Barry’s Blog # 305: Death, Where is Thy Sting? Death Poems, Last Words and Epitaphs, Part Two of Two

The West

Yoel Hoffman, editor of Japanese Death Poems, observes that jisei poetry arose out of a culture of extreme conformism:

Death poems reveal that before death, the Japanese tend rather to break the restraints of politeness that hold them back during their lifetime. After a lifetime of fitting in, there’s an opportunity to go against the grain in one’s last moments, after which one can hardly be punished for unorthodoxy.

Angela Chen compares jisei and Western death poems. These differing traditions offer a glimpse into the clash of individualism versus collectivism and spontaneity versus control:

When the group takes precedence, as is the case in many East Asian cultures, its members spend much of their lives bending to the collective will and holding back their individual quirks and needs. Against this backdrop, death poems provide a break from conformity, a cherished opportunity to say what one really thinks.

Modern Western poets, on the other hand, favor

…spontaneous last words that serve as a final confirmation of your personal brand…In the West, the pull away from religion, coupled with the emphasis placed on individualism, provided both the freedom to perform our “authentic” selves and the responsibility to make sure those authentic selves were…never phony. Last words are a final chance to reinforce the unique personality the speaker has worked so hard to cultivate throughout his life.

And yet I think I see more similarities than differences. Here are some last words, epitaphs and final poems and comments on death by Western writers:

Shakespeare:

Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbeare, To dig the dust enclosed heare. Bleste be the man that spares these stones And curst be he that moves my bones. (Epitaph)

Antonio Machado:

And on that last day when finally I embark
on that ship that will never turn back,
you’ll find me shirtless, traveling light
almost naked like the children of the sea. – from Self Portrait

Seamus Heaney:

Walk on air against your better judgment. (Epitaph)

Noli timere (“Don’t be afraid” – texted to his wife shortly before his death)

William Butler Yeats:

No longer in Lethean foliage caught

begin the preparation for your death

And from the fortieth winter by that thought

Test every work of intellect or faith,

And everything that your own hands have wrought

And call those works extravagance of breath

That are not suited for such men as come

proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.

– From Vacillation

How can I, that girl standing there, my attention fix

On Roman or on Russian or on Spanish politics,

Yet here’s a travelled man that knows what he talks about,

And there’s a politician that has both read and thought,

And maybe what they say is true of war and war’s alarms,

But o that I were young again and held her in my arms.

– from his final poem, Politics

And his epitaph, from Under Ben Bulben:

Cast a cold eye

On life, on death.

Horseman, pass by!

Nikos Kazantzakis:

I hope for nothing.

I fear nothing.

I am free. (Epitaph)

Pablo Neruda:

And now I’m going behind

This page, but not disappearing.

I’ll dive into clear air

Like a swimmer in the sky,

And then get back to growing

Till one day I’m so small

That the wind will take me away

And I won’t know my own name

And I won’t be there when I wake.

Then I will sing in the silence.

– from Autumn Testament

A train waits for me, a ship
loaded with apples,
an airplane, a plough,
some thorns.
Goodbye, harvested
fruits of the water, farewell,
imperially dressed shrimps,
I will return, we will return
to the unity now interrupted.
I belong to the sand:
I will return to the round sea
and to its flora
and to its fury:
but for now – I’ll wander whistling
through the streets.

– from Farewell to the Offerings of the Sea

Ranier Maria Rilke:

No yearning for an afterlife, no looking beyond,
no belittling of death,
but only longing for what belongs to us
and serving earth, lest we remain unused.

Mary Oliver:

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

– from When Death Comes

– Czeslaw Milosz:

In advanced age, my health worsening,

I woke up in the middle of the night,

and experienced a feeling of happiness

so intense and perfect that in all my life

I had only felt its premonition.

And there was no reason for it.

It didn’t obliterate consciousness;

the past which I carried was there,

together with my grief.

And it was suddenly included,

was a necessary part of the whole.

As if a voice were repeating:

“You can stop worrying now;

everything happened just as it had to.

You did what was assigned to you,

and you are not required anymore

to think of what happened long ago.”

The peace I felt was a dosing of accounts

and was connected with the thought of death.

The happiness on this side was

like an announcement of the other side.

I realized that this was an undeserved gift

and I could not grasp by what grace

it was bestowed on me.

– Awakened 

William Stafford:

If the sky lets go some day and I’m
requested for such volunteering
toward so clean a message, I’ll come.
The world goes on and while friends touch down
beside me, I too will come.

– from November

Now—these few more words, and then I’m gone:

Tell everyone just to remember their names,

and remind others, later, when we find each other.

Tell the little ones to cry and then go to sleep, curled up

where they can. And if any of us get lost,

if any of us cannot come all the way—

remember: there will come a time when

all we have said and all we have hoped will be all right.

– from A Message From the Wanderer

Raymond Carver:

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so? I did.

And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

– from Late Fragment

Thomas McGrath:

Down the small and crooked road

I walk straight toward my death.

How marvelous the moon sits on my shoulder!

The wind is laughing as I laugh.

