A good death

That was the subject for yesterday’s walk from the Orsay train station to the university, through the misty fog of a vanishing winter. The night before, I had been chatting with daughter Tia and had learned that the principal at her little El Cerrito elementary school had succumbed over the long weekend to her cancer (I think it was pancreatic; that seems to be all the rage, lately). Last month, Tia was astounded that the woman would struggle on in her job, knowing almost certainly that she would be dead before the end of the school year. “Is that really how I would spend the last months and days of my life?” she wondered. And would she? Would I?

In many senses, we all have been notified of our imminent deaths; it is just a matter of how imminent and how much we are aware of that imminence. If our reaction to a diagnosis of “only a few months to live” is to withdraw from society, from work, and contemplate the state of our souls, revisit the places and people we love best, one might ask why work at all? Knowing that we are to die in the end, should we not give ourselves over to contemplation from the start? Perhaps we should!

But what if our work is what we love, and not merely the thing that keeps us alive and doing the things (in our spare time) that we really do love? What if being a principal, or being a researcher, is what gives us joy? Why, then we would want to work until we drop dead at our desks!

How do we spend this allotment of years on earth? We discussed this in terms also of what we had seen last weekend, in Languedoc, namely the town of Aigues-Mortes (Ag-e-mort -- "Dead Waters" from the marshes thereabouts; marshes always get bad press... must be the mosquitoes), built from scratch by St. Louis-de-France, the king who lead the 7th & 8th crusades, and died of the plague in Tunis, whose life has been written up by several contemporary biographers and many hagiographers, to boot. Louis was, as I have written elsewhere, “the ideal king, so if you ever plan to be a monarch, listen up! He really had faith: he sincerely believed in God and that God was the boss, not Louis. In Paris, King Louis built one of the most beautiful churches anywhere, called La Sainte Chapelle: the walls are almost entirely made out of dark red and blue glass, and the ceiling is spangled with gold stars. He also knew it was an awesome responsibility to be in charge of all the people of France, and he did his best for them. As a judge, he was fair, whether you were rich or poor, and he was merciful, too, even when punishing people who did wrong. Louis insisted on preserving everyone’s rights, no matter who they might be or what they looked like. In dealing with other countries, he was astute (meaning no one could fool him) and respectful, working for peace whenever possible, but he was a good soldier when he needed to lead his troops into battle. You could always trust him to do what he promised. And, like Joan of Arc and most saints, he hated dirty and blasphemous language (swearing by God and that sort of thing) and he wouldn’t allow it around him.” (Folk Like Me, p. 14)

When Louis decided to go on crusade, he wanted to do it right, leaving from his own port on the Mediterranean; since his lands didn’t quite reach that far, he bought a chunk of unwanted marshland from the local landowners, displaced the fishermen, drained and deepened the ship channel that connected to the sea and built himself a neat little city, and encouraged settlers to come and fill it. Its four-square walls and multiple gates still stand, and in near-mint condition. There he was able to host the captains of the 1500 ships that accompanied him, be blessed in a proper church (also built from scratch) and house all the needed craftsman and vittlers to launch such an effort: he really did it right, and the place was built as neatly and snugly as you might like, with window-seats for the archers, all the way around the lower reaches of the walls, plenty of enclosed guard-houses. Someone really thought that place out – Louis himself or someone he trusted to do it properly, and whose work he approved, as the final arbiter.

Yet Louis himself enjoyed that city only a few months, if that long. He left it behind when he went on each crusade, and died far away. Was his effort a waste? Is anything we leave behind us when we go a waste? Ars longa, vita brevis (“Art is long, life is short”) as the Romans have it, and I think they’ve got it. Make something, solve something, improve something, teach something, and none of it will have been a waste.