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<\/a>(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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From an uncompleted manuscript on which I was working a few years ago:<\/p>\n
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The eighteenth century English poet Thomas Gray is remembered largely for one melancholy composition, entitled \u201cElegy Written in a Country Churchyard.\u201d\u00a0 He wrote it as a meditation on the church cemetery at Stoke Poges, a village in Buckinghamshire.\u00a0 Looking over the graves there, he allowed himself to reflect on the people who occupied them, but who had once been as full of life as he himself:<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,<\/span><\/p>\n Or busy housewife ply her evening care:<\/span><\/p>\n No children run to lisp their sire\u2019s return,<\/span><\/p>\n Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.[1]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Thomas Gray\u2019s own body has rested in the churchyard at Stoke Poges since 1771.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n William Cullen Bryant\u2019s aptly named \u201cThanatopsis\u201d (\u201cView of Death\u201d) puts the matter very directly:<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Yet a few days, and thee<\/span><\/p>\n The all-beholding sun shall see no more<\/span><\/p>\n In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,<\/span><\/p>\n Where thy pale form was laid with many tears,<\/span><\/p>\n Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist<\/span><\/p>\n Thy image.\u00a0 Earth, that nourish\u2019d thee, shall claim<\/span><\/p>\n Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,<\/span><\/p>\n And, lost each human trace, surrendering up<\/span><\/p>\n Thine individual being, shalt thou go<\/span><\/p>\n To mix for ever with the elements,<\/span><\/p>\n To be a brother to the insensible rock,<\/span><\/p>\n And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain<\/span><\/p>\n Turns with his share, and treads upon.\u00a0 The oak<\/span><\/p>\n Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mold.[2]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone until recently,\u201d remarks the literary critic [?] Ronald Blythe, \u201cknew the actual smell of death.\u201d[3]<\/a>\u00a0 People died at home, surrounded by family, and their bodies rested in the family parlor while awaiting burial.\u00a0 Today, we die in antiseptic hospitals and are then immediately rushed away to equally antiseptic funeral homes.\u00a0 \u201cDeath must be denied,\u201d says Carol Zaleski, \u201cnot because it is painful\u2014it has always been painful\u2014but because it signals the failure of our medical technology, the evaporation of our dream of progress and of individual self-fulfillment.\u201d[4]<\/a>\u00a0 Still, notwithstanding our efforts to ignore the fact, or to make light of it (literally) by \u201cgallows humor,\u201d or, by frenzied activity and diversions, to forget about it, every one of us knows<\/em> that we will die.\u00a0 \u201cA man sees death in things.\u00a0 That is what it is to be a man.\u201d[5]<\/a>\u00a0 We are unique among animals, it seems, in our awareness of death. \u201cAll our knowledge,\u201d said the Nobel Prize-winning Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist Maurice Maeterlinck, \u201cmerely helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing.\u201d[6]<\/a>\u00a0 \u201cConsciousness,\u201d said Unamuno with this very issue in mind, \u201cis a disease.\u201d[7]<\/a>\u00a0 \u201cIf consciousness is no more \u2013 as some inhuman thinker said \u2013 than a flash of lightning between two eternities of darkness, then,\u201d he wrote, \u201cthere is nothing more execrable than existence.\u201d[8]<\/a>\u00a0 And those who deal with death professionally gain no exemption from it.\u00a0 Undertakers themselves will someday require the undertaker.\u00a0 As Shakespeare observed,<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n By medicine life may be prolong\u2019d, yet death<\/span><\/p>\n Will seize the doctor too.[9]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Our few brief years of consciousness are preceded by we know not what, and followed by . . . what?\u00a0 \u201cDust you are, and to dust you shall return,\u201d says the book of Genesis.[10]<\/a>\u00a0 \u201cThe living,\u201d remarks Maeterlinck, \u201care the dead on holiday.\u201d[11]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Thomas Gray, \u201cElegy Written in a Country Churchyard.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Bryant, \u201cThanatopsis.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Ronald Blythe, introduction to Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich<\/em>, translated by Lyn Solotaroff (Toronto and New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 20.\u00a0 [See original.]<\/span><\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Carol Zaleski, The Life of the World to Come: Near-Death Experience and Christian Hope<\/em> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 8.<\/span><\/p>\n [5]<\/a>\u00a0 Herbert Mason, Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative<\/em> (New York: New American Library, 1970), 49.<\/span><\/p>\n [6]<\/a> Cassell Dictionary of Cynical Quotations<\/em>, 58.<\/span><\/p>\n [7]<\/a>\u00a0 Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations<\/em>, 22.<\/span><\/p>\n [8]<\/a>\u00a0 Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations<\/em>, 17.<\/span><\/p>\n [9]<\/a>\u00a0 William Shakespeare, Cymbeline<\/em>, V.v.29-30.<\/span><\/p>\n