Following is the second of two excerpts from A Simplicity of Faith: My Experience in Mourning, published by Abingdon in 1982. The article includes a short introduction taken from the book's preface and two sections from its last chapter, titled "Joy."
I do not anticipate that either my grief at Anthony's death or my mourning for Anthony's life will be exhausted or concluded by the writing of this book. The fact that I have been able to write it only indicates that both my grieving and my mourning have matured enough--beyond initial traumas--to become continuing features of my daily life. I do not expect the grief to ever be fully dissipated; I do not want the mourning to ever be completed. Furthermore, I think that, in the months that have elapsed since 11:28 p.m. on January 28, 1980, I have grieved and mourned sufficiently so that I now distinguish the one from the other. I mention that here, at the outset of this book, because it informs and affects everything else I have written in this book.
I understand grief to be the total experience of loss, anger, outrage, fear, regret, melancholy, abandonment, temptation, bereftness, helplessness suffered privately, within one's self, in response to the happening of death. By distinction and contrast, I comprehend mourning as the liturgies of recollection, memorial, affection, honor, gratitude, confession, empathy, intercession, meditation, anticipation for the life of the one who is dead. Empirically, in the reality of someone's death, and in the aftermath of it, grief and mourning are, of course, jumbled. It is, I think, part of the healing of mourning to sort out and identify the one from the other. In any case, of all those I have known and loved and grieved and mourned, Anthony's life was the closest to my own, and the most complementary, so his death is my most intimate experience in grief and mourning. From that experience--so far--what I have to say is: grieving is about weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth; mourning is about rejoicing--rejoicing in the Lord. From that standpoint, I confess I have found mourning Anthony an exquisite, bittersweet experience. I enjoy mourning Anthony.
Such sentiments would not surprise Anthony. Sometimes he accused me of being stoic. The doctors constantly report that I have a very high tolerance of pain. (I usually tell them that is a matter of their luck, not mine.) I prefer to consider myself very patient. Whatever the appropriate way to put it, there was a difference between Anthony and me in this respect. He was impatient, intolerant of pain, not given to stoicism. He was quickly outraged by injustice; he complained promptly of suffering--whether his own or others'. He was indignant toward death. He spent much effort prompting and prodding me when I would be tempted to procrastinate or rationalize. (He attributed these temptations to the odd circumstance that I was trained as a lawyer but became a theologian. He considered the poet's art more humanized than either law or theology.)
After the requiem on Block Island, Scott Kennedy, who had come from California, for himself and on behalf of other friends there, remained with me for several days. There are few other people I would have been glad to have with me in the household at that time. Scott, who is the brother-in-law of the late Bishop James A. Pike, about whom Anthony and I had written two books, is a good friend and compatriot, and he and I talked in those days--as one would expect--about Anthony's life and its meaning for each of us. At one point in our dialogue, Scott asked me directly what, above or beyond everything else, Anthony had meant to me.
"Anthony is my conscience," I confided in Scott.
It was an instantaneous and spontaneous reply. And the response was no hyperbole, least of all in the circumstances. It is unembellished, and it needs no embellishment.
That is my epitaph for Anthony Towne.
The Freedom Of The Dead
Any season of grieving is riddled with temptations to render death an idol, and though these may sometimes be bizarre, they are as often subtle. The subject is tender and attended by an etiquette that discourages candor. Other people, intending to be considerate of the bereaved, or supposing that they are easing the burden of a survivor, readily, if unwittingly, abet delusion.
I have already alluded to the common temptation to follow the dead into death either by deliberately and directly committing suicide, or, perhaps more often, by resigning from living, and instead of making the effort to continue to live, indulging some fantasy of the past or spending the remainder of one's time literally awaiting death. In such circumstances, the death that has happened works an estoppel of the life of one who survives.
