The Mother of Beauty

by John Daniel

Is there no change of death in paradise?

Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs

Hang always heavy in that perfect sky . . .

—Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning”

When Marilyn and I moved to Portland from California in 1988, we brought my mother from the coast of Maine to live with us. Zilla was eighty and faltering, both physically and mentally. She had a slow-developing case of Alzheimer's disease, or something that acted like Alzheimer's, as well as high blood pressure and the beginnings of congestive heart failure. She could walk, with a cane on her left side and me on her right, but one circuit around our city block was enough to wear her out for the rest of the day.

One afternoon in July of 1992, Zilla fell in the bathroom and broke her right hip. The fall may have been precipitated by a stroke, though that never was confirmed. The EMTs rushed her to the Emmanuel Hospital emergency room, where two or three doctors (we arrived just before a shift change) examined her and spoke briefly with me. My mother's hip was x-rayed, and an orthopedist showed me the expected news: The neck of her right femur had cleanly snapped. The orthopedist conferred on the phone with a colleague of my mother's personal physician—who, unluckily, was away on vacation—and learned the essentials of her chart. Most notably, he was informed that Zilla had at least one damaged heart valve from a childhood bout with rheumatic fever. The orthopedist recommended immediate surgery to repair the hip, with either a pin or a replacement. It was the only way she would have a chance of walking again, he told me, and if she didn't walk she almost certainly would die before long of pneumonia or some other infection.

My mother had been unable to speak since her fall. She was conscious, but it was far from certain that she understood in medical terms what had happened to her and what her choices were. I had to decide for her, and I agreed to the surgery. The operation went well until near the end, when my mother's heart failed. The medical team worked hard and quickly, and after an hour of touch and go they managed to get her stabilized.

In the intensive care unit, a respirator billowed my mother's lungs to a steady gasping beat through a tube inserted through her nose. She had an IV in one arm, she was catheterized for urine, she was wired to an EKG monitor through four patches on her chest, and a delicate high-tech sensor had been introduced through a vein in her shoulder into the right side of her heart and through the heart into the pulmonary artery, there to detect fluctuations in blood pressure and report the information to a monitor above the bed.

My mother's eyes were closed, her mouth open, her head tilted to one side,shifting rhythmically with the rising and falling of her ventilated chest. She looked puny among the tubes and wires and monitors, her white hair matted. She was there and she was nowhere.

Zilla was in intensive care for two days. Eventually a kind and forthright internist told us that she might stay alive indefinitely on the respirator, but only alive. If she were going to recover she would have showed signs by now. The surgery simply had overtaxed her heart, which already carried the burden of forcing blood through a calcified aortic valve. She had no resilience, no resources in reserve. At this point, the internist advised, we might want to think about taking her off the respirator.

We did just that the next day, after my brother had arrived. Zilla, tough bird that she was, went on breathing on her own. She lived another few days, out of intensive care, trammeled only by an IV to maintain her fluid balance and an oxygen cannula on her nose. She drifted for a while between sleep and semi-waking, then slept steadily and died, eight days after entering the hospital.

*

Every doctor and nurse who treated or attended my mother at the end of her life acted capably, responsibly, and sensitively, and I believe the same of Marilyn, my brother, and myself. It's a story with no culprit, no villain, yet it troubles me.

I knew some things about Zilla that the doctors and nurses didn't. I knew that she had volunteered, six months earlier at the dinner table, that she had a feeling she might not live much longer, and that she was little troubled by the prospect of death. I knew her religion's teaching—she was a late-life spiritual pilgrim—that the death of the body is not an extinction but a liberation of the real being, the soul, and I knew that her religion, despite her dementia, remained real and central to her. I knew she had meditated on her departure, worked at overcoming her fear, sought fortitude in scripture and poetry. I knew that in the four years she lived with us she had more than once expressed an explicit wish to die, though at other times she had shown a fear of death. I knew that Zilla had been a lively and fiercely independent woman, and that the humiliating infirmities of age sat not at all well with her.

