My Own Funeral

Lippincott's Magazine (1 November 1901, pages 601-608), 3,762 words

Perhaps within the next few weeks, certainly not later than 1930, the hand now writing will have been reduced to a fine, white dust by fire. The dust will be poured into a Wedgwood vase, and my heir will go to Hampstead Heath on Bank Holiday and, with the antique gesture of the sower, scatter me under the passing hoofs of the donkeys.

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Some four or five years ago a letter came saying my mother's health seemed to be failing. A little while and a second letter arrived: there was cause for anxiety, and if a change for the worse should happen, a telegram would be sent immediately. The telegram came, and I started for Ireland, for my county in the west, a county I have hardly seen since boyhood, for a beautiful western landscape!

But a landscape interests us in proportion as it quickens our moral sensibilities, and this landscape I had seen before I had attained any.

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So, like all that is external, it is disagreeable to me, and the wooded lake shore ringed round with dim mountains haunted me like a doom while I prepared for the journey…. Of the journey to Ireland I have lost ail memory — whether the sea was calm or tossing, whether I crossed by night or day; I only remember the beauty of the clouds wreathing in a soft sky (I saw them as the train, with slow, jogging rhythm, steamed westward), and the color of many laburnums faint in the white air.

There was an exquisite·expectancy in the air, a comely promise of fulfilment in the white, diaphanous morning, a boding sacredness be­hind the dosing clouds and the pale shadows. And the train followed by an old, disused canal — an old canal which carried me back to the earliest impressions of my childhood, to a time when my father and mother were young in the world and life was fuller of expectations for them than it is for me now.

That canal was my first curiosity. Whither did that long water lead? Towards an enchanted country, I thought; thither the horse must be towing the long, black barge; and I pondered the mystery of the great rudder and the smoke issuing from the funnel. Now I know the canal leads nowhere, and I see that the railway has absorbed the life of the canal. Its sides are overgrown with bulrushes and its horses dead. Stagnant, pathetic, in a weedy resignation, my first reading of life Iay before me. But one boat remained, — aground, it is true, the bargeman seeking to float it again whilst the horse climbed up the bank to browse. Soon after we passed a ruined lock-house, and the canal flowed on amid ruins, bringing me visions and remembrances, a tangled skein of thoughts which went out softly like silk, tangled only at one place.

And while the morning seemed immovable, like a thing fixed for­ever in a magic mirror, while my thoughts groped and lost themselves in the beautiful mystery, I knew I was hastening through a smiling world to witness life flicker and fade in my mother's face.

Millions must have felt exactly as I then felt, but the knowledge did not lessen my terror, it rather added to it. Behind all beauty and hap­piness there is a boding destiny, and the cruel and vivid vision of me sitting by my mother's death-bed must have occurred again and again since I left London, in the train to Holybead and in my berth on board the boat; but writing at some distance of time, I remember best the leaden terror which lay on my heart as the train steamed alongside of the old weedy canal.

Though I could not believe that life had in store for me so awful a fate, it did not seem that anything short of a resolution on my part to get out at the next station could save me from it. For it was not probable that I should find my mother out of danger when I arrived, nor was it likely that I should find her dead. The ordinary circumstances would be for me to arrive in time — some two or three hours before her death. Fortune had spared me much, and when fortune spares us, it is only, I said, to revenge herself upon us later. For I could not believe that I should be spared anything, and yet the fate that reached out to take me, in whose grasp I nearly was, did not seem to be my fate. Men under sentence of death by law or incurable disease must often ask themselves why they were especially selected out of the millions, and this sudden question, to which no answer, or appearance of an answer, can be found, must as often seem the hardest part of their fate.

My mind buzzed like a fly in a glass dome, climbing up and down and buzzing against cold, bright glass, and I thought I had never been more than a fly buzzing in a glass dome, and then understood that men imagined Gods and a God, shadows of this life, to escape from the mystery of death, from the dome of glass up which we poor flies crawl, growing wearier, some never to reach the top again, but to crawl on and on till they fall for the last time.

That I should not desire to see my mother before she died will seem at first strange; some may even deem me deficient in natural feeling, but many will understand my feeling better; for a feeling truthfully expressed must find an echo, though the echo be remote; I cannot be the only one to whom farewelle and partinge are so intense a suffering that no price seems too much to pay to escape them. Maybe this is personal feeling, inseparable from me even if I were convinced that we shall be raised from the dead. Maybe it is a consequence of the belief that with this life all consciousness passes from us. I only know that I do not desire to see a human face at the moment when light and sound will die out of my eyes and ears, when sense of touch will escape from my hand. It is the appearance of death, not death itself, that frightens me. Death may be beauty, truth, and happiness; we know it is the one thing that is harmless, whereas life is certainly ugly, false, bitter, ephemeral. If we were ruled by reason instead of by instinct, few would choose to remain living, and those few who did choose life would do so because they preferred to endure life rather than war against a purpœe which may lie behind the veil, and for the due work­ing out of which our submission to the coil of things is required.

