I can't rightly say whether I think Death and Loss, in general, have more of a presence in the Last Quarter than in earlier ones. By elementary school, kids get it:
Shmen-the-Hamster dies ...
Kazimierza the Pooch got very sick and did, too ...
My friend's Grandma died, but she was very, very old ....
Mommy and Daddy won't die for a long, long time ... and
I may not die, forever.
Perhaps, when Fourth Quarter types say that "It passed so quickly," they're referring to the surprise that Donne mentions ... when you hear the church bell toll, don't fret the name of who died, it's tolling for you ... and me ... and stars and heroes ... and young newscasters and camera-folk ... and kids who are at the wrong place or doing some wrong thing ... or police-folk doing their thing ... !
The note came ... they arrive as e-mails these days ... her husband had died ... Father of her two kids ... kids?! L's a Shrink out on the West Coast where they had just recently moved ... and their son's a Dentist. Boris was a Grandpa. Died Tuesday ... the Memorial Service is Today ... just a few blocks from the Atlantic Ocean. Boris had emigrated to the States from the Soviet Empire sometime in the 1950's ... -- as the expression goes -- without a pot to piss in. He learned English. He went to school. High School, College, Graduate School. He married a nice lady and spent his adult years living and parenting and being a researcher, teacher and Chair of a university department.
M and I will drive to the Ocean, today ... to say good-bye ... to be with others who knew Boris ... to be sad together and with his Wife, Kids and Grandkids. I woke not with memories of what Boris wrote or him chairing meetings in a University Statistics Department or with the happenstance of my meeting him ... I had been running a school for crazy inner city high school kids. A Diorector of the State Department of Education had visited our school and was humiliated by a student over a chess board. I was led to believe that our school with its emphasis on odd subjects would get no more student referrals if the guy with the strange -- even, if very successful -- programs stayed at the helm. I submitted my resignation and went home to tell M that at the end of that year monies would have to flow from elsewhere for us and our three kids ... 2, 9 and 10 years old, then.
Sitting at the table trying to answer: "So what ARE we gonna do, Howard" ... the phone rang and Boris was there ... heavy accent ... "You want to come teach in my Statistics Department, next year?"
Living in a serendipitous world ... pretty cool.
But the image I arose with, this morning, was not of Chairman Boris or anything he published but of Boris at the Beach. He would take off his shirt ... Boris wasn't a tall man ... solid body ... short legs. Then, Boris would take off ... in the direction of Iceland or something. He would run through the shallows, dive into the first wave and keep swimming. Was he running away from Stalin's Russia? or was he just grabbing a piece of life "by the balls" ... Who knows what's in another person's heart?
Boris, in the end, lost a battle to little rapidly multiplying clonal cells that colonized his Liver. But not before he swam through many-a-wave and lived the Good Life.
For quite sometime, my custom has been on hearing of a friend's death to read Alexander Woolcott's homage to G.K. Chesterton and his homage to Dickens. I can't recall -- sitting here with my friends in the front pew who wrote what part of it ... it don't matter ... memory in that first pew seems to be more than a bit foggy ... but here goes:
"We have a long way to travel
before we get back to what Dickens meant ...
and the passage is along a
rambling English road, a twisting road such
as Mr. Pickwick travelled. But this
at least is part of what he meant;
that comradeship and serious joy are not
interludes in our travel
but rather our travels are interludes in comradeship
and joy
which through god shall endure forever. The inn does not point to
the
road; the road points to the inn. And all roads point at last to an
ultimate
inn, where we shall meet Dickens and all his characters, and
when we drink again it shall be from the great
flagons in the tavern
at the end of the world".
"When it came Mr. Chesterton's
own turn to die, it was my notion that
if he was right there must have been
great preparation afoot in that tavern.
I seemed to see Mr. Dickens himself
coming down to the desk and making
a reservation. A good room with a fireplace
in it, please. And polish up
the flagons. We're expecting a chap named
Chesterton"
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