Capital Suffering
Seeking distraction recently, I happened upon a short video of Angus Young, co-founder and lead guitarist of the rock band AC/DC, doing his version of Chuck Berry’s duckwalk across the stage before a cheering crowd in Berlin. Young is now old. Yet he and his bandmates are on the road again, perhaps hoping that not only rock-and-roll, but rock-and-rollers, too, will never die. But they will. It is the way of all flesh.
Still, I couldn’t help a metaphorical tip of the proverbial hat to the little fellow, his stringy white hair flying about as he played, yet again, the same old songs he’s been grinding out for decades, though the old fingers no longer scramble up and down the fretboard as fast as they once did. Like too many boys of the 1980s, I went through an adolescent AC/DC phase, assuming, no doubt like the boys in the band, that as long as the music was loud and fast there would be no end to youth and health and vigor. Nearing sixty now, I see the evidence everywhere: that trifecta of blessedness is waning.
Descending the Stairs
For the past two years, I have been caring for my elderly mother, watching her slowly disappear, physically and mentally, before my eyes. She is 90 and suffers from cancer and dementia. When I agreed to care for her, none of us thought she would still be with us two years hence. Her body has declined noticeably over the past six months. She is now under 80 pounds, cannot walk, and it’s become almost impossible for her to articulate coherent speech. Yet she lingers.
I am now more familiar with my mother’s frail, rickety body than either of us ever would have wished. John 21:18 is now our reality: “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, When thou wast young, thou girdest thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not.” How humbling it must be to occupy a body falling apart slowly like a dilapidated house. Repairs are impossible but you must stay until the Landowner removes you from the property.
Early this year, when my mother’s condition declined a little further, the hospice nurse who visits weekly told me, “Just to let you know, this is the point where most people bail.” She explained that the decline from this point on would be like going down a flight of stairs. Flat, down, flat, down. More than once I have called out to God, imploring him, “How many more stairs? How much further will she (and I) have to descend?”
A Flittering Soul
Descending through travails en route to triumph is a well-known literary device. In classical literature it is known as katabasis, in which the hero must descend into the underworld either to retrieve something (or someone) or to encounter the shades of certain individuals who have died in order to gain from that encounter some special knowledge or prophecy vital to the hero’s calling, which he continues upon returning alive from the underworld. Orpheus, Odysseus, and Aeneas all underwent a katabasis. Dante, too, endures a kind of katabasis. Although he awakens “in a dark wood” and finds himself already in the antechamber to Hell, he must descend to the very depths of the Inferno before beginning the ascent to Paradise.
In Book XI of Homer’s Odyssey, there is a scene that, as a careless undergraduate, I scarcely noticed but that I now find quite moving. Odysseus has descended into Hades and encounters his mother, who died while he was away in Troy.
. . . I, pondering it in my heart, yet wished
to take the dead soul of my mother
in my arms. Three times
I started toward her, and my heart
was urgent to hold her,
and three times she fluttered out of
my hands like a shadow
or a dream, and the sorrow sharpened
at the heart within me.
Odysseus was away at war when his mother died, and he complains that she will not let him embrace her once more so that they both might “take the satisfaction of dismal mourning.” He wonders if the image before him is really his mother, or only an image sent by Persephone to beguile him. Odysseus’ mother reassures him.
Oh my child, ill-fated beyond all other mortals,
this is not Persephone . . . beguiling you,
but it is only what happens, when
they die, to all mortals.
. . . the soul flitters out like
a dream and flies away.
But before the soul “flies away,” there is weakness, decline, and suffering. As Odysseus’s mother describes it, “The sinews no longer hold the flesh and the bones together, and once the spirit has left the white bones, all the rest of the body is made subject to the fire’s strong fury.” I am still able to take my mother’s skeletal body in my arms; often I must, yet it seems that she is not entirely in this world anymore, but somewhere between worlds, tethered only by the last few remaining sinews holding her 75 pounds of flesh and bones together, her spirit fluttering awkwardly like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis.
Thomas Jay writes from the Valley of the Sun in Arizona. He is the Curriculum Consultant in the West at Memoria Press.
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