Happy endings

 Essays After Eighty is wonderful, Donald Hall became quite the eccentric old goat after Jane died of leukemia at just 47 (he was 66). Leave it to a poet to insist on speaking honestly and bluntly of our mortal condition, and contemptuously of our timid reluctance to acknowledge straightforwardly what old Henry James called "the distinguished thing."

“IT IS SENSIBLE of me to be aware that I will die one of these days. I will not pass away. Every day millions of people pass away—in obituaries, death notices, cards of consolation, e-mails to the corpse’s friends—but people don’t die. Sometimes they rest in peace, quit this world, go the way of all flesh, depart, give up the ghost, breathe a last breath, join their dear ones in heaven, meet their Maker, ascend to a better place, succumb surrounded by family, return to the Lord, go home, cross over, or leave this world. Whatever the fatuous phrase, death usually happens peacefully (asleep) or after a courageous struggle (cancer). Sometimes women lose their husbands. (Where the hell did I put him?) Some expressions are less common in print: push up the daisies, kick the bucket, croak, buy the farm, cash out. All euphemisms conceal how we gasp and choke turning blue.”

We die. I will die. That's the one sure message of Heidegger's that 's really stuck with me. Not that he was a clarion of honest language himself, the Nazi. Dasein? I prefer the old goat's way of putting the point. 

One of the goat's other winning ways, for me, was his devotion to his team. He loved the Red Sox. 

“Everyone who concentrates all day, in the evening needs to let the half-wit out for a walk.” Exactly. And now that I've paid for streaming I can follow all the teams and let the half-wit out for a marathon. Trying to resist that.

The old goat also says “there are no happy endings, because if things are happy they have not ended.” 

We caught up with the penultimate episode of This Is Us last night (the finale aired but we're saving that, we don't like things that make us happy to end either). Near the end of her hallucinatory train ride and escorted amble to the caboose, Rebecca says "it's all very sad, isn't it?" Her escort William (Randall's birth father) doesn't see it that way. If it feels sad at the end, he says, it must have been pretty great before the end. 

That's how I want to look at death. At life. Same thing, different aspects. 

“I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is on the whole preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two.” 

The goat made it to eighty-nine, which is a decade-plus longer than my parents. Ask me, at eighty-nine, if I'm going for a hundred and one like Roger. Ask me today, at sixty-five, I'll say yes indeed. Keep the train on the track. Keep chugging.