I knew these things, yet almost automatically I chose surgery. The orthopedist had put it bluntly. She wouldn't walk again without surgery, and if she didn't walk she would die. I wish, now, that I had asked the doctor to assess Zilla's chances of walking again after the surgery, given her age and frail condition and the possibility that she had been felled by a stroke. And though I understood, of course, that any surgery posed a risk, no one specifically discussed with me—I did not ask anyone to discuss with me—the degree of risk to the particular patient in question, a failing eighty-four-year-old with a damaged heart. I know the risk could not have been pinned down in numbers, but we should have talked about it. I let the orthopedist and the intense energy of the emergency room make the decision for me. My own shocked panic said, Yes, do everything. Please do it now.

If I had chosen against surgery, I would have spared my mother the stress of a major operation and an awful travail in intensive care. I would have spared her the misery of a ventilator opening and closing her lungs like a big fist in her chest. To have declined the operation would have consigned her to death, but now I ask myself what I wish I had asked at the time: Once she had fallen, once she had broken her hip and possibly suffered a stroke, wasn't she, barring a miracle, consigned to death in any case? Wasn't death thoroughly written in her situation, there to be read by anyone with eyes to see? Wasn't the little room of hope we huddled in, doctors and family alike, actually a room of denial?

At the time, of course, that room seems the only place to be. Outside, the weather is terrible, impossible. The technical expertise exercised while you wait in the room seems unquestionably right. Everyone wants only the best, everyone wants life. But were we—doctors, family, all of us—were we really serving my mother's life, my mother's being, by conspiring to prolong a physical existence that had arrived at its final passage?

Another question I didn't ask at the time, didn't come close to asking, and would have found it intensely uncomfortable to ask: If death by pneumonia is the likely outcome without surgery, what is that death like? I know now that it tends to be, with oxygen and morphine, relatively comfortable—a slow depression of all systems, a coma, and the end. (Sir William Osler, the father of internal medicine, called pneumonia “the old man's friend.”) My wife and brother and I, and other relatives and friends, would have stood a better chance of communicating with Zilla if she had not gone into surgery. Maybe we could have brought her home. Even if she hadn't been able to speak, she might have been able to express herself through hand squeezes, through smiles and tears. Or maybe not, but in any event, we would have had more time with her before she slipped into a coma, time for the affirmations and regrets and the simple need to be together that the dying of a loved one evokes in us. And her time, her last time on Earth, would have been far less troubled.

*

In an earlier era—the nineteenth century, certainly, and the first decades of the twentieth—things probably would have gone as I've just described. Those around my mother, and my mother too if she was able, would have recognized that death was near, and death would have proceeded by its own course in its own time. When it arrived, we might have washed her body, dressed her as she loved to dress, held a wake for her. As was common in the late 1800s, we might have taken a photograph of her as she lay on her bed—her accomplished body, her completed physical being, frail and in pain no longer.

Please understand, it is not at all my wish to repudiate our present medical knowledge and technical capacities, even if that were possible. My mother lived a long and active life; a hundred or two hundred years ago, her life might have been as active but wouldn't have been as long. I do think, though, that in forestalling death as we have done, in extending the human life span through the application of the medical profession's technical genius, we have incurred losses along with our gains, and that we will face further losses with further gains. I'll tell another story, a briefer one.

A friend in England , a former Jain monk named Satish Kumar, once spoke in an interview about the death of his mother in India . When she was eighty or so she said to her family, “I'm now too old. I can't cook, I can't see, I can't do anything for you. What point is there in carrying on? From tomorrow, I'm going to start dying.” She made the rounds of her village, stopping in to visit relatives, friends, everyone she knew. “I have come to say goodbye, because I am going to die,” she told them. Then she began to fast. As she lay peacefully, bearing herself into death, the villagers chanted, sang hymns, prayed and meditated around her. They did their part to launch her on the voyage she had chosen.

Satish's mother had reached a limit, acknowledged what that limit asked of her, and made a decision. It could be said that she committed suicide, but her act was of such clarity and integrity and gentleness that it bears no resemblance to suicide as we ordinarily understand it, as an anguished act of violence against oneself, an act that inevitably works further anguish on the suicide's family and friends. We use the phrase “to take one's life.” Satish's mother did nothing so abrupt or destructive. She completed her life; she did not take but gave it. She was an apple on a tree, ripe and growing overripe. One day soon—a good day, like all others—the apple would surely drop from the branch. Satish's mother affirmed, by choice, the most natural of events.

