Mortality and a Meaningful Life: Reflections at 70

 

John Hallwas

 

I have interacted with older people for a long time, having had a special interest in their experiences and insights throughout my adult life. I have also spoken and written about aging, from psychological and social perspectives. But now it’s a personal matter: Tomorrow [May 24, 2015] I turn 70. 

I hasten to say that I’ve been pretty fortunate so far, in a physical sense. I don’t have significant hearing loss, or mobility issues, or inner malfunctions, or memory problems—yet. And I can still do what I love: read, write, teach, walk, travel with my wife, visit with friends, and relate to younger family members. Like so many other senior citizens, I have learned to be grateful—as well as realistic about what’s coming. 

Even for relatively healthy, active older folks, like myself, the mounting losses from our social web are something to cope with. Because I lost my mother when I was in high school and my father when I was in college, death was an early issue for me. And I’ve lost other close relatives over the years, as well as some good friends. I have spoken at a number of funerals.

In fact, death became an intellectual interest of mine, too, which is probably why I have less anxiety about it than most people. Over the years I have acquired dozens of books on the subject, including some favorite titles like Jacques Choron’s “Modern Man and Mortality” (1964), Philippe Aries’ “The Hour of Our Death” (1981), and Robert Pogue Harrison’s  “The Dominion of the Dead” (2006).

Decades ago, I was a medievalist, studying, teaching, and writing about European literature of the Middle Ages—the world of Dante and Chaucer—when death was a huge anxiety. I had an interest in lyric poems from that era—like this one from the 13th century:

“Merry it is while summer lasts, 

     and birdsong I hear;

But now comes the wintry blasts,   

     and weather severe.

Aye, but the night is long—

And I, who have done much wrong [i.e., many sins],

Sorrow, and mourn, and fast.”

Comparing his life’s temporal experience to a passing year, the aging speaker is confronting the ultimate long night (death), so he is worried about his chance for eternal life—sorrowing for what he has done, mourning for his sins, and fasting (or not eating) as a kind of penance. 

         In a much more religious age than ours, fear at the end of life, about punishment in hell, was common. As another medieval poem puts it, “In dread we stay,/ And in dread depart.” 

Medieval British drama was another interest of mine. The most famous “morality play” from the late Middle Ages is “Everyman,” centered on a nameless figure who represents you and me—and who discovers that he has to die. After experiencing terror and regret, he descends into the grave as the play closes—but we are told that he achieves salvation. I taught the play many times in early British literature classes, chiefly because it dramatizes spiritual growth in the face of death. 

That’s still a priority, whether modern people realize it or not. But for many individuals, as they grow older, anxiety about salvation has given way to anxiety about a meaningful life, regardless of their religious orientation. Long ago, I switched my focus to American literature, partly because so many of our nation’s finest writers have engaged in intense spiritual questing: Bryant, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, Twain, Stevens, Frost, and others. 

One of the greatest and most influential was Walt Whitman, who viewed himself as part of a vast spiritual community. In his masterpiece “Song of Myself” he referred to himself as the “Comrade of all who shake hands and welcome [others].” Few poets have ever written so much, or so positively, about growing old and the approach of death, including poem collections like “Sands at Seventy” and “Old Age Echoes.” In a celebratory poem called “Song at Sunset,” he praises “the spirituality of things” and is grateful “To have gone forth among other gods—these men and women I love.” Feeling that separatism was a kind of pathology, and that identification with others was essential to spiritual growth, Whitman led a deeply meaningful life.      

All this, and much else, is background to my local and regional writing. I have focused increasingly on communities and the relationship of individuals to them, in books like “Macomb: A Pictorial History” (1990), “The Bootlegger: A Story of Small-Town America” (1998), “Remembering McDonough County” (2009), “Here to Stay: Reflections on the Dead in a Small-Town Cemetery” (2012), and “On Community: A Crucial Issue, a Small Town, and a Writer’s Experience” (2015). And I became convinced that a deep sense of community can both foster our search for meaning and help us accept our temporality. After all, one of the biggest problems we face, as we age, is separation from meaningful others, and from significant human continuities.

One writer who focused intently on seeing himself as part of a meaningful continuity was Edgar Lee Masters, the author of “Spoon River Anthology” (1915, 1916). As I mention in the Introduction to my “Annotated Edition” (1992) of that famous book, the poet goes on “a spiritual quest, into the world of his past,” which results in “his increasing sense of wholeness and feeling of community.” By reflecting on so many dead individuals, who inspire his poems, he heightens his “sympathetic identification with others” and achieves “confidence in the face of death.”

Many poems in that book reveal the difference between self-concerned townspeople, who eventually become alienated from others, and individuals whose community orientation leads to deeper meaning. “James Garber,” for example, is about an older man who allows “the faces of friends and kindred” to fade out of his life, and he ends up trapped in “the loneliness of the soul.” But the speaker in “Jeremy Carlisle” remembers and appreciates others, and eventually realizes that he is part of an ongoing community, so he can “sing in chorus” of a meaningful life.

“Spoon River Anthology” helped to inspire one of my Macomb history books, “Here to Stay: Reflections on the Dead in a Small-Town Cemetery.” The latter is an effort to strengthen community by promoting awareness of, and appreciation for, people of the local past—many of whom led deeply meaningful lives, as they interacted, contributed, and shaped their town.         

          By enlarging our sense of connection to others, both the living, who reside in our place or elsewhere, and the dead, who faced similar challenges before us, we can avoid the creeping sense of meaninglessness that so many commentators regard as a major psychological problem, especially for the elderly, in our world of rapid cultural change and increasing secularization. If we maintain tradition and foster concern, we build community, and in personal terms, we expand the spiritual boundaries of the self.