Available Surfaces: Essays on Poesis

Going Gentle

110 Going Gentle “Yes . . .” that peculiar affirmative. “Yes . . .” A sharp, indrawn breath, half groan, half acceptance, that means “Life’s like that. We know it (also death).” —­Elizabeth Bishop My father died on December 17, 1994. When his lung cancer had been diagnosed a few years before that, I was not surprised. I have never seen a more intransigent case of nicotine addiction than his. He smoked unfiltered Lucky Strikes and Camels for decades; in later years he switched to filtered brands, but was never able to give up tobacco, though he tried many times. He was a poster boy for lung cancer. Still, the small-­ town doctor he insisted on using missed it, for how long we still don’t know. Emphysema was diagnosed; cancer, no. Surgery for the initial cancer went well; the upper right lobe of his lung, with a “self contained” tumor in it, was removed; he recovered. For a couple of years, he did well. The removal of part of a lung caused him some difficulty; decreased lung capacity coupled with emphysema made it hard for him to breathe at times. Still, on the whole, he was in reasonable shape, and his prognosis after radiation treatment was guardedly good. But his health began to decline, and in the fall of 1994 a new diagnosis came in: brain tumor. An intelligent man without much education, reared on a farm with a farmer’s intimacy with the up-­ close-­ and-­ personal knowledge of the fate of the body that farmers have, and a non-­ combatant but nonetheless real participant in World War 111 II (serving in England during the Blitz), my father was a fatalist . He never talked about faith or things of the spirit, whatever one may mean by those things. The closest he ever came, in my presence, was to say once, after the lingering death of one of his uncles, “When my time comes to die, I want to go off by myself in the woods alone like an animal; animals understand how to die.” He was hospitalized in late November of 1994. I was living and teaching in Eugene, Oregon, at the time, and was prepared to go home for the holidays to be with my parents in any case; I stayed in touch with my mother to monitor his progress (toward what at first we were not sure). His tumor was diagnosed at first as inoperable and then as operable, but on the eve of surgery his case was studied by an anesthesiologist, who said, “This man cannot be put under general anesthesia; his lungs are too weak: it would kill him.” In the end they opted for a less intrusive procedure to attempt to shrink the tumor: draining it with a syringe, which could be done with a local anesthetic. But that procedure failed; the tumor, to the doctors’ surprise, contained no fluid, and so there was no benefit from what must have been, to my father, a terrifying and demeaning process. My office phone rang one afternoon while I was revising an essay I had long been struggling to write­ —“Ex Machina: Reading the Mind of the South,” which is about race and class in the Mississippi where I was born; my father figured in it, as he had to do, as the racist he was, and I was there as the bewildered boy I was, trying to understand his loving, brutal lessons about how to be what I was supposed to grow up to be: by his definition, a white man. The essay had been in and out of my thought for a decade, and I was finally wrestling it onto the page; it was a deep emotional struggle, and I was exhausted by it, as I was exhausted by the knowledge of my father’s illness When I answered the phone, my mother said—without preamble , as I recall—“Your father says he wants to leave the hospital , go home, and die. What do you think?” ❧ My mother is a person of strong and to all appearances unquestioning religious faith; my father, I think, was a nihilist: a home-­ 112 grown country-­western meat-­and-­potatoes anti-­philosophical nihilist, but a nihilist nonetheless. His ideas, insofar as I know them, were atavistic, pragmatic, materialistic, and pessimistic. He was quiet about all this, as he was quiet about almost everything; strong opinions erupted from him only when...