Take Care
"When a man dies, it's not only of his disease; he dies of his whole life." Charles Péguy
Our neighbor Laura Foley used to love to tell us, every spring when we returned from work in richer provinces, the season's roster of disease, bereavement, loss.
And all her stars were ill, and all her ailments worth detailing. We were young, and getting up into the world; we feigned a gracious interest when she spoke, but did a wicked slew of imitations, out of earshot.
Finally her bitterness drove off even such listeners as we, and one by one the winters nailed more cold into her house, until the decade crippled her, and she was dead. Her presence had been tiresome, cheerless, negative, and there was little range or generosity in anything she said.
But now that I have lost my certainty, and spent my spirit in a waste of one romance, I think enumerations have their place, descriptive of what keeps on keeping on. For dying's nothing simple, single. And the records of the odd demises (stone inside an organ, obstacles to brook, a pump that stops, some cells that won't, the fevers making mockeries of lust) are signatures of lively interest: they presuppose the life to lose.
And if the love of life's an art, and art is difficult, then we were less than laymen at it (easy come is all the layman knows). I mean that maybe Laura Foley loved life more, who kept so keen an eye on how it goes.
by Heather McHugh, from Hinge & Sign I Prefer © Wesleyan University Press. Reprinted with permission.
