Death: Part III

People have an amazing ability to think of everything as a story. They isolate certain events or periods in their lives and turn them into chapters. Thus everyone hears, every Christmas, about the time Aunt Mabel went to the corner store for a loaf of bread. For the sake of a story there must be a willingness to allow certain details to be ignored, such as why Aunt Mabel needed the bread in the first place or what she did with it after she returned. The important thing to the listeners is what happened at the corner store.

Unfortunately life can’t be divided up into these little segments. It is not in the least bit episodic. If you tell life as a story, it must be an indivisible epic. Aunt Mabel went to the corner store not because she wanted toast but because she had always had an obsessive subconscious need to reenact scenes from her childhood. But you wouldn’t know that unless you saw, thirty years ago, Little May walk to the corner store in the rain and get splashed by a bus. You don’t see the bigger picture because you want to hear about when she got hit on by Arlo Guthrie.

Here is the bigger picture. Aunt Mabel bounced you in her lap before you were a month old. She bought you your first ice cream cone at the aforementioned corner store. A few years later, Aunt Mabel died in her sleep.

How depressing, you must be thinking, and how fortunate for you that you don’t actually have an Aunt Mabel. Well, some people aren’t so lucky. They have to come to terms with her death. How do they do that? They tell stories at the funeral. It’s a vicious circle, I tell you.

The stories at the funeral are all about Mabel Full of Life. They cheerily reminisce about her love and good cheer. They don’t shy away from her faults, her light fingers and questionable meetings on street corners, but they dismiss them as inconsequential in the larger sense. They comfort and they provide closure. The stories at the funeral all end with “and then she died.” It isn’t spoken out loud, but it’s there as the hidden subtext to every giggle, every smile of remembrance. Although people are troubled by it, they intuitively understand its necessity.

This isn’t to say that death is an unmixed blessing. It is natural to pity those people who miss out on their childhood, or their teenage years, or their adult life, even those who miss out on their senescence. They miss out on the full range of human experience. When death comes before the story has run its course, it is a tragedy. Just as it is nearly impossible to judge an unfinished book, it is very difficult to understand an unfinished life. But death at the proper time is fitting.

There is nothing wrong with this tendency to turn lives into stories. It is how we ascribe meaning to our existence, and to our dear ones. When we are caught up in a narrative about Aunt Mabel, we honor her. After all, legends are merely those people who are as alive through their stories as they ever were when they still drew breath.

I want my story to end well. Not “and he lived happily ever after” but “and he died peacefully, in the arms of those he loved.” One feels incomplete and unbelievable, the stuff of fantasy. The other carries a hint of perfection.

So, irrationally, I do not fear death. I embrace it. I will be ready for the conclusion of my story, and I hope it will have been a good one.

The past incessantly intrudes into the present in Poland in a way it does not in America. I recall one autumn afternoon shortly after I arrived feeling strangely overwhelmed by the sheer number of different injustices visited upon Poles in recent and distant history. Groups of people displaced. People disappeared. Sold out by the Americans and Brits. Almost annihilated by the Germans and then the Russians. Protestant against Orthodox. Catholic against Jews. As I walked along an exhausted-looking street of filthy and dilapidated Soviet and pre-war buildings in Lodz, a city where the past weighs particularly heavily, I said to my wife, “Too much happened here.”

And yet—there is another more beautiful way of looking at the past in Poland, and one can experience this other past on November 1, All Saints Day. Throngs of people set off for local cemeteries to remember their parents, brothers, sisters, relatives, friends and co-workers. I have never seen such crowds in Koszalin, the city of 150,000 where my wife Beata and her parents live. The town, like all towns in Poland on this day, is completely shut down. All city buses have one and only one destination—the city cemetery. 

It is a pleasantly cool and sunny autumn morning as we set off. In bigger cities like Warsaw and Krakow there are immense traffic jams and sometimes accidents as all head for the same destination, but here it is festively busy. As our bus approaches the cemetery, sellers are peddling chrysanthemums, candles and colored glass lanterns from hastily set-up stalls outside the entrance. The cemetery itself and the feeling inside it is quite unique compared to any graveyard I’ve ever visited. Gravesites are brimming over with white and yellow flowers in great clay pots. Red, yellow and green glass lanterns flicker in neat rows lining the headstones. Women and men sweep away dead leaves around a particular grave. The mood is somber, but not overly so. People smoke, talk quietly on cell phones, children laugh and run a bit after setting lit candles near the graves. Yet in other places, a lone man sits, quietly remembering. Further on, a woman dressed in her best clothes wipes her tears away with a tissue.

My wife and in-laws have four graves to visit. We find the first one quickly, my father-in-law’s work friend, my wife’s godfather, a man who died in his fifties. My father-in law crosses himself as he silently prays. My wife and mother-in-law say their prayers, and we move on.

Next, we are to pay respects to a neighbor, but as we walk the wide path and then the narrower walks between graves, this becomes a problem. My Tato (Dad—which is what I call my father-in-law) remembers only that the grave was near a birch tree at the border of the cemetery. We wander among those graves, but we cannot find “Stanislaw Grzegorek.” Even I join in the hunt, and though I see many “Stanislaws,” and many “Grzs” we don’t find his plot. Tato’s leg starts to hurt, and we decide that we’ve tried long enough. I feel bad for Stanislaw, but then think, in a way he’s really been remembered as we spent so much time looking for him. I suggest going to find the cemetery office and maybe locate his grave that way, but Mamo (Mom—which is what I call my mother-in-law) assures me that the office (if one exists) will surely be closed today.

It is now noon, and the cemetery is wall-to-wall people. I’ve never been in such a lively graveyard. From time to time I guiltily remember my own parents, whose graves I have not visited in years. What kind of bad son am I to neglect their graves for such a long time?

We walk to another neighbor’s grave, a man who died of lung cancer at forty-nine, leaving behind a wife and two children. His grave is lined with lanterns and flowers, as undoubtedly friends and family have already been there.

The last grave we visit belongs to my wife’s classmate, who drowned when she was nineteen. Her sister, who also died young of meningitis, lies beside her. “Her parents must have gone out of their minds,” my wife says after she finishes her prayers.

Beata lights a last candle at the Soldiers’ Memorial, a Soviet-style cement affair with two mightily abstract figures holding hands against a banner, its furled corner emblazoned with the hammer and sickle. Strange to see that anachronism, but it remains, another kind of reminder of an unfulfilled past.

That night we take the eight-hour bus ride back to Lodz, but the ride seems shorter that night, for as we pass through all the towns, each town’s graveyard is aglow in green, yellow and red candlelight. The past is indeed everywhere alive in Poland, particularly on this day, as I remember with the Poles all of their saints, and for me the name of this day, All Saints Day, which only used to signify distant and unknown holy people from the Middle Ages, assumes a different meaning as I contemplate a heaven filled with friends, family, co-workers and classmates; for the Poles who take a special day to publicly remember their loved ones, they are all saints.