My mother was more ambivalent about dying than Satish's was, and both her Alzheimer's and her stoic New England character made it difficult for her to express personal wishes, but she had given what I now see as clear signs that she was ready to go. When she told me, six months before she fell, that she might not live much longer, I asked how she felt about that. Without hesitation Zilla said, “Thankful for everything I've had. It's been a privilege.”

I wish I could have accepted what my mother was telling me. I wish I had tried harder to draw out her thoughts and feelings in the weeks that followed. Instead of merely going on with the usual care I gave her, the daily humdrum, I could have helped her imagine how she wanted to meet her death. I could have read to her from her religious books, meditated with her, played her tapes of sacred music if she wanted to hear them. I could have asked her if she would like to fast. I could have notified everyone she might want to see before she died.

I could have acknowledged and made an honorable place in our household for the guest soon to arrive, who had traveled eighty-four years to meet my mother. If I had helped her welcome him, helped her greet and begin to know him, perhaps he wouldn't have had to trip her in the bathroom to accomplish what he had come to do. Or perhaps she wouldn't have had to trip herself. We're not certain that my mother was felled by a stroke, or—as sometimes happens—by a spontaneous break in her fragile hip. It's possible that she felled herself. Caring for her had put me and my marriage under a lot of stress, and my mother knew it. Tending to her things in the weeks after she died, I found two items in her deer-hide purse. One was her pendulum, of the kind dowsers use, which she had sometimes consulted to help her make decisions. The other was a slip of paper from a fortune cookie. It read, “Leave your boat and travel on firm ground.”

*

I didn't make a place for death because I didn't want my mother to die. That came of my love for her, but it was also a selfishness: I didn't want to feel what I knew I would have to feel if she did die. I didn't want to be burdened with my mother's death, and in stonewalling against it I was acting out the deep denial of death that pervades our culture. Death is taboo, a hush-hush deal, an unseemly rumor that might turn out not to be true, we seem to hope, if we ignore it long enough. Dying is a little like sex—everyone does it, but no one, in polite society, talks about it.

After all, who dies in the modern world? Certainly not us. Our birthdays conspire to prove that we get older, but we counter that sinister trend by devotedly making ourselves younger. We dye our hair, plump out wrinkles, sweat off fat, tone our muscles, improve our diets, curb our vices, replace our joints, have great sex longer, and stay actively engaged in our work and hobbies and recreations. We can't possibly die—we're too busy. Only others are subject to death, those unfortunates who didn't care for themselves correctly, who didn't improve their lot if poor, who indulged themselves if rich, who didn't see the doctor when they should have, whose self-esteem was too low or anger too high, who didn't laugh or meditate or play enough golf, who didn't see to their personal growth as they should have, who drove cars too fast or themselves too hard, who took too much whiskey or not enough garlic and omega-3s, who should have drunk ten glasses of water each day, whether or not they were thirsty, and preserved themselves through psychotherapy or high colonics or deep massage.

But we do age, despite ourselves, and when death draws nigh and will no longer be ignored, we do not go gently into that good night. We hold out with everything we have. We go down fighting. Look at the phrases we read every day in the newspaper, and hear on radio and TV, and sometimes find issuing from our own mouths: She fought bravely for life. He lost his long battle with leukemia. She was cut down by a stroke. We are making progress in the war on cancer. This is the language of mortal combat, in which the practitioners and recipients of medicine heroically struggle together against death, and in a certain limited sense we are winning the struggle. We the people demand longer life, medical science provides it, and we the people take for granted each incremental boon and demand still longer life. Where will it end, this war? Will we be satisfied when the average life span reaches ninety years? A hundred and ten? Or will we settle for nothing less than genetically tinkering ourselves into immortality?

The financial costs of the war on death are immense and growing. The bill for the final eight days of my mother's life came to well over thirty thousand dollars. She had no resources, and we in the family couldn't pay it either. Medicare and Medicaid paid it, or paid part of it, which is to say that the American people paid it. And thirty thousand, I feel sure, is a cheaper tab than many others incur who spend their last days or weeks or months in the hospital undergoing intensive and expensive treatment. Heroic interventions command heroic fees. The cost of health-care insurance already ranges from formidable to staggering for many of those who can afford it, and over forty million Americans can't.