Succumbing to such resignation is, I observe, accentuated significantly in situations of mandatory retirement at a specified age, regardless of health or capability for work, which have become routine in the American economy. The connotation of retirement institutionalized in this manner is that of waiting for death. The moral implication of such retirements is that a person is no longer useful or worthwhile in society and is, withal, officially discarded. So the outcast, having been pronounced as good as dead, waits to die to ratify his or her status as dead, by filling the time with passive diversions, practicing boredom, and dwelling in apprehension of death. The only thing that makes such an existence bearable, for multitudes, is the companionship of a spouse, but then it seems a further indignity should the couple not die simultaneously.
There are more temptations in grief, and many variations of each.
One of the most commonplace, I think, and one with which I had to struggle following Anthony's death, was the temptation to keep everything as it had apparently been, to freeze time by ritualizing the routine of household that had prevailed before his death. I know of neighbors on the Island who have been bereaved who keep the clothing and similar personal items, or the personal space, of the dead just so, as if in readiness for an imminent return of the dead. It is a morbid fantasy and a pagan practice, and to oppose it and eschew any hint of it, I promptly removed almost all of Anthony's personal possessions from the house, giving them away or discarding them.
I realized there was a special problem in the bedroom where Anthony had slept, because Pollyanna, our eldest dog, a pensive creature, as she has always seemed to me, was long accustomed to waiting there each evening for Anthony to retire. Then, when he would come, he and the dog would play awhile. Anthony would talk at length to Pollyanna--usually highly literate comments (not baby talk like some people inflict upon their pets)--as if she understood it all. I have no reason to doubt that she did.
When Anthony was taken to the hospital by the Rescue Squad, Pollyanna went to that room and began her solitary vigil on his bed. And, when he did not return from the hospital, she, neither bashful nor stoic, would softly cry each day when the hour came when ordinarily Anthony would have been expected. Pollyanna would soon become utterly disconsolate if this went on indefinitely, and so Anthony's bed was taken away and the room's appearance changed. Pollyanna no longer pines, but she and I both know she is still waiting.
In short, it was important to promptly acknowledge the fact of Anthony's death--even for the dogs and the cat--not only verbally but, so to say, liturgically, by enacting the acknowledgement, for example, by altering the appearance of the household.
The Manger posed a similar question. The next time I went there, after having found Anthony's obituary on his desk, was some days later. Someone who had stopped by to offer me her condolences, asked to see Anthony's study. I showed the visitor the Manger, but, as I did so, I was conscious that if I kept it as Anthony had left it, it would soon become some sort of shrine, sentimental, vulgar, and profane. The next day I began to dismantle the place. I had collected, over the years, a considerable quantity and variety of circus memorabilia, so I decided the Manger would become the circus library.
Anthony and I had shared a reciprocity in the practical regimen of the household at Eschaton. To a remarkable extent the division of responsibility between us coincided with our various capabilities or interests, and the efforts of each of us generally complemented those of the other. We did not expend much energy organizing Eschaton, that was a casual and spontaneous matter. This meant, however, that when Anthony died there was a gap in the rhythm of the household. For a time, I was tempted to try to fill that gap myself, until I faced the truth that much of what Anthony had done I was physically or otherwise incapable of doing. Besides, to try to substitute for Anthony's absence or to gainsay, somehow, that there was a void concealed the familiar temptation to pretend that nothing had changed. In fact, there had been a momentous change, and facing that reality was essential to creating a new mode of living in the household compatible with my own capabilities and congenial to my own priorities. Eschaton had been, while Anthony and I had lived together there, for ourselves and, I think, for many others from the Island and from the mainland, a blessed and hospitable place, but that did not make it sacrosanct.
As one might expect, there were friends who, upon Anthony's death, began to suggest that the answer for the practical problems of conducting and maintaining Eschaton as a household would be for me to locate some surrogate for Anthony, someone to assume the role that (it was erroneously presumed) he had played in my life and incidentally furnish me with greater freedom to write and mobility to travel for lectures and similar engagements on the mainland. Their logic usually featured admonitions about how precarious and unpredictable my health is and how, living alone, I risked another stroke or diabetic coma or other jeopardy and might not be able to summon help by my own effort. This argument typically posed the prospect of my being inadvertently discovered, after some time of helplessness and futility, dead. The same basic proposal was commended to me, by different friends, in several versions, variously casting as surrogate a secretary, a paramour, a houseboy, a bride.
