i was at a poetry reading last night. the poet, john terpstra (a canadian, i had to suppress a smile every time he said, “this next poem is aboot...”) read and commented on some of his poems. one of these poems struck me, or struck something in me.
“every day
we inhale
the ashes of the innocents;
their last, expired
breath—
that it’s in the air.”
i’d been thinking about death a lot lately. i think i’d been listening to “rent” too much, and all i could think about was “no day but today.” i realized with awful finality that i am NOT living each moment as my last.
what would that entail? how does one live life to the fullest? i’m not an adventurer; bungee jumping is not my idea of a life-changing experience. i like comfort, and quiet; those are the good things to me, so is staying at home a waste of my life? i don’t think so. the thing that troubles me is, what have i contributed? if each moment could be the last one, i want to know that i leave a legacy. that i’ve helped someone. sure, i’ve done volunteer work. but that’s not enough. i just don’t think i’ll ever be able to repay the debt i owe to the universe for letting me EXIST. i should be savoring the existence more. or SOMETHING.
how does one savor a place like this world? that’s where the thanatopsis starts, for me. death is in every corner, right? why should i WANT to stay in a place where people leave syringes on theater seats to deliberately infect strangers with HIV? where black people get towed behind trucks and little kids get molested and there are countries where bloody horrors have become so common no one even gives a shit anymore. why the hell should i want to be here?
maybe...because i AM here.
ever since i was a little kid, i’ve had this horrible morbid fascination with the holocaust. i didn’t think it was “cool,” but it fascinated me. the split second change. one day you’re living comfortably. the next day you’re in a cattle car heading for a death camp. it was the stories of the ovens at nazi death camps that connected that line of poetry to my personal thanatopsis. stories that the nazis would stuff bodies into the ovens, and the ashes would fall from the smokestacks, like snow. i imagined—or rather, tried to imagine—breathing in that air choked with dead. its these things, these little things, that make me absolutely ill, bone-tired of living.
i keep on living, i guess, because i have to. the urge towards suicide (once so familiar) is now repugnant, and i have no choice but to keep on going. sometimes i consider going out of my mind, just letting myself go, so that they’ll give me a lobotomy and lock me up. but that wouldn’t do any good. people will ask me sometimes why i believe in god. i can never explain properly that it is because i don’t have a choice. i don’t mean that i feel pressure from others to accept their beliefs. i mean that, inside of me, i have to believe. i have to to survive. and i have to survive....so i suppose it’s the driving power of grace that’s keeping me alive. that, or guilt. i feel guilty because i have it good. i mean, i can sit here and muse about death at leisure. i don’t have to worry about the immediate threat of dying. i haven’t even lost any close loved ones in my life. should i be doing something, to make it up to people who’ve had more than their share of pain? i don’t know what to do. yeah, i give money to “worthy causes”, but not enough. i try to get in volunteer work, but more often that not i end up forgetting, procrastinating. my mother asserts that my tombstone will read “i forgot.”
i don’t want to be taking this for granted, that i have the luxury to forget. that i have time to put things off.
but i SHOULDN’T! there’s guilt for things that COULD happen; the possibility that you’ll tell your parents you hate them and they’ll get in a car crash; the possibility that you’ll turn down an invitation to go out with a friend in favor of some time to yourself, and the next day discover that your friend has killed him or herself; there’s always the possibility of sudden death. a friend of mine was talking about how he had his whole life left to go to college. i reminded him that he might not. we all run the risk of being hit by that phantom bus. but are we living with that in consideration? i know i’m not. i haven’t learned yet how to live with death always on brain. perhaps that’s why “rent” amazes and shames me so much. that a story about people who are dying could be so full of LIFE. and this is just MY view on the topic; i can only guess what it’s like for someone whose actually had death touch their life. i can sympathize all i want, but i can’t empathize. these things creep about muddily inside my head, and i wonder if maybe this is all teen angst brooding. if it’s disrespectful to the truly unhappy people to refuse happiness. to quote paul rudnick’s “jeffrey,” “how DARE you not LUNGE for any SHRED of happiness!”
i try to focus on that fact that i’m alive. i try to be sympathetic, but not brood about other people’s problems that i can’t fix. i try to be giving and trusting, but still keep enough of my own identity so that i can survive alone. i try to listen to the message, to “give in to love or live in fear.” i try to remember that death is both tragic and everyday. another line of terpstra’s poetry lends some much-needed perspective to my little thanatopsis.
“...so the roof won’t fall in, again—it always
feels like it has. But
they keep it up, the dead. They lean
this way and that, twist in and out
of our line of vision, but they’re still
employed.....”
i like to think that even if i never understand any of this, someday i’ll be able to pay my debt and keep up my piece of the roof.
-written by (copyright ©) Violet Nova (originally appeared in Nova #13, 1999)