Month: January 2018

[This is the last posting submitted by Will Stanton.  He passed into history and memories on 1 January 2017.  He is missed. — Editor] 

Leaving

He was diagnosed with
lung cancer in 1991.  We knew the
inevitable end; we just did not know when. 
Each passing day, each passing year, was, in its own way, leaving.  We both understood that.  Some acquaintances told me, “Why don’t you
leave him?”  I would not, not that
way.  I stayed.

I did not cry as a
child.  My mother told me that, and we
both pondered my difference from other children.  Of course, I felt emotion, but nothing seemed
to drive me to tears.  That changed later.  A special someone came into my life who truly
mattered – – – and then left.  It was the
leaving that changed me.  As the famous
19th-century, authoress George Eliot stated,  “Only in the agony of parting do we look into
the depths of love.”

I always have been
sensitive to others, perhaps unusually empathetic and caring.  That increased significantly after his
leaving, both with people whom I knew, and also even fictional characters in
movies.  If, in viewing well presented
stories,  I become particularly attached
to characters who have deep bonds with each other, I apparently identify with
them, at least subconsciously; for, if they part from each other, either in
having to leave or, perhaps, in dying, emotion wells up within me.  Such deep emotion comes suddenly and
unbidden.  When a good person dies,
leaving the loved-ones behind, the emotion catches within my gut.  When loving, deeply bonded people part ways,
never to see each other again, that, too, deeply moves me.  Again, quoting George Eliot: “In every
parting, there is an image of death.”

I admit it: I never have
come fully to terms with reality, with mortality.  And, I’m not like so many who choose to hold
deep-seated beliefs that this world is merely a stepping-stone to a so-called
“better world,” beliefs based upon common indoctrination and, perhaps, upon
fear and hope,  Oh, I don’t mind so much
the afflictions and death of inhuman humans, those whose cruelty and dire deeds
harm others.  But, it is the good people,
the loving people, people who have contributed so much to the betterment of
humankind, whose leaving distresses me. 
I would be so much more content if they (dare I say, “we”?) did not have
to leave.

I understand and feel the
passionate, poetic lines of Dylan Thomas:

“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

So, with these thoughts
of mine being presented close to All Souls Day (or in German, “Allerseelen”),
with the cold days of December soon upon us, I prefer my thoughts to dwell,
instead, upon our happier memories of May, our younger days, as expressed in
the final lines of Hermann von Gilm poem, “Allerseelen”, “— Spend on my heart again those lovely
hours, like once in May.”

© 23 July 2016 

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