What I will miss when I die are many things: walks in
the park, holding hands with my wife, chocolate and vanilla, curling up with a
good book, shopping for books, and many, many other things. I will miss friendship, because I am
convinced from the few mystical suggestions in Revelations that we will know
each other but differently than we do
now, whatever that means. I may be
becoming somewhat more rationalist as I age, more of a deist, concerned with
the here and the now, for I do believe with real certainty that the life beyond
this one will be favorable and shine like the sun.
When I die, I am sure that I will miss certain
aspects of church, although I imagine that worship will be more direct and even
more meaningful. My wife and I became—I
became—Episcopalian/Anglican because (1) the English connection, (2) the
richness of the liturgy, (3) the meditative silences that seem built into the
service, and finally (4) the tradition of reasoning
about faith. We switched to Anglican
worship and communion while living in Arkansas to get away as far as possible
from the unrepentant Southern Baptist
influence—they have never come to terms with their corporate sins of slavery,
sexism, racism, and a general disregard for others. (I sometime think these are the sins we are
still living without acknowledging, which is why we have as a nation ended up
as an angry, xenophobic people electing a man who is a confirmed racist and
sexist to our highest office.) In the
name of “Christian” love, some have corrupted society into a panopticon that
does nothing but judge others as unworthy.
When
we lived in Arkansas, our last landlords were Southern Baptist, and they were
nasty people because we did not fit their mode.
The female member of that family became incensed when Angie, through no
fault of her own, lost her job at the school where we taught and had to go back
to waitressing. She said to me that she
hadn’t thought she was renting to “that kind of folk” when she rented us the
house. She made every excuse in the book
to come over early on Saturday morning when she knew my wife had worked late the
night before and was sleeping in, always demanding to “talk to Angie” about
this or that. Our next door neighbor, a
sweet older southern woman, told us that the woman had it out for us; and even
the cleaning lady who came in as we were preparing to move out (and move back
East) told us that the landlord’s wife had described the house as wrecked when
it wasn’t even mildly dirty. (The female
member of the landlord couple simply hated the fact that we turned one of the
front rooms into a bookroom instead of a nursery—even though books do not throw
up, color the walls, mess up the carpet, etc.
The house had berber carpet in a slightly off-white, which showed every
dirt speck and was the most uncomfortable carpeting I have ever set on—like
prickles of a cactus telling you to get up, keep moving, keep working for the
man…). While there were certainly
exceptions—and many of whom remain dear friends—I have to say that that area of
the Bible Belt had an evil, evil culture that was damaging to us and which I do
not miss.
I guess when I die I will miss memory as well,
perhaps even most of all. I know our
memories if kept will be refined and refocused, yet there now is a certain joie de vive in remembering and lamenting
those who have gone on before us; a certain pain-for-pain-sake, divine
delectation in the quiet languishing of a broken, grieving heart. I think this aspect of my character, rather
akin to the joyful wallowing in misery that May Sarton describes in the French
writer Collette in Sarton’s journal Recovering,
comes out particularly in my loving to listen to singers who have passed—Mama
Cass, Minnie Ripperton, Tammi Terrell, Karen Carpenter, Ella Fitzgerald
(especially her aging recordings of the ‘80s and early 90s). I also seem to enjoy “old” but still living
artists, like Willie Nelson, who is just amazing; and the late recordings of
Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash (where I do not necessarily listen to their
earlier recordings much if at all). There
is just a wonderful band of these aging country male and female singers that I
have found very commensurate with this perhaps deliberate miserableness on my
part, but that also strengthens me to live out my life strongly and
forthrightly, because after you get to a certain age, you do not care what
others think or how others evaluate you because you stand requisite in your own
skin and in your own space. At times, I
hope I have and can achieve that level of confidence and certainty as well.