I am not the sort to foreclose options quickly, and if I have any virtue, I suppose it to be open-mindedness. I listened attentively to such suggestions and appreciated the concern that prompted them. Perhaps someday, somewhere, I will have a wife, a houseboy, a paramour, or even a secretary (or all of them at once), but in the midst of both grief and mourning I yearned, more than anything else, to be alone, to return to myself, so to speak, to conserve myself for awhile, and to be freed of entanglements. I needed no surrogate for Anthony. That was very clear to me. And if I sought such a surrogate in another person it would be an imposition on that person as well as trivialize the good community which Anthony and I shared.
In that connection, the whole idea of a surrogate for the dead is an instance of the morbidness that seeks, in death, to cling to the past, maintain things as they were, and indulge the pretense that the dead are not quite dead.
Furthermore, speaking of my eccentric health, what my health required above all else, in the months following upon Anthony's death, was simply acceptance of the truth of his death. If that happened, as I have said before, I had no skepticism that an apropos style of living by myself would gradually, spontaneously emerge. After that, there would be leisure to cope with the further vulnerability of my life to other human beings.
In the autumn of 1980 there was a curious interlude in my grieving while I was in New York City for a few days to consult a physician. During the experience the temptation to retreat into the past in pretense that Anthony was not dead and the idea of locating some surrogate for Anthony merged as it were. I had remained in the city for a couple of days after seeing the doctor intending to shop and go to the theatre and perhaps also attend a movie and get a haircut--these amenities being unavailable on the Island. Instead, I found myself wandering about the city one afternoon. I realized that I was not wandering aimlessly, but very purposefully. I was expecting to see someone. In truth, I was searching for Anthony. I had returned to where we had first seen each other. I was retracing steps I had originally walked seventeen years earlier. I kept expecting to sight Anthony among the passersby, though I had no idea what I would do if I did see him. When I understood whom I was looking for, the search was exhausted, and this awful temptation fled from me. I have been free of it ever since.
These matters I have here touched upon are not casual or insignificant; they are similar, I think, to those afflicting anyone seriously bereaved. What is involved in such issues, in the end, is learning to respect the freedom of the dead to be dead; honoring the dead in their status as dead people, and refraining from harassment of the dead by refusing to mythologize the dead or enshrine them. What is at stake is recognition by those in grief of the right of the dead to be regarded mortally, which is to say, to be treated humanly in death.
A View Of "Afterdeath"
Some people, I suppose, would consider it virtually obligatory--in a book concerned with death, grief, and mourning--to speculate about the afterlife, so called. I will, literally, not do so here. The term itself is (at the least) a misnomer. More often than not, "afterlife" refers to a mush of vain and pagan imaginings.
The real issue is, anyway, not "afterlife" but "afterdeath." Any bereaved person, or anyone contemplating his or her own death, is likely to give some thought to what, if anything, happens experientially when a person dies. One reason such brooding is commonly incoherent or merely self-serving is that it presupposes the linear reality of time and does not probe the mystery of time, especially the relation of time to the bondage to death in the present age, in the era of the Fall, or the disruption of time and the emancipation from time that is implicated in conversion, as I have previously discussed.
The most radical confusion about afterdeath, however, has to do with the transliteration of the resurrection as some idea of immortality. This is an interpolation frequently attributable to preachers, and it is categorically false. Anyone who has read some of my work will be familiar with the significance I attach to distinguishing resurrection from immortality. In my view, immortality, essentially, is no more than an elaborate synonym for remembrance of the dead, though there are attached to it multifarious notions of spiritual and/or material survival of death. Resurrection, however, refers to the transcendence of the power of death, and of the fear or thrall of the power of death, here and now, in this life, in this world. Resurrection, thus, has to do with life, and indeed, the fulfillment of life, before death.
I am aware that some may cite my own experience in coma at that hospital in New London as if it has evidentiary significance for the idea of an afterlife. I do not. I consider that the experience warrants no such inflated inference. What happened then, so far as I understand it, was an ordinary near death episode. It may offer some insight into death as an empirical reality, it betells nothing thereafter.
For all I know there may be, in some sense, personal survival after death, but that is not what the resurrection is, in esse, concerned with. Where confusion reigns and the distinction between resurrection and immortality is lost or suppressed, it is common to find people, frantic in their embrace of one or another versions of survival after death, rejecting life in this world, including, typically, the gift of their own lives. That is more than an escapist doctrine, feigning to justify withdrawal, default, or cowardice so far as life in this world is concerned; it issues an idolatry of death.
And its denial of the efficacy of the resurrection of Jesus Christ is tantamount to blasphemy.
These imaginations about personal survival provoke a plethora of other questions when they are associated with reputed communications between the living and the dead. I strive to remain open-minded, and I think I have great appreciation for the intuitive realm, but the fact remains that so-called paranormal (another misnomer; if this is part of reality, the appropriate word is normal) experience has been, at least in American culture, so preempted and promoted by quacks, cultists, charlatans, and others exploiting the guilt inherent in grief for profit or notoriety, that intelligent opinion about the subject is practically precluded. Anthony and I exhaustively researched, for instance, the alleged communications, through assorted mediums, of Bishop Pike with his son Jim, who was thought to have committed suicide. The product of these researches is included in our biography, The Death and Life of Bishop Pike. We concluded that our friend, the Bishop, had been cruelly importuned, though that view is quite inconclusive as to the merits of the question of whether there can be credible communication betwixt the living and the dead.
Whatever the disposition of that question, it represents a trivial aspect of afterdeath. Biblical faith promises the consummation of all created life, in all its range and diversity, in the end and fullness of time, and it offers images, pictures, parables, and stories characterizing that consummation (e.g. Revelation 21). There is no timetable, there are no literal descriptions, the biblical witness is no horoscope of the Kingdom. The veracity of the promise, thus, is not dependent upon prooftexts, predictions, or tests of God like those conducted in seances or similar demonstrations, but upon the witness of the risen life in this history in this world, as the Church, where the Church is faithful, and as the Communion of Saints.
I am so persuaded that the resurrection means the accessibility, for human beings, on behalf of all of life, of the power of the Word of God, which the whole of Creation enjoys in being made, overcoming the power of death here and now, that I expect the consummation eagerly. Anthony shared this piety with me. That is why our common occupation became the work of prayer. When Anthony died, it did not occur to me to somehow seek explicit communication with the dead. (I doubt that would have been grief therapy for me.)
Instead, my mourning is the answer to my grieving. I rejoice that Anthony lived, while he lived, and that when he died he had already known the resurrection from the dead.
Once upon a time, while Anthony Towne and I were immigrating to Block Island, a friend from New York joined the two of us in moving stuff by car and ferry from the city to the Island. We arrived in Old Harbor on a gray and dismal November day and disembarked. Our friend looked all around, surveying the boarded-up shops and desolate hotels and the somewhat scruffy characters loitering around the pier. "God!" he cried with anguish, "this is the end of the world!" "No," I responded, "it is the beginning of the world."
That evening there was a long discussion at dinner amongst the three of us about what to name the house and premises where we were to live on the Island. We disdained names such as "Sea Breeze" or "Foggy Bottom." At last Anthony recalled the exchange of words when we had arrived on the ferry and proposed that we name our place Eschaton, because eschaton means the end of the world coinciding with the beginning of the world as the Kingdom of God. Thus, in common usage, eschaton means hope.
At Eschaton, Anthony and I lived in the simplicity of that consummate hope.
William Stringfellow was a theologian, lawyer, and contributing editor for Sojourners when this article appeared.
Copyright © 1982 by Abingdon. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
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