Of fear of death I believe myself to be free. It would seem that I

understand death as the birds. They hide themselves so well that we seldom find a delicate skeleton among the leaves: they would not sadden the woodland for their kindred. But man is without such gracious thought: he rejoices in coffins and marks the landscape with tombstones and engraves his ridiculous name thereon. His relatives advertise their grief by means of black gloves and hat-bands, their faces cloud, and their voices catch mournful tone at each fresh arrival, and, having spoken of poor So-and-So two or three times, they talk of other things until someone whom they have not yet seen necessitates a repetition of the comedy of grief.

A little later, anxiety is shown that the grave should be kept in good repair, and it is considered disgraceful that Nature should be allowed to hide the spot in her graceful way with briars, weeds, and mosses. Unlike birds, animais cannot hide their shameful remains, and hardly any man, unless the suicide, dies unobserved. Shame of what he leaves behind should prevent a man from cutting his throat; a revolver bullet would be more refined. Poison results in grimaces; the river ejects the swollen body. I have often wondered that no suicide has gone forth by night seaward in a boat heavily weighted with lead. This seems to me to be the only way by which man may practise the posthumous altruism of the birds.

II.

The names of the stations grew more familiar and the thread in which my heart was tied grew tighter. And the train stopped at my station! I had to get out. We drove through many miles of westering land, a thin, black land, where the peasants still lived by the roadside, and the gentry in their houses surrounded by woods. I recognized the cross-roads, the bridge, the azure silhouette of distant mountains, and all these appearances reminded me but of one thing — my destiny!

We were at the foot of the little hill at the top of which my property begins. In a few minutes more we should be within the park, and the woods recalled little pictures, abstract rather than dim. I saw my old governess walking, and myself eager to escape from her to the lake's edge. I can see both; but peer as I will into the past, I cannot distinguish the season of the year, only a strange abstract season, the ghost of a season.

At a turn in the drive, a hawthorn covered with bloom carried my thoughts back to distant years, to a day just like the present day, when an old man-servant took a child out for a walk in the morning. The child was in dread of being instructed; but the old servant told him the names of certain trees and pointed out differences in the bark and leaves; and the child's interest grew intense when, lifting some branches from the hedge which guarded the orchard, be showed the child a black­ bird sitting on her nest. How her bright eyes trembled! But she sat close, and the old man told the child he must not disturb her, and this lesson on mercy was not lost upon the child.

But in five, in four, in three minutes more I should be by my mother's bedside, hearing the dying voice, feeling the touch of the dying hand. I should have to seek for words of consolation, farewell; and from this fate nothing could save me. I could love my mother in my heart, I could think of her tenderly, intimately, but I could not weep by her bedside nor deplore her death in the gross way that the world demanded.

The horse walked up the last hill, at the top of which the house stood, and I espied a group of peasants about the hall door, and in wailing chorus they cried, —

"We have bad news for you!"

I thought that if they knew the weight of terror their words had lifted from my heart I would seem to them a monster; for the peasant delights in laying out and watching by the dead, in shrieking his grief as the coffin is borne to the grave; but I shrink from the appearance and from all the suggestions of death, even as the birds do.

I escaped from the peasants, —- I had known them as young men, and now they were old men, — I escaped into the house with only a rapid sign of recognition and salutation, and in the drawing-room, designed in Greek style, I saw my sister on a sofa, weeping. I recognized the room, and my father's taste was borne in upon me, for it was he who had designed the door-ways and divided the walls into panels, and had had them painted pale yellow and the frames pale blue, verging towards mauve. All the old furniture was there, and the very smell of the room was the same.

My sister told me all there was to tell. Mother had died that morning, some hours before I arrived. Her death had been an easy one. Nothing could have saved her, except an operation, so the doctor had said: a consultation was necessary; meanwhile mother had died. That was all.

Conversation failed; questions about the dead woman were painful. My sister wept and I tried to think. But I could not think. It seemed to me that my father had made a mistake when he removed the old eighteenth-century panes and put in their place the large panes of plate glass. My father thought these windows were an improvement: he had not considered that it is necessary to conœal the view rather than expose it. Then lunch was announced.

