The frenetic energy of the players in Rent pauses as some of the singers ponder dignity and whether anyone will care when they are dead and gone.
In similar fashion, the artist J.M.W. Turner, in the movie, Mr. Turner, laments that his ultimately fatal heart ailment will condemn him to obscurity.
I’m not sure when I began scanning the obituaries on a more regular basis. The old joke suggests that I do so to be sure I’m not listed. Sometimes I read the longer ones entirely, those that chronicle lives that included particular achievement or accomplishment.
The death of Charles Schulz years ago made me feel a part of me had died. I did not know him, but I read Peanuts every day. From the time of Schulz’s death on, I could only read repeats, unless someone took up the pen and ink and carried on. The creator was gone. So was part of my daily life. I felt like some micron of me was dead.
Silly, of course. Countless others who have contributed in some way to my life have died since. I don’t mourn every passing as I did Schulz’s. But some. I am made up of lots of microns. I can survive many more deaths like this.
I have survived more immediate deaths: my grandparents, my father, my uncles, colleagues, children of colleagues, dear friends. Recently, the love of my sister’s life died, before age 70, younger than the statistical norm for male deaths in the U.S. Ill, and in a rehab center, he died wearing a snazzy shirt, sooner than expected though he, and we, knew that his illness would claim him sooner rather than later.
Was the snazzy shirt—a colorful Hawaiian shirt—his claim to dignity? Like the heroine in Cabaret would choose “when I go, I’m going like Chelsea,” did he choose to dress up for his going? Did he know the when of his dying and determine to cross over looking smart and feeling proud?
People care that he has died. He’s avoided that apprehension of the Rent players. There’s talk of some lasting memorial of his life, a form of immortality. As long as we who knew him live, he enjoys one form of immortality. We’re talking about something that would outlast us. I have wished before that every soul leaving this earth would be remembered by more than a footprint on the shifting sands of time.
I can’t do anything about the who-will-care part for those I don’t know. I think anyone who dies without someone caring is the utmost tragedy of death.
I have also wondered about dignity and death. A movement for assisted suicide is called Death with Dignity, asserting for the dying the right to determine how and when to end their lives. The usual image of the nearly-departed is one of pain muted by palliatives, being bed-ridden serviced by tubes, monitored by technology.
It must be a chore for a person to find and assert dignity in that tableau. I hope people do.
Dying a hero’s death on the battlefield has always commanded high status among the ways one can die. Nathan Hale bravely proclaimed “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country” just before being hanged by the British. Millions of us have benefitted in the course of U.S. history from the willingness of men and women to “give their last full measure, “ as Lincoln proclaimed.
We owe such as these. We honor them. We memorialize them. In our honoring, we dignify. We can hope that, if they were conscious in their last moments, they thought about something more than their torn bodies and oozing lifeblood.
The “Renters” faced AIDS. Their literary ancestors in La Boheme confronted tuberculosis. The physical nature of those deaths is not pretty, either. Their anxiety about dignity might be shared by many of us who, were we able to choose, would opt for the way the Gambler in Kenny Rogers’ song, cashed in his chips; asleep. You can’t fall dead if you are already prone. No fear. No pain. You simply don’t wake up. Did the Gambler die with dignity?
Truth is, dignity is a state of mind. No one can rob anyone else of his or her dignity. I do not know when, how, or where I will die. I hope I do so proclaiming “I’ve had a good run.”
Maybe I will have the chance to put on a snazzy shirt—a Hawaiian one.
Daniel E. White
April 15, 2015