REMEMBER? EVERY NOVEL HAS ITS FINAL CHAPTER!
Whenever I give a lecture or talk, whether it’s about the hospice volunteering we do or the subject of my book, I always begin with this profound quote from Viktor Frankl: “The drama and tragedy of a man’s inner life never have unfolded in vain, even when played out in secret, unrecorded, uncelebrated by any novelist. The ‘novel’ which each individual has lived remains an incomparably greater composition than any that has ever been written down.” In being present to people who are aware they are close to death, the hospice volunteer realizes how important is the personal story of the life that is drawing to a close. It’s her story, or his story, their history that matters! And I conclude, listening intently, “All we are in the end is our story!”
Every story, every life, has its beginning, its middle, its conclusion. When we begin reading a short story or a novel, we know there will be an ending, a final chapter. So should we be surprised, if our life is considered as a story, that each lifetime has its final unfolding, its denouement, so to speak, then its last page?
Now in my mid-seventies I remember well when many a schoolmate in the 1930s and 1940s was an orphan or had lost one parent to death, because modern medicine had not yet made the strides it did in the last half of the 20th century. The ability to transplant organs, the advent of medical technologies we could never even have dreamed of, and the newer therapeutic treatments – all have decreased “early deaths” and increased life expectancies. Thus we end up as a society not anticipating death as a natural event or the ultimate outcome of ever having lived! But our ancestors did!
It’s not like the “olden days” when many a relative died at home and people saw the hearses come to pick up the remains, gently carrying them through the front or back entrances to houses. Death was a more common outcome of illness, seen “up close and personal”, more often witnessed firsthand, and certainly, anticipated as one anticipates the inevitable coming of the season of winter.
When I began writing a memoir about the first 31 years of my life, I couldn’t outline just how my story should end. But I knew as I started the last chapter that, for sure, there had to be a last page. When I came to the telling of one climactic event and its aftermath, I suddenly had my ending and I knew it immediately and unmistakably.
Perhaps, in this new century, our society, -- meaning each of us, -- can find beauty as we face death, --our own or that of another, --if we begin to look at each human life as a unique and wondrous story, but knowing always that every story has its final chapter.
When we attend temple or church or mosque, we hear the reading of sacred texts. But the reading doesn’t go on, ad infinitum. Instead, we are asked to leave those holy spaces and to ponder what we have heard, take its meaning home in our memory. The German poet Novalis puts it so beautifully: “Every person’s life is a sacred text.” Remembering that, let us go forth in the imminence or presence of death to hold the memory of that “sacred text” deep within our hearts and minds.
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