earlier this summer she'd taken to sleeping out of doors at night, not caring to navigate the four stairs up and into the house. When Dave called her to breakfast Friday morning she didn't show. She'd been doing that, too—refusing food for up to three days at a stretch.  Dave called again. He heard a yelping from out by the roadside, saw something black. Maddie. 

She relaxed as soon as she saw him. He called for me. What could we do? Nothing. Nothing but be present to her even as we waited for the veterinarian to arrive to euthanize her. 

We sat with her for three hours. She seemed relatively free of pain, relaxed, alert, aware. We talked to her, stroked her gently. She raised her left front paw and pressed it against us, her customary way of returning affection. 

We told her thank you. We reminisced about our 13 years as a family, how much she was a part of it. How she'd slept at our bedside, howled when we made love, followed us about the yard as we did chores, for several years accompanied me to the office, was a familiar and welcome sight at the design agency where I work. She'd been a gentle soul, tolerant of chickens and grandchildren. While she'd bark at raccoons, she'd learned to give deer a wide berth. 

The vet arrived with death in a syringe. We gave Maddie the best release we knew to give. 

I'd watched her carefully in those closing hours of her life. If she blossomed in death, I missed it. Yet so recently I'd prated on about us blooming as we let go of everything. As tears welled in my eyes, I realized again I don't know shit. 

I'm working on putting that into 17 syllables:

      Car-struck, our dog dies.

  The world rushes by, dammit.

  These are empty words.

An earlier version of this essay appeared in the August issue of The Community Letter.

GOOSE ME AGAIN, WILL YA?

He stood behind the ravaged corpse, blood staining his hands, no apology in his black eyes. The white wall behind him was dotted with crimson handprints as if he had been creating art out of gore.

When I have no words to express what's going on inside, sometimes a line from a poem nails my feeling. As I looked at the carnage, a question from Stanley Kunitz' The Layers came to mind: "How shall my heart be reconciled to its feast of losses?"

Then came a question spoken aloud by my husband Dave: "What do you want to do with him?"

What indeed?

I love geese. In particular, I love Chinese geese, the most cantankerous, ornery and aggressive of all breeds of domesticated geese. But also the most garrulous. They always have something to say, will offer an opinion on anything.

Several years back Dave and I reared two Chinese goslings. I have warm memories of going out to pick wild black raspberries one summer, leading a parade of two humans, a raccoon foundling, a dog, cat and two young geese. We all of us picked raspberries, even if only two of us deposited any in the bucket.

I love geese. I love their antics, their gregariousness, their individual temperaments. I see myself in their headlong rush to catch up, being too dense to find simple routes through barriers, the way they think they know it all, imagine themselves far bigger and braver than they are.

The woods around us teem with predators: fox, coyote, raccoon. Probably a weasel or two, as well. We'd had the geese two or three years when some creature of the night killed them, first one then the other. After the second strike, I wandered the yard weeping, clutching a white feathered body to my chest. Eventually my arms grew tired. I dug a grave. A friend gave us a concrete goose statue to mark the site.

These wondrously recalcitrant creatures had been my teachers about life, anger, self-centeredness and getting along with others. And now they were dead.

We've been gooseless the last few years and I didn't realize how much I missed the excited trumpet call of a welcome, soft murmurs of grassy contentment, the way a goose always gets the last word. Didn't remember until this spring when we came home from the farmers' supply store with three goslings, two white Chinese and a gray-brown Toulouse. I was in heaven.

They lived in a box in the dining room the first two weeks, then in a corner of the basement until they were big enough to sleep outdoors in a predator-proof cage. During the day we gave them run of a large pen with a goosecote (a doghouse-like structure) for shelter. Then Dave and I returned from an afternoon trip to town to find one of our Chinese geese missing from the pen. We beefed up security, but about a week later, a second goose disappeared. I looked for her, looked for feathers, evidence of (forgive me) fowl play. I saw nothing. Poor feathered thing. I hoped the end was quick.

Dave conducted a more thorough search. He shone a flashlight into the back of the goosecote. "Come look," he called.

I looked. There was my beloved Chinese goose, snow white feathers spattered with blood, body rent asunder. And there, at the back of the cote, caught literally red-handed, a raccoon, staring up with beady eyes.

What to do? Dave put this question to me. I considered the options. Did I want to get a gun, blow the back out of the goosecote and the hell out of the murderer? I could get a pitchfork, impale the hard-hearted creature. Or seal up the door, let it starve to death.

"Let's let him go," I said to Dave. "The woods are full of raccoons. What will we accomplish by killing this one?"

I removed the dead goose from the cote, let the wild creature be. Dug a grave near the concrete statue. The spade turned up a white grub, ugly toothsome creature with a grey butt, orange-yellow face and legs. I focused my anger on that grub, held it back, threw it to the banty chicks temporarily housed in the basement. They looked askance at it until the biggest of them pecked at it, found it to his liking, chawed it down.

Even in death, geese teach me about dealing with loss: mourn what is taken, give focus to anger, let go resentment and revenge, honor the departed, allow life to feed life, learn that to love is to risk loss. Know it's worth it.

Bryn Marlow lives in Indiana on a 1930s farmstead with his husband Dave who mopes about the house saying, "I can't stop thinking about that poor grub." This letter appeared in the August issue of The Community Letter. Photo credit: Rocket Ship, flickr.com

DEATH AND TAXES

Income taxes come due mid-April. I know this. Yet every year I act as if the deadline has been changed to the thirtieth of July, say, or September third, or the fifth of Never. I only fool myself, I know, but I can be pretty gullible, especially when I work at it. Problem is, my fool’s paradise is a fragile thing and one of my co-workers seems bent on shattering it to pieces. Not only does he file his taxes early, he advertises this fact. Again and again.

“Nope, didn’t watch the game last night. Got my taxes done instead.” A few minutes later, “See you got a haircut. Looks like they shaved you as close as the IRS did me this year. Found that out last night when I did my taxes.” Then, “My cousin called me last night and I told him about getting my taxes in by the end of January. . . .”

Sheesh. The groundhog hasn’t yet poked its nose out of its burrow. No way I’m going to take my head out of the sand. Or so I reason. I want to believe that my life flows easier, richer, fuller when I ignore all things taxing. That my days grow more footloose and fancy free. Never mind that little black cloud on the horizon, the one that grows darker and more threatening as April approaches. Never mind that I scramble at the last minute to put my financial house in order, find the papers I need, receipts, bills, check stubs. Never mind that last year when the IRS reviewed my return they found I’d overlooked some of the finer points of the law. They refunded me an extra 800 dollars. 

There’s a lesson here if only I would listen. My way of doing business exacts a high price, both in mental stress and material loss. Ignorance falls several hundred dollars short of bliss. The cost of living in a fool’s paradise keeps going up. 

So does the cost of dying there.

Death and taxes, they say, are the only two sureties. And I do a capital job of ignoring both. But as I lollygag my way through life, pretend I am immortal, I wind up paying a high price when death comes knocking on my door. Ignore the fact that I am going to die, and I lose out on experiences of life I don’t even know are mine. What’s the good of hiding my head in the sand when I have one foot in the grave, the other on a banana peel? Staying aware of death’s approach may allow me to more fully experience the moments I have, 

Easy to say, hard to do. Monarchs of the Middle Ages had a servant whose task it was each day to remind their royal highnesses they would die someday. I can’t afford to hire someone for the job. Guess I’ll have to do it myself.

Life offers me little reminders, opportunities to practice dying. To say goodbye. To feel pain. To let go. 

A college professor friend teaches a class on death and dying. He passes out four slips of paper to his students, asks them to write on each something they value highly. Could be people, popularity, relationships, eyesight, physical or mental health, house, home, motorcycle, good grades, whatever. He then talks about the aging process, about having to let go of things that have been meaningful. He directs his students to select one piece of paper, pass it to him. “You’re left with only three now,” he says. “Imagine what your life is like.” They discuss these losses. He has them turn in yet another slip of paper. Students find it difficult to choose. They talk some more. Then he walks the aisles, himself takes one slip of paper from each student. Some grow angry. “That’s how it is,” he tells them. “You don’t have a choice in what you will have to give up.” Fact is, in the end, they will have to surrender everything. Life itself.

Hard words, these. Hard truths. Not pleasant to think about.

But they can motivate me to stay open, aware. To be thankful for what I have now. To know it will not last, that circumstances will change. To practice holding all things lightly, practice letting go. When I feel pain, to try opening to it rather than clenching tight around it. To see if I can get through it, to find out what, if anything, awaits on the other side.

My husband, bless his heart, all year long saves receipts, files papers, tracks tax deductible expenditures. As if he knows this preparation will pay off somehow in the end. As if he has some privileged information about a day of reckoning to come. Can it be?

This essay first appeared in The Letter, April 2008.

FINAL SEEN

“This was the world’s edge. So long as he was here, Noburu was in contact with the naked universe. No matter how far you ran, escape beyond this point was impossible.”

-- Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea

I stand under our back porch, look up to the rafters, and suddenly I am on the edge of the world. A dying grasshopper takes me there. A spider several sizes his junior cradles his head in her arms, appears to kiss his brow. I’m not fooled. She is sucking the life from her paralyzed prey. 

The grasshopper stares at the world around. Does he see? If so, what? And for how much longer? How did a creature of pasture and field meet his fate so high above the earth? How did he of such long legs, strong thighs and powerful kicks fall prey to so spindly a captor? 