I had not seen my sister for years, and something had to be said. I had to ask her about her children, and while speaking of them I thought, and no doubt she thought, it was shameful to talk of, or to think of, anyone but the dead. After lunch we had to do something. We walked into the park and stood, in the still warm afternoon, looking at the lake, which shimmered like a mirror, misted here and there as if it had been breathed on. The reflections of the reeds and islands fell straight into the languid water, and the smiling air paused between spring and summer. Nature seemed like a child, as young, as soft, as gentle, as far away from death!

We walked by the white strand, I, at least, reading in all the land­scape, even in individual trees and rocks, my life's fleeting dream; re­membering, and with displeasure, that it was from these shores that we had sailed our toy boats; remembering, and with displeasure, that when they had reached yonder island we were proud as of an achieve­ment. Since then another generation had come, and to it our generation is no more than a shadow moving already within the middle land. There are some to whom it is a pleasure to revisit the scenes of their childhood: to me to revisit any well-known place after a long interval is a pain, I suppose because my moral sensibilities are continually unfolding. But my mother did not divine that this was the reason why my face grew overcast when I visited her in the square Georgian house on the hill-top, and the poor woman died without ever learning the reason, and it is the writing of this confession that has revealed it to me.

III.

Our mother had asked not to be buried until decay had begun in her, and many days were spent by me in the daily company of my brothers and sister. They saw what remained of her, they prayed by her bedside; but in me the resolve not to see her was inherent and invincible: I wished to remember her alive, and not dead. She was an excellent mother, and we all deplored her loss. I have seen other familles deplore the dead: their mourning was as fitful and as super­ficial as ours. There is but one for whom I could feel deep grief, and that it may not be my lot to suffer the grief of this one's death is all I fear in this world or the next.

The soft, serene sunshine continued from day to day, and at night the lake was white as a ghost. The reeds and the water-fowl dozed in silver silence, and the branches, in full leaf, swayed, dappling the long grass with soft, moving shadows, and the ringing mountains melted into infinite distances. And day after day we walked about scenes of our childhood, now overgrown with briars and weed. Every turn in the lake's shore, every bend in the woods, recall dead days, distinct as pict­ures. My brothers and sister could contemplate their past selves; but I cannot tolerate that shadow of me which preceded my real self, which began many years after in rich southern lanes and meadows. The still, shallow lake mirrors the ineptitude of my life and the long dark wood which stretches into the lake carries my thoughts to the gloomy end of all of us. True that the shore is pleasant and secluded, but there is another reason why the wood drew our steps.

The outline of the wood is like a saw; it is sharp against the sky and menacing, — so it has always seemed to me, for I know the wood's secret. The trees grow thick and dark and close, like a cloister, and a path divides it from end to end. First a heavy growth of hollies, whose dark, glistening leaves are solemn preparation. A little farther there are open spaces and glimpses of the lake through the branches. But the pleasantness of the aspect is overcast by the stone seat beneath the pillar-like trunks of four Scotch firs.

From early childhood I remember this wood. When a little child I noticed how the wood grew denser and more supernatural as it advanced. After passing the stone seat I did not run in front of my governess and lose myself among the ferns, but clung to her gown, for the moment a demure and docile child. The thick undergrowth of bushes which bides the crumbling wall by the lake's edge is no longer dreaded as the possible covert of lurking fairies, malignant spirits, creatures beyond the pale of human Iife; but the pine-capped knoll has lost little of its dread significance. The most beautiful part of the wood is about this knoll. There the ground slopes away to the lake's edge, and in sloping it shapes a long dell lovely with shadowy grasses, overhung with swaying branches of !arches. ln the wood are still the stones to which the marauders who came from the islands used to tie their boats; and, musing over these relics of barbaric life forever gone by, I listened to the flitting cry of a bird, strange because of its continuous restlessness; it always seemed near the dark knoll but never in it, and it seemed to call me to the fir-encircled knoll.

Far back among the years I see myself, a child, frightened by the darkness of the firs and yews. The ground is always damp there, and the moss grows about the steps, and in the dark wood behind the sepulchre there are old stones; centuries ago a graveyard was here; and it was in this forgotten graveyard I once saw a strange figure disappear among the brown leaves and the disappearing graves.

It was how long ago? yet the memory is still as clear as well water, and I can recall at will the agony of fear in which I hastened to my governess, whom I fortunately found still sitting by the sepulchre.

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Now it is four years since I sat in that gloomy wood listening to the restless cