Chapter 19 - Pleasant Dreaming with “Thanatopsis”

Summary

Sometimes a text shows up at the right moment, more or less, so long as one is attentive and willing to connect. William Cullen Bryant's “Thanatopsis” showed up for me when I was 17. The story of why I needed it started several years earlier.

I was standing next to my parents’ bed. Struggling to get up, my father vomited on the sheets, then managed to sit up, his feet flat on the floor. “I hope the hell I’m happy,” he kept saying. I stood there, helplessly watching, and tried to say it wasn't a big deal. “It makes more work for you and Mom,” he declared.

He was battling a cancer already advanced when it was diagnosed a couple of weeks earlier. Within another week, he was dead. He was 53. I was 13.

It was my brother, older than I by 12 years, who woke me in the middle of the night to tell me Dad had died. He gave me a back rub, commented on how skinny I was, and rejoined the others in the kitchen. When someone dies in the middle of the night, people show up. I lay in the dark, listening to them arrive. I thought I should cry, and I really tried, but the tears wouldn't come. Did that make me a bad son?

When I went into the kitchen, my uncle, who was in the hospital room when Dad died, passed along that my father had said I should only be a priest if I really wanted to, not to please him. Back when I told Dad that I was thinking about the priesthood, his response was, “I’d sure be proud.” It was a real gift to get the word, as if from beyond the grave, that it was okay with Dad if I didn't go that way.

It was in high school, American Lit., that I first encountered Bryant's “Thanatopsis.” At the time, I was an indifferent student in quite a literal sense. Decades later, I spoke with the teacher of that class, who described to me what a frustrating student I had been. Reading and writing all the time, I was indifferent to what my teachers assigned. My former teacher generously said he was impressed by what I was reading on my own, though I read only just enough of the class assignments to get by.