The spider eyes me with what looks like suspicion, then pulls her prize upwards towards her web in the corner. I admire her strength, cunning, determination. I wonder what I would say should she invite me to dine with her.

Judging by his size and appearance, her meal is leeward of middle age. He was a graduate student, I imagine. Hopper U. Theatre major. Liked the limelight. Copped a thrill from being up on stage, having all eyes on him. Assumed that others saw himself the way he did. Never considered that some eyes fastened on his body for reasons other than his art or physique. That there were those who saw him as dinner waiting to happen. A protein-rich meal to be taken in, chewed up, shat out. 

Too late for him the lesson he teaches me: not justice, but fate is blind. The universe beneficent? Tell that to this aspiring actor, bound and hanging upside down, one leg pulled away from his body at what seems an obscenely painful angle.

Arachne’s daughter doesn’t care that her catch has a family, a home, a history. A favorite song. A little sister. A future that once stretched ahead of him further than he could jump. Comrades who even now expect him to join them any minute.

Here in miniature is spun the destiny of us all. The fates who spin, weave and snip the threads of history do so without regard for any one individual. “We want historians to confirm our belief that the present rests upon profound intentions and necessities,” says Foucault. “But the true historical sense confirms our existence among countless lost events without a landmark or a point of reference.”

Ask the immigrant. Ask the exile. Ask the reject of society. Ask the bereft mother howling in the war-torn heartland. Ask my friend Jim, diagnosed with cancer the day after he turned 40. 

I eye the grasshopper. Life is tragic. I watch the spider wrestle with her super-sized meal. Absurdly comical. I stare into unseeing eyes. A tragicomedy in all too few acts. 

How to live in such a world? How to embrace “what is” when it is happening to me? I hope the grasshopper had moments of bliss, from time to time soared on wings of joy. Tasted dew. Made love. Felt the sun warm on his back. 

To savor the moment. To feel into pain. To somehow choose hope over despair in defiance of all the facts. To say yes. 

Able to offer the dying actor nothing more than this, I keep my eyes on him during his final scene.

This essay appeared in The Letter, February 2008

TO TELL THE TRUTH

Virginia (not her real name) would die with in 36 hours. She didn’t know it. I didn’t know it. Newest arrival to the nursing home, she’d been placed on the bed beside my grandmother’s. Virginia was distraught, wild-eyed. restless. “What do you think I should I do?” Her voice ran to the high side of throaty. Her tone was earnest, laden with emotion. Her question very human: “What should I do? Oh, what should I do?”

My own throat tightened. What should you do about what? Doesn’t look like you can do much of anything. And how should I know? I don’t have the answers. I felt relieved when her minister and granddaughter soon arrived. 

“Virginia?”

“Grandma?”

 “Oh good! Maybe you can help me. What should I do? I don’t know what I should do.” 

“Rest,” said the granddaughter. “You’ve had a big day. You were transferred from the hospital this morning, remember? You’re here now, but you’re tired out. You need to relax, and get some rest.”

“I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t know what should I do.” She caught her breath. “Am I dying?” 

Ah, that’s her real question. 

“You’re tired,” the minister said. “You’ve had a big day. You need rest. You need to let your body rest.”

“Is that it, then? I’m tired out? Oh, good. I didn’t know what was happening to me. I’ve been worrying myself sick.”

“Try to relax, Grandma. Just lay back and relax.”

By the next evening Virginia was dead. Didn’t her minister and granddaughter know she was dying? Or did they know but feel uncomfortable talking about it? Did they choose to protect her from the truth?

I don't know. But I do know I don't want the same thing to happen to me. If and when I am dying, don’t tell me I’m merely tired. I want the truth. 

This represents a sea change for me. I spent years not wanting to know, suppressing my attraction to men. I didn’t want to be gay, didn’t want to consider that I might be. I was afraid of this truth. Life changed for me when I turned and faced what was. Possibilities opened up. Awareness set in. No way I want to go back. 

When I am dying I want to know it, and to use the hours and energy left me to prepare for my final passage into Mystery. I'd rather do this than go to bed early and catch up on my rest. Those around me, if they're willing to be honest, able to overcome their own fears about the subject, may be able to offer me a heads up. As I have opportunity, I'd like to make use of my time. Yet that time, that opportunity is now, isn’t it? I need now to be surrounding myself with truth-tellers, using my time to honor, further and tell truth. I need now to be living into what is, learning to stay aware of those facets of truth I already know. 

This I know: I am dying. You are dying. We all of us received a sentence of mortality when we were born. Virginia was no braver than me. No smarter. No stronger. No different, really. Her death, when it came, came with a rush. She navigated this ultimate passage with eyes closed. Me, I want mightily to keep them open wide.

An earlier version of this essay appeared in The Letter, September 2007.