Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone

Nothingness

(2002)

i.

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,

Before high piled books, in charact'ry,

Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain...

When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,

Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

And think that I may never live to trace

Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance...

This particular work resonates with each successive generation because it grapples with the most profound fear any of us will ever experience: the acknowledgment that one day we will perish, not knowing what actually awaits us once we're gone. That John Keats, easily one of the incontestable geniuses of any era, had several decades-at least-of his life stolen by a vulgar disease tends to augment the import of his solemn meditation. There is nothing anyone can say that could possibly begin to explain or rationalize this travesty of karmic justice, this affront to life. It's enigmas like these that make certain people hope against hope that there's a bigger purpose and plan, a way to measure or quantify this madness. But in the final, human analysis, whatever we lost can never subdue all that we received.

Does it make a difference if he's no longer around, if he never knew his words would be read, studied, and savored centuries after he drew his last breath? Was he hoping he might witness that as he wrote the words; are we hoping we might see it when we read them? The questions are unanswerable, and the only thing we can be certain about is that he did live, he did write, and we do read. That's not nearly enough in terms of consolation for his death, and our loss, but it helps. As always, with art, it helps that we will always have the gifts the artist left behind. It's never enough; it's more than enough.

It's enough to make us consider asking more unanswerable-and unsatisfying-questions, like: "What kind of God would take a poet like Keats from us?"

Asking questions like that can lead us to answers that are at once the easiest and most difficult to understand or accept: "The same one who gave him to us?"

This, of course, isn't enough. It's never enough.

But somehow, it will have to do.

ii.

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!

That I shall never look upon thee more,

Never have relish in the faery power

Of unreflecting love!-then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

He thought about his life.

(There is no sight so surreal as your mother being picked up, put in a bag, and carried out of her house-the house she just died in. Nothing you've heard or seen or read can properly prepare you for that moment. Let's face it: you may have thought about one or both of your parents dying, and perhaps you've even contemplated the manner of death: sudden, shocking accident or painful, protracted struggle. It all depends upon the type of person you are and how far you'll allow yourself to go when-and if-you think of the possibilities.)

For the past two weeks he had walked, alone, down by the lake just before dinner. It quickly became part of the new routine and, for whatever reason, was the only time each day he felt comfortable leaving the house even for a few minutes. Late August, just as dusk was descending, the insects doing their dance with death on the surface of the water. Quiet: the place he had come to swim and fish all throughout his childhood.

Childhood's over, he didn't think, because he had long since dispensed with clichéd ways of thinking. Worse, he had accepted the transition out of childhood some time before. Do we become adults when we earn the right to vote? Or drink? When we first have sex? When we move away from home? When we graduate college? Get our first job? Get married? Have kids? Lose our parents? Decide, for whatever reason, that we have put childish things behind in both the practical and stereotypical sense? None of these for some people; any or all of them for others.

He had thought about his life, and his mother's life long before she first got sick. But being obliged to confront the end of her life concentrated a certain set of scenarios: what her illness was going to do to her; what he was going to do for her; what her death was going to do to him; what he was going to do for himself. These last weeks he had walked, alone, at dusk and occasionally-like now-later at night. In the dark and quiet, alone, he always found some measure of peace.

On the shore of the wide world I stand alone and think.

He stood, alone and afraid. He talked to himself and the water responded in its silent way. He looked down and was once again confronted by the sight he always saw, but still had no answers for. Once again, the scrutiny of his own face, staring back at him, demanded answers he could not provide. He suddenly entertained a curious compulsion to jump into the lake, fully clothed. To swim; to disappear-if even for a moment-under the warm, waiting water. He stood still, unable to decide, unable to look away from his own eyes.

He looked upward at the uncommunicative sky and remembered what he had once read, ages ago: that the light from some dead stars, once it actually reached the earth, was millions of years old. At that moment, this seemed to signify everything awesome and immutable, all that he could grasp, but neither rationalize nor reconcile. All the things there were no answers for.

He thought about his life.