Negotiating with Death

"You should write a book someday" is the sanction that appears both in the Hilda Raz poem "Vocation" and in her memoir, What Becomes You. It is curious to me that it was on the subject of her writing that I first interviewed Hilda in her office in Andrews Hall. She described me as "sylvan" to a friend. That proves how long ago it was—forty, fifty years ago? Yes, this essay concerns borrowed time, how she and I were both able to forestall that "bent guy" crouched in the window, who whispered, "I've come for you. It's time." And how did this "amiable" figure not only let her off this time but instill her vocation within her as well?

How did Hilda negotiate with "death in the window?" She was only eight at the time and getting ready to go downstairs on Thanksgiving morning. My own solution is that she told him, "I will be good." To her, though, being good was more than Thanksgiving manners. It meant that she would always be conscious of death in the window, as Henry James said, to be "one on whom nothing was lost." It was a lifetime commitment to embrace the gift of passion, the passion of words and of putting them together, what Henry James called the "sacred rage." It was helping other people who could not have made it through without her. I was one of them. The last time she and I met in Chicago at the AWP annual conference, she skipped panels to take a blind poet on a walk through the park. She took me too, shaky from losing my husband only a week earlier. She and the Prairie Schooner staff had flowers waiting for me when I arrived, grieving, on the night of my birthday.

How has Hilda combined the passion for words and the passion for life so seamlessly? It comes through years of practice and discipline, of taking on the mantle of being good, being conscious, being generous, putting first things first since the age of eight. She brings the present and the past together, as in her poem "Vocation" in which she is waking up both in her childhood home and then brushing her teeth in "someone else's" bathroom. The blessing, the curse, of negotiating with death is that the bent guy is always with you, the skull on the desk. You never have a reprieve. He is always pressing you forward to write more beautiful poems, to edit more books, to husband more students through to their PhDs. More, more, it's part of negotiation that you are never off the hook. But never think that vocation is drudgery. It carries the daily thrill of creativity, the impulse of constant revision.

When another dear friend, Dorothy Stafford, lost her husband, Bill Stafford, she wrote me that he came to her in a dream. They had reached a crossroad, and Bill said to that guy, "No, not Dorothy. She's too filled with life." And that's how it has been with Hilda. Since she was eight.