Evanston RoundTable, July 30, 2024
Many decades ago I volunteered at an Evanston hospice organization. Volunteers had to undergo a day of training, and one of the exercises during the training session required us to list the things we most enjoyed, in order.
In my case, it might’ve been:
- Spend time with family
- Exercise to enjoy good health
- Travel
- Play music
- Read
- Go to Cubs games
- Play tennis
- Work
And so on. Then we were instructed to delete each item, one by one, starting from the bottom. The point of the exercise, we learned afterward, was to demonstrate what aging was like: the inevitable loss of the things we loved most.
At the time I didn’t think much about the list. After all, old age is a place young people can hardly imagine visiting. But now that I’m the same age as many of those hospice clients, I can’t help but see things differently.
As my wife Ronna put it, more succinctly, about the things we no longer can do: “There are a lot of used-to-be’s.”
With so much of my life in the rear-view mirror and my parents and both siblings gone, I am left to consider: How does one keep from agitating about dying and death?
This is a question I have put to some of my older friends and relatives. One responds with practical advice: stay busy. Several are philosophical: they’re satisfied with the good lives they’ve been blessed to have. My former RoundTable colleague Charlie Wilkinson, who is now 88 and wrote more than 700 columns during his two decades at the paper, says he remains curious about life and grateful for his three children and four grandchildren – and is still passionately if futilely cheering on the Cubs.
A churchgoing friend (who has since passed away) was comforted in the belief she would go to heaven – and if anyone belongs there, she does.
What does Siri say?
Of course, websites abound with ways to deal with anxiety about dying and the abyss of death. There’s one here with an “epicurean perspective” and another here that deals with “thanatophobia,” extreme fear of death. And of course there are many about assisted suicide, should one choose that course, even a Death Cafe that meets monthly at the Robert Crown Community Center to discuss the topic. Their motto is, “Drink Tea, Eat Cake and Discuss Death.”
Thankfully I’m not suicidal or thanatophobic. I don’t spend all my time thinking about death. Like my friends, I stay busy and productive and am blessed with a life mostly free from pain, suffering and want.
But death and dying creep into my mind more often than I’d like. As I approach my ninth decade and my physical and cognitive decline becomes more noticeable, I know my thoughts will wander more frequently to the dark side.
Perhaps that’s inevitable – even purposeful. A recent New Yorker article noted that “losing our capacities might be a kind of prerequisite to accepting our mortality: maybe the slowing of body and mind is what makes death tolerable. … Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century essayist, [wrote], ‘Inasmuch as I no longer cling so hard to the good things of life when I begin to lose the use and pleasure of them, I come to view death with much less frightened eyes.’”
Still, pushing back against the long hard night still seems worthwhile. I admire my 91-year-old brother-in-law who, despite recent cancer treatments, drives, travels and organizes family get-togethers. He said only half facetiously that he plans to live, like Moses, to 120, because he wants “to see how things turn out.”
Me too. If nothing else, life is too fascinating to let go.
Case in point: my late friend Fritzie. She was an 80-year-old violist with whom I shared a music stand when I first joined the Evanston Symphony Orchestra some 25 years ago. Fritzie and I sat in the back of the viola section and in her schnapps-soaked and cigarette-rasped voice she’d make hilarious sotto voce comments about the then-conductor’s competence.
Fritzie would know. As a young woman she had played violin under the baton of the legendary cellist Pablo Casals in his summer orchestra, and was fired not once but twice by the equally legendary conductor Leopold Stokowski for refusing to sleep with him. Still later she formed one of the first all-female string quartets and played for JFK’s kids at their grade school.
I learned these things visiting her in her apartment overlooking Lake Michigan, trying to interest her in smoking a joint while she tried to get me to try schnapps. (Neither of us succeeded.)
Live full out
One answer to thanatophobia is to live a life so outrageously full, so wondrously out there, so amazingly complete, that there’s no time or room for anxiety and regret at the end. “People living deeply have no fear of death,” said Anais Nin.
Like Fritzie. She died in 2007 at age 87.