If government health-care entitlements founder in the next few decades, as many expect, even as life-prolonging techniques and technology grow ever costlier, will long life become an amenity reserved for the wealthy? What will it mean to a people who respect the principle, at least, that all persons are created equal, if winning the war against death proves a victory for only an elite few? Probably the fairest approach would be to cut expenses by rationing end-of-life care in order to provide at least basic medical care for everyone, including those who don't now have it except through the emergency room. Such rationing, as in the British system, would likely have meant no hip replacement for my mother. I might have railed about that at the time, but now I think it might have produced a better outcome—for my mother, for our family, and for the American people.

But it's not the financial costs that concern me most. Americans are dying miserable, arduous deaths, in many cases far more protracted than my mother's, because of the warfare mentality of modern medicine. We are dying more closely embraced by tubes and wires and chemicals than by family and friends. And we are dying in this way often with no legitimate hope of winning anything more than a brief extension, usually deeply troubled, of a life that has come to its close. Living to the end and past the end has acquired the force of a strict duty, an orthodoxy, for all concerned. Even when the pained and anguished patient is ready to leave the boat, too often she feels she cannot do so without the permission, stated or implicit, of the loved ones who rally around her, and the pained and anguished loved ones themselves too often fear that to grant such permission amounts to betrayal. And so the boat rocks offshore in rough waters, the weather awful, no one at peace, all hands rowing as hard as they can against the waves that soon will beach the boat in any case despite their mightiest efforts.

*

But it is one thing to speak of the elderly dying, quite another to speak of the young. The loss of a mother in her eighties is a sadness, but she, at least, has completed the arc of a lifetime. The death of a child, a teenager, a young adult, seems a gratuitous cruelty, an injustice, a tragedy. Here the metaphor of warfare seems more justified. We want the youthful patient and all around her to pursue even the most minute possibility of recovery, to fight come hell or high water for the decades of living that ought to have been her birthright.

Here's a third story, and this is a harder one. A daughter of good friends of ours was diagnosed at age thirteen with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. She received the best treatment available, at Stanford Medical Center , and went into remission. Five years passed, and Susie and her family dared to breathe again. Half a decade means, often, that one has beaten the cancer. But in the sixth year, when Susie was nineteen, it came back. A blood stem cell transplant and radiation didn't work. Susie, now twenty, didn't want to go through the ravages of chemotherapy again. Her focus turned to alternative treatments as she, her boyfriend, and her family cast about for hope. Their research turned up a doctor in Chicago who was trying, with some success, a combination of diet and alternative healing modalities together with limited chemotherapy. The doctor was reputable, his credentials fine.

Susie was sick, coughing a lot, feeling miserable. Some urged her to try the new treatment. Some were uncertain. Susie told her boyfriend that she feared she would die in Chicago . She told one friend—but not her family—that she didn't want to go, that one of her doctors had recommended hospice rather than another hospital, and that she had been thinking about her funeral. Susie wavered, but in the end, she and her boyfriend flew to Chicago to begin the experimental treatment.

Very quickly she developed pneumonia. Her family and several close friends came to Chicago to be with her. Susie was tubed and wired, her condition grave. More equipment was wheeled in. Fluids were pumped into her body. Susie's heartbeat went flat. Everyone around her was possessed by an agonized desire to keep a brave and beautiful young woman alive. They fought her death as hard as they could, and that is how Susie died—surrounded by loved ones but very much in battle, two thousand miles from home, her departure from the world overrun by machines and techniques attacking the illness that had overrun her body. In the war on death, the battlefield is the body.

In retrospect, that most privileged of perspectives, hospice might have been a wiser choice. But Susie wanted to live, and everyone who knew her wanted her to live. She chose to try one more treatment, and why wouldn't she? Relatively new therapies had extended her life by seven years, allowing her a taste, at least, of adulthood . One of my best friends, a fiction writer, is alive today because recently-evolved techniques and medicines have beaten his acute lymphocytic leukemia into remission. Had he been stricken a few years earlier, his wife would probably be a widow, his two young sons fatherless, his friends and family bereft. If I should fall gravely ill, I would probably choose as Susie and my writer friend chose; I would hope to live, I would ask medical science to do everything in its power.