It has been a long journey. And now, at the end of it,

Like a boat that broke free and drifted far down the river,

I come to rest on an unknown shore:

Half in, half out of the water.

Stephen Dobyns:

Somewhere that shovel stands propped against a wall,

the patch of grass is freshly cut where that final hole will be dug.

Let’s march toward our grave scratching and farting,

our own raucous music of shouted good-byes.

Let’s make sure they bury us standing up.

– from Uprising

Abe Osheroff (lifelong political activist):

My ship is slowly sinking, but my cannons keep firing.

Or, here’s another way to say it:

I have one foot in the grave

and the other keeps dancing.

Anonymous, from the Kuba People of Zaire:

When I die, don’t bury me under forest trees; I fear their thorns.

When I die, don’t bury me under forest trees;
I fear their dripping water.

Bury me under the great shade trees of the market.

I want to hear the drums beating.
I want to feel the dancers’ feet.

Woodie Guthrie:

My sweat can grease the engines
That makes the whole thing run
And the ruling class can kiss my ass
‘Cause I had a heap of fun

Jackie Gleason (epitaph):

And Away We Go!

(Reputed) Last Words:

Johann Sebastian Bach:

Don’t cry for me, for I go where music is born.

Frederic Chopin:

Play Mozart in memory of me, and I will hear you.

Gustav Mahler:

Mozart! Mozart!

Joe DiMaggio:

I’ll finally get to see Marilyn.

Roger Ebert:

I’ll see you at the movies.

Salvador Allende:

Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers! These are my last words, and I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain, I am certain that, at the very least, it will be a moral lesson that will punish felony, cowardice, and treason.

Rilke:

I don’t want the doctor’s death. I want to have my own freedom.

Henry David Thoreau:

I did not know that we had ever quarreled. (Upon being urged to make his peace with God)

Gertrude Stein:

What is the answer?…In that case, what is the question?

Leonardo Da Vinci:

 I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have.

Groucho Marx:

Die, my dear? Why, that’s the last thing I’ll do!

Steve Jobs:

Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.

Carl Jung:

Let’s have a really good red wine tonight.

And finally, my obituary for Greg Kimura:

Greg called me “brother” – not because we socialized together, but because the time we spent together was in ritual space. There, everyone who could stand the heat, stay in the room and laugh or weep together was either a brother or a sister. We shared these spaces for five years in our weekly men’s group, ten years at men’s retreats in Mendocino, poetry salons and grief rituals.

Greg was “a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.” And for that reason, he was full of joy. Does that sound strange? I’m reminded of a friend who visited a West African village and asked a particular woman why, despite her poverty, she seemed so happy. She responded, “Because I cry a lot.”

Greg was rock solid. At these rituals he could always be counted on to be one of the drummers. And that’s no simple or easy thing. It means to maintain the beat for up to two hours, to hold the container while others release their pent-up feelings in the sacred work of grief. It’s one of the countless ways in which Greg served the beauty and the terror of this world.

Because of this, Greg’s humor was inseparable from both his pain and his compassion. His Caring Bridge website said, “Hi. I’m Greg and I’m dying. And so are you!” And his poetry. I’d like to think that this crazy insight came from his knowledge of Rumi, who wrote:

Listen, I would make this very plain

If someone were ready to hear what I have to tell:

Everybody in this world is dying.

Everybody is already in their death agony.

So listen to what anyone says as though it were

The last words of a dying father to his son.

Listen with that much compassion, and you’ll

Never feel jealousy or simple anger again.

People say everything that’s coming will come.

Understand this: It’s all here right now.

And me? I’ve been so woven into the mesh of my trivial errands

That only now do I begin to hear the mystery of dying everywhere.

Greg had done much difficult interior work, and so (depending on your point of view) he was a real Christian, a real Buddhist and/or a real Pagan. Perhaps I’m idealizing here – the family knows far better than I – but it seemed that he achieved a profound sense of peace with his own death, an ability to be in the moment. True to his Japanese heritage, he wrote what I think is his own jisei:

Resist the World’s Numbness

And your passion revive,

so when death comes to find you,

Iet him find you alive.

He was lucky in those last nine months to be surrounded by so much love, appreciation and music. When we visited for the last time and I asked him “How are you doing?” he responded, without a trace of irony, Couldn’t be better!”

So finally he was a teacher, who left me with a spontaneous Zen koan that I’ll be working with for a long time. We recited some favorite poems together, including this one of his:

Sacred Wine

Sit with the pain in your heart, he said.

Hold it like a sacred wine in a golden cup.

The wine may break you and if it does, let it.

To be human is to be broken,

and only from brokenness can one be healed.

The ancestors say: the world is full of pain,

and each is allotted a portion.

If you do not carry your share, then others are forced to carry it for you,

And the suffering you bring to the world is your sin,

But the suffering you bring to yourself will be your hell.

Sit with the pain in your heart, he said.

Hold it there like a sacred wine in a golden cup.

When we got to the third from the last line, he interrupted me:

…the suffering you bring to yourself will be your salvation.