Fritzie’s younger sister Gloria is still playing violin in the Evanston Symphony. She’s 97 and during the summer she swims daily in Lake Michigan. As if that weren’t enough, she also plays in and helps recruit musicians for the Savoyaires, the venerable Evanston-based Gilbert & Sullivan theater company.
When I asked Gloria about facing death, she said she’s unafraid, and paraphrased the late Norman Lear, who said, “‘There’s always something interesting wherever you are. Oh, but what I’m leaving behind.’”
In The New Yorker article, the author wrote about “a curious body of psychological research, which suggests that as we age and lose our capacities we tend to grow more content, not less. This finding clashes with popular conceptions of getting older, but seems to hold across continents, cultures, and eras. ‘I can’t do everything I used to,’ a family friend, who is in his eighties and has been married for sixty years, recently told me. ‘But I wouldn’t say I’m any less happy than I was before.’ Lost pleasures, he said, could sometimes be replaced: rounds of golf gave way to brisk walks, and when walking became difficult he spent more time talking to his children and grandchildren. As we grasp that our days are limited, we seem to abdicate our need for control; we may try to close the gap between what we want and what we have. Healthy aging seems to require a shift in mind-set as much as a shift in muscle mass.”
Interesting, but I’m not so sure I’ll be that sanguine about my declining years.
I was born the last day of 1945, and sometimes I try to comfort myself with the knowledge that, wherever I was on Dec. 31, 1944, that’s where I’ll be (in all likelihood, given my family health history) on the last day of 2045. Is that so bad? But in 1944 I knew nothing about life – about the love of family and deep friendships, the glories of Bach and Beethoven, the richness of the cosmos’ mysterious and complex tapestry. As Norman Lear said, oh, what I’m leaving behind.
As always, art points the way. Perhaps the most furious depiction of grief at the dying of the light is Dylan Thomas’ famous poem. In music we have Billy Strayhorn and Johnny Hodges’ powerful lament Blood Count, Steve Winwood’s plaintive, African-centric Vacant Chair and Shostakovich’s hopeful Immortality, the final song from his Michelangelo Suite (“I live in the hearts of those who love and so I am not dust. In death, decay will not touch me.”)
Or perhaps it can be reframed, even elevated, as Antoine de Saint-Exupery does in his 1942 memoir Flight to Arras: “Death is a thing of grandeur. It brings instantly into being a whole new network of relations between you and the ideas, the desires, the habits of the man now dead. It is a rearrangement of the world. Nothing has changed visibly, yet everything has changed. The pages of the book are the same, but the meaning of the book is different.”
Thus fortified and encouraged, I am thinking about a new exercise to stave off death anxiety.
It’s so utterly simple, so ridiculously naïve, I’m hard pressed to credit its effectiveness. Nonetheless, what I try to do, when attending to simple chores when the mind tends to wander its dismal course, is focus on this very second – not just now, which slips away before we can grab it – but the now of now, the very center of this moment, the dot at the center of the pointillist painting of life.
The idea is to find the essence of the moment.
‘The knowledge of knowledge’
The great Buddhist scholar and writer Sogyal Rinpoche alludes to this focus, called rigpa, in his The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. He describes it as “a primordial, pure, pristine awareness that is at once intelligent, cognizant, radiant, and always awake. It could be said to be the knowledge of knowledge itself.”
The problem is that attaining such pinpoint focus is incredibly hard to do. Our monkey brains are as wild as children in a playground, amoebas in a pond or atoms in a cell. It takes years of practice to slow down our thinking and focus acutely on whatever is in front of us, to avoid the mental distractions of the unknown future or the regrettable past.
As Rinpoche asks, “Isn’t it extraordinary that our minds can’t stay still for longer than a few moments without grasping after distraction? … We are fragmented into so many different aspects. … So many contradictory voices, dictates, and feelings fight for control over our inner lives that we find ourselves scattered everywhere, in all directions, leaving nobody at home.”
The answer, Rinpoche advises, is mindful meditation, which Buddhists call “calm abiding.”
