The Staircase Letters Read Online Free Page B

even now, in my eighties, I might go on growing into more of who I am.
    Dear E.,
    Alasdair is now in Newfoundland, and I go there this next weekend to join him for a couple of days. So, I think of him far away, and I thinkof you far away, and I think of Carol far away; but, of course, none of that is true, because none of you is far away. Don’t you feel increasingly that what you carry within is far more important than what may be happening to you in some more obvious outside world?
    Last night I went to hear a talk given by Sister Elaine MacInnes, Canadian born, who began a career in music (violinist at the Juilliard School) before she decided that all that wasn’t enough, and an inner restlessness took her deeper within. She became a Roman Catholic nun, and later went to Japan where she studied Buddhism for years and eventually became a Zen master and was invested as roshi (old teacher). Years followed in the Philippines, working with prisoners, teaching them Zen, showing them how to be free, even when they were confined by concrete walls. In 1993, she was invited to be director of the Phoenix Trust in Oxford, and retired from that just two years ago when she turned seventy-five (my age!). She has the Order of Canada and has written a couple of books, one of whichI bought last night. Her talk was a bit rambling and casual and not as gritty as I might have liked, but I did get a sense of how remarkable a human being she is, and I look forward now to learning something more, by reading her book, about how she marries Zen to Christianity.
    I liked what Carol had to say about having friends in for dinner and cooking a chicken. It was the observation of very small things that helped Lear back to sanity on the heath, you will remember, so that he could ask forgiveness of his daughter Cordelia and say to her, “We two alone will sing like birds in the cage;” and so long as both you and Carol can continue with some of life’s little rituals, even the very small ones like cooking a chicken, you are likely to move further towards grace and acceptance. But how little I know, when I’m not going through what you’re going through! Please forgive my fumbling and awkwardness. You know I think of you, both of you.
    Ever … ever … ever …
    A.

    Elma insisted, of course, that her own life go on, as best it could, even when she continued to be deeply interested in the cancer that was destroying her. She was grateful for all she still had, but, as she would soon write to Carol, she wanted to make “a good death” when the time came.
    Recognizing that we all must die, I wonder what “a good death” means. Is it a matter of good, better, best?
    For the person dying, is it “good” to die in one’s sleep, a quiet and final exhalation, “good” to die suddenly in a plane or car crash, when no goodbyes can be said to anyone, “good” to shut the door quickly, as if leaving a party, without even a thank you for inviting me? “Better” to die after a short illness, surrounded by family and friends and farewell speeches and tears, the inevitable known in advance? “Best” to die of old age, body broken but mind intact, a shining example of acceptance?
    But what of those left behind? What is good, better and best for them? Dying, after all, is the last living thing we have to do, and one would hope to get it right.
    John Donne, supreme among seventeenth-century metaphysical poets, dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, a great writer of sermons and obsessed with death, arranged for a painting of himself, wrapped in his winding sheet (reproduced later as a sculpted marble effigy for St. Paul’s, where it can be seen to this day), to be set before him as a proper subject for viewing long before he died in 1631. It must have focused his mind wonderfully.
    Donne and the Worm: If my soule could ask one of those Wormes which my dead body shall produce, Will you change with me? that worme would say, No; for you are like to live eternally