It’s All Saints’ Day. I am sprung from four weeks of outpatient rehab, with a new lease on life and a new consciousness of mortality. Yesterday I talked with my occupational therapist, with whom I grew close over the four weeks, about the fact that a condition of my life now is that I can have a stroke at any time. I allowed as how I wasn’t done thinking about that fact but that I figured I shouldn’t forget it.
On the other hand, I am acutely aware of how fortunate I am, and that awareness has been significantly reinforced by my recent association with other stroke survivors who have been left with impairments far worse than mine. My left arm and leg have returned to normal strength, but my sense of balance remains impaired. Perhaps that condition will right itself over the next months as I continue to recover, perhaps not. Perhaps I will have another stroke, or strokes. I have now had three.
Today I can walk without assistance, and I feel almost normal as I do so until something occurs that challenges my balance. I have now become accustomed to recovering my balance when challenged, but I continue to lack confidence in my left leg’s ability to support my body’s entire weight. I have been given exercises to do at home that should help me regain confidence in my left leg. I remain hopeful.
Tomorrow is the Day of All Souls for orthodox Christians, which doesn’t exactly coincide with the Day of the Dead as it is now celebrated in Mexico and Central America. Google tells me that the Day of the Dead began last evening as we were celebrating All Hallows Eve, or Halloween, and will continue until tomorrow, November 2nd. When I think that today is a good day, I am reminded that we remember our own dead on All Saints’ Day and that the day’s memento mori hangs over us until week’s end this year.
And I realize I could have had a stroke at any time, no matter what. There’s a poem in my book called “Take the Hard Road Home” that imagines dying from a quick stroke but also drooling for ten years in a nursing home. Regardless of what my religion tells me, I know that life is a crap shoot. We’re guaranteed absolutely nothing. As one of my fellow patients said one day as he reflected upon his condition, quoting a Jewish proverb, “Man plans and God Laughs.” Somehow, I take heart from that piece of gallows humor and the resilience quoting it betokened in my fellow rehab sufferer.
And I am reminded that this time of year has been my favorite time for many years now. As the old year starts to die we experience a time of ripening that carries with it a presage of renewal. And that is a joyous thing for me today as it has been in the past of pasts. Here’s a memory from my time in North Carolina. I associate it in my mind’s imaginary with All Souls’ Day, Allerseelen in German: the title of a song I used to sing. It is dated November 4, 2013, six years ago.
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That time when the year starts to sink from late autumn into winter and we recall the names and ways and times of absent friends and loved ones. We recall the feel of them, too, and the feel of the world with them in it, as figured in my memory by the song of the French horn in the last of Richard Straus’s Last Songs. A time of last things in that sense, before Advent arrives with its heavy script.
I was on my way home from a two-day meeting at the Quail Roost Conference Center about this time of year, I think, in 1975. My way took me through Chapel Hill, which then still had a little of the village about it. On impulse I decided to stop at The Intimate Bookshop on Franklin Street. By then I had better than ten years’ experience of the place, known by those of us who loved it as “The Intimate.” I went there whenever I could, sometimes looking for something specific, sometimes to browse, sometimes just to soak up the atmosphere.
It was about five o’clock when I walked in. The day outside just gone to twilight, warming to a muted sunset that sat folded like a well-worn rug on the horizon. As I entered, the chill outside gave way to a wonderfully shabby interior of wooden floors and jerry-built bookshelves, stairs that creaked as someone walked up to the mezzanine. Like many another college-town bookshop, The Intimate did a big textbook business, supplying UNC and Duke students, but also dealt in trade books. I looked about me to see what was new since I had last been in.
On a table in front of me was a stack of newsprint catalogs form Marboro’s in New York, a scattering of remaindered art books, and a few copies of T. S. Eliot’s Collected Poems, the edition with the pink cover. I picked up the top copy because I didn’t own it and thought I’d buy it to add to my small but growing collection of non graduate school books. As I opened it my eye fell upon “A Song for Simeon,” a poem I didn’t know well then, my education to that point having focused my attention on Eliot’s earlier work, particularly “The Wasteland.” I read the opening lines:
Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and
The winter sun creeps by the snow hills;
The stubborn season has made stand.
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.
In autumn 1975 I was barely thirty-eight. That Eliot poem in that setting gave me an intimation of mortality that was new. But the surprising thing was that no chill emanated from it. The moment was in feeling altogether welcome and welcoming. I had been given a brief but direct experience of passing divinity, of standing where there is no place that doesn’t see you, as Rilke put it, in which life and death fall away and there is only the real thing left, just now, just for now. My heart burned within me as surely as John Wesley’s had at Aldersgate.
But my experience carried with it no conviction of salvation. Such a thing was as remote from my mind as yesterday’s news. I have experienced other hierophanies. Each has left its print. As I drove home in the early darkness of that long ago November day with my newly acquired Collected Poems wrapped tight in a paper sack on the seat beside me, I carried with me a new and as yet wordless apprehension of the fragility and wonder of the world
—and it was well.