But what is meditation, and (for us monkey brains), how do we do it?
Pretty simple, according to the Buddha, who might be said to have written the book on living and dying. “Once an old woman came to Buddha and asked him how to meditate,” we learn from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. “He told her to remain aware of every movement of her hands as she drew the water from the well, knowing that if she did, she would soon find herself in that state of alert and spacious calm that is meditation.”
My version of that approach (admittedly unorthodox and probably heretical) is a walking meditation in which I try to focus laser-like on the most mundane objects, trying to see them (as well as life itself) anew.
I gave it a test-run a few weeks ago, went for a neighborhood walk with a heightened awareness of everything I encountered – every tree bud, sidewalk crack and garage door panel.
Finally I stopped at a humble fire hydrant. Is there a more commonplace object? Here’s something we’ve passed without the least notice every day since we were little kids. In my case that’s more than 26,000 days, certainly dozens and maybe even hundreds of times a day. That’s hundreds of thousands of fire hydrants I’ve ignored. But this time I really paid attention. I noticed the odd shape; the huge bolts; the lovely color; the nicks and chips and encrusted dirt; the chains attached to the hose caps like silvery necklaces; even the similarity to the 1956 cinematic robot. I admired the 15 feet of legally protected curbside sanctuary. I considered the homes and lives it’s saved, the assurance it provides that in the event of a fire, help is close at hand. Amazing! Miracles large and small!
John Cage’s silence
On Aug. 29, 1952, pianist David Tudor premiered a new work by the avant garde American composer John Cage. It consisted of three movements – all without a sound from the keyboard. The name, 4’33”, was the total length of the piece – four minutes and 33 seconds.
4’33” was met with howls of outrage, but Cage said it was misunderstood, and intended to make a serious point.
“There’s no such thing as silence,” he later wrote. “What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.”
In other words, listeners were encouraged to apply a new dimension of listening, a new sensitivity to their environment, a new level of attention. It was more than music; it was meta-music, meta-awareness.
Meta-awareness is one reason why I so enjoy long train rides: the ever-changing tableau of American streetscapes and landscapes constantly focuses one’s attention on the very present moment.
In his novel The Stranger, Albert Camus writes of the protagonist’s scheduled execution in three days, during which, seemingly for the first time, he experiences something like a revelation about “the moment of awareness.” He looks up through the narrow ceiling to see “…the stars were shining down on my face. Sounds of the countryside came faintly in, and the cool night air, veined with smells of earth and salt, fanned my cheeks. The marvelous peace of the sleepbound summer night flooded through me like a tide.”
In his book, You Are Here, Thich Nath Hanh observes that “…three days before [the Stranger’s] death, he is able to touch the blue sky in a very deep way. The moment of awareness has manifested.”
Elsewhere in the book, Hanh writes, “Joy and happiness are born of concentration. When you’re having a cup of tea, the value of that experience depends on your concentration. You have to drink the tea with 100% of your being. The true pleasure is experienced in the concentration. When you walk and you are 100% concentrated, the joy you get from the steps you are taking is much greater than the joy you would get without concentration. You have to invest 100% of your body and mind in the act of walking. Then you will experience that being alive and taking steps on this planet are miraculous things.”
Similarly, the poet M.S. Merwin said, in the documentary The Buddha, “Pay attention to who is there, pay attention to what isn’t known and what is known. Pay attention to whatever and what everyone is thinking and feeling and what you’re doing there. Pay attention.”
Same with the now of now – paying focused attention, hearing the message from the unplayed piano, experiencing the Tibetan rigpa of pristine awareness, delighting in the train window’s view of the passing world, enjoying the Buddha’s alert and spacious calm, living life with fullness and intention, homing in on the beauty of a common fire plug – which enables us to focus on and find the core reality of existence, the signal amid the noise of our messy lives.
Paying attention to the small things – the tea, the walking, the breeze, the hand – can help allay our fear of the big things, like the anxieties of dying and death, and allow us to enjoy life more fully and joyfully.
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