But what is reasonable hope, and what is the hope of Tantalus, who perpetually reaches for fruit too high to grasp? Each new cure or treatment raises expectations of further advances, but medicines and procedures at any level can never be entirely effective, and not every disease can be outright banished from nature. Cancer patients are living longer these days, but in most cases the difference amounts to a few added months spent in sickness from the disease and its treatment. If we ever achieve an environmentally sane society we might reduce the incidence of cancer, but cancer will still occur, and so will other afflictions. Tuberculosis, once thought to have been virtually extinct, has returned to become the number-one infectious cause of adult death in the world. Any year now, any decade, a new form of flu virus could recapitulate or far transcend the deadly pandemic of 1918. Antibiotics were supposed to permanently subdue all dangerous microbes; now, microbes are demonstrating natural selection so quickly and clearly that even creationists should be able to get it. And diseases previously unknown, such as AIDS and the West Nile virus, arise and spread rapidly in our humanly engrossed world.

In short, our efforts to control and prevent diseases—not to mention accidents—will always have limits, and that means we will never be able to save every child or young man or young woman, let alone every eighty-four-year-old mother who falls in the bathroom. And so, even as medicine works hard to save those it can, shouldn't we on both sides of the medical relationship learn to make an intelligent peace with death, when it will not be denied, instead of fighting it to the bitter end? Wouldn't it enlarge our humanity to recover, from beneath the heavy overlays of technological optimism and military rhetoric, the ability to discern and respect the arrival of death in a human life? Wouldn't it ennoble life to honor its natural end? Susie in her twenty years lived a beautiful life, as did my mother in her eighty-four. I wish each had died a beautiful death.

*

Marilyn's step-grandfather, Harry, died at either 103 or 106, depending on which records you consult. (He lied about his age to get into the Navy and sailed with Teddy Roosevelt's White Fleet.) He suffered some of the lesser infirmities of age but nothing debilitating, nothing that made him physically miserable. He lived in a pleasant Seattle retirement home with a view of the water. He was well attended, visited regularly by Marilyn's father and stepmother. He was not depressed in the medical sense. Yet Harry prayed every day, in his last years, for Jesus to come and take him. He wondered why he was still alive. His predicament reminded me of the epochally old French woman who died around the time that he did. I think she was 121. She was quoted near the end as saying, “I feel as though God has forgotten me.”

The wish of the old for release from life echoes in the oldest stories of our civilization. Aurora, goddess of the dawn, who was in love with Tithonus, a mortal, petitioned Zeus to make Tithonus live forever, as she would. This Zeus did, but Aurora , in her excitement, had forgotten to ask that he exempt her lover from aging. And so Tithonus grew old and decrepit. Shrunken, in pain, hardly able to move, he begged for death, but death would not oblige him. At last Aurora shut him in a room where he babbled maniacally, his mind as ruined as his body. By one account he shriveled and jabbered to such a degree that Aurora turned him into a small, bony, and seasonally loud creature that we call the grasshopper.

Researchers now investigating the genetic basis of the human life span, with the hope of doing some tinkering, ought to consult the story of Tithonus before they tinker much more. And they also should consult the many stories in the Western tradition about human hubris, or overreaching arrogance. Some of the laws relevant to our existence are not of the scientific kind. One of them, well known to the ancients but not to us, is that the gods hate hubris, and that its consequences usually are grim.

I don't underestimate the tinkerers. They are technical wonder-workers. But even if they find a way to extend the human life span and to retard or deactivate the aging process, I think their bioengineering wizardry will prove an ill gift. In his poem “Sunday Morning,” the American modernist Wallace Stevens wrote, “Death is the mother of beauty,” the only repeated phrase in the poem. He meant, I believe, that it is only because of mortality, and our awareness of it, that we can perceive and value the beautiful. It is only because of mortality that beauty can exist, and that we humans can love the beautiful in each other and our surroundings.

In a life without death and knowledge of death, what could stir our passions? Without the need to realize ourselves before we die, to cross the mountains or sail the sea, what would become of our topography of essential desires and emotions, what variation from the flat plain of paradisal bliss? What would drive us to write poems or symphonies that amounted to more than repetitive celebrations of the unchanging boughs that Stevens imagined, hanging heavy in a perfect sky with ripe fruit that never falls? Why would we tell or listen to stories? How could we, because in that paradise, without desire and hope and fear, there would be no stories, no beginnings and no endings, no past and no future—only a single, eternal, enslaving moment beneath those boughs of fruit whose very sweetness would be dulled, if we could taste it at all, by the easeful death of our indefinitely ongoing lives.

Like any true privilege, conscious being is both a boon and a burden. It is, in Wendell Berry's phrase, “a mighty blessing we cannot bear for long.” We simply are not made, in body or in psyche, to carry the burden of life indefinitely, just as we are not made to stay permanently awake. Sleep rests the body, but even more so, by regular immersion in the soothing waters of oblivion, it rests the mind and spirit. With sleep we are eligible for happiness. Without it we go crazy. Without it we can't live, and I have a strange hunch that we could not live without death, either. Death is the warrant that we are truly alive, that we have truly been here at all. It is the non-negotiable price of our unlikely incorporation as living beings, members of a universe in which all creatures born, from bacteria to blue whales, must perish too. New lives are ever coming into the world, and they can grow only from the compost of those that have died . We grow from the compost of those that have died, and others will grow from the compost of our own accomplished lives.

From sleep, of course, we expect to wake. From death we don't know what to expect. It is a mystery, the mystery, momentous and ill-defined, about which all of us are poorly informed. Is it the end of the story of “I,” the living individual, or is it the beginning of a new chapter, or a new book? Is it an extinction? A passageway? A judgment? A joy? We all have hopes and fears and intimations. Those who seem to feel most certain—spiritual fundamentalists who find the tangible world unreal, material fundamentalists who find everything but the tangible world unreal—are the ones I trust least. I trust Henry James, who carried into his deathbed his resolve “to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.” He said, in his last days: “So it has come at last—the Distinguished Thing.” And I trust Henry David Thoreau, who, as he lay dying of consumption, was pressed by a friend to tell what he could see through the doorway opening before him. “One world at a time,” Thoreau replied.

We think of sunrise as a beginning and sunset as an ending, but each is equally a beginning and an end. Their colors are close kin, and those colors interfuse to form the daylight by which we see our way and know ourselves, in which we bloom for a time in bones and flesh and blood, in which we touch fingers to skin and look into the eyes of others as they look into ours, in which we love and sing and weep and suffer and live. The light that fades in an old man's eyes as he sinks into death is the same light that burns in a young woman's eyes as she gives birth to her child.

*

The human species, as it developed self-consciousness, developed an awareness of death, and those ancestors of ours grappled with its mystery pretty much as we do today—the best they could. Neanderthals, fifty thousand years ago, gave flints and axes and medicinal flowers to the graves of their dead; I would guess that they also keened and chanted, wept, perhaps sang. In North America , Paleo-Indians and their descendants, like all human cultures, spun stories about death. Those that I know best—in Coyote Was Going There , Jarold Ramsey's inestimable anthology of Native American stories from the Oregon Country—recapitulate archetypal themes that we Euro-Americans know from our own tradition, in particular the stories of Orpheus and Pandora.

In a tale of the Wishram, a Columbia River people, Coyote and Eagle go to the land of the dead to find and retrieve their wives and families, who have recently died. Eagle, the elder, knows the way; he instructs Coyote. In the great underground chamber of departed spirits, they first must kill Frog Woman—a bad sign, surely, for pilgrims intent on reversing the finality of death—whose practice it is to swallow the moon every evening and disgorge it at morning. (In the land of the dead, everything works oppositely to the way of things among the living.) Coyote takes Frog Woman's place, choking on the moon and barely pulling off the ruse, and Eagle places in the doorway of the chamber a box he has fashioned, filled with leaves from every kind of tree and blades from every kind of grass. At daylight the dead file out of the chamber, as is their custom, and unknowingly into the box. Eagle triumphantly closes the box, tosses the moon into the sky—where it would stay—and he and Coyote set out homeward, the box humming with a sound like a great swarm of flies.

Eagle carries the box. On the third night Coyote hears voices. On the fourth night he realizes the voices are coming from the box. He presses his ear to it and makes out the voice of his wife. He smiles, he laughs with happiness. At the end of the fifth night, only a day from home, Coyote insists on carrying the box, appealing to Eagle's vanity—how will it look, he says, arriving among our people, if the chief is seen carrying the load? Eagle, against his better judgment, relents. Coyote takes up the box, and every time he hears the voice of his wife, he laughs. He deliberately falls behind, stops, and cracks open the box. The dead rush out in a wind that knocks Coyote to the ground. Eagle turns, sees the cloud of the dead fountaining skyward, and goes back. Only one of the dead remains, a cripple; Eagle throws him aloft and the cripple ascends out of sight.

“Do you see what you have done?” says Eagle. “If we had brought these dead all the way back, people would not die forever, but only for a season, like these plants, whose leaves we have brought. Hereafter trees and grasses will die only in the winter, but in the spring will be green again. So it would have been with the people.”

“We can go back and catch them again,” Coyote blurts.

But Eagle knows better. “We would not know how to find them,” he says. “They are now where the moon is, up in the sky.”

So the story ends, with classic rough news: What we do, we do once only. And why do we die? Because we smile and laugh when we hear our wife's or husband's voice. Because we are impatient and cannot wait. Because we are vain and foolish. Because we live and because we love. Because we are born into beauty and yearn to become that beauty, even as we cradle the small candle of the self by which we know it.

*

Marilyn's mother died six years after mine, four months after her cancer had been diagnosed. Half a year before the diagnosis, when we were visiting, Winona seemed to be feeling fine but evidently had felt an inkling. “Don't you kids worry if something happens to me,” she told us, out of the blue. “I've had a good life.” The cancer was inoperable, it turned out, but the doctors told her that radiation might buy her more time. Winona declined the discomfort and indignity of that. She lived right on into her death, ambulatory at first, then bed-bound, taking medication as the pain intensified.

Marilyn moved to her mother's home in Leavenworth , Washington , and attended her (with the vital support of hospice), doing everything from fluffing pillows to turning her mother in bed to administering painkilling anal suppositories. When I was with them, I saw something wonderful happen. Winona had not been a particularly warm or nurturing mother. I think it does her no injustice to say that her gifts were more physical than emotional or intellectual. She was a sportswoman, a perennial golf champion at her club who outplayed women twenty years her junior. Toward Marilyn she had been pushy, sometimes overbearing. She had more than once made comments that cut to the quick. As she neared death, however, Winona warmed. She wanted to be touched, to hold hands. She spoke affectionately to her daughter, expressed her love and gratefulness. She laughed readily. Her arriving death brought with it that final gift for the two of them, a gift that could have presented itself and been received in no other way. And to Winona 's broad face, her dark hair damp with sweat, it brought a nobility I hadn't seen in her. The sportswoman was a brave soul, her courage clearly signed in her candid, clear-spirited beauty. That January, in her last weeks, she often verged into fantasy. She thought she was booked on a cruise, was worried about finding her purse. She had some traveling to do. Eventually she slipped into several days of steady sleep, and very early one morning—a good morning, like all others—her breathing came to an undramatic halt.

“I think she's gone,” Marilyn whispered, more awe in her voice than sorrow. I rose from the easy chair where I had been sleeping, and silently, for a long time, we watched. Outside the window in the frigid morning, drifted snow took on the pink and golden hues of sunrise, and a chickadee came and went from the feeder, picking one sunflower seed at a time.

John Daniel's essays and poetry have won numerous literary awards. He is the current chair of PEN Northwest. His teaching and writing, as well as the home at Winter Creek that he shares with his wife Marilyn, are at the center of much of the literary creativity from the Pacific Northwest .

John's new book of essays entitled The Far Corner: Northwestern Views on Land, Life, and Literature is published by Counterpoint and should be in stores by the end of March. Excerpts from those essays, upcoming readings, and some Northwest opportunities for writers can be accessed at

http://www.johndaniel-author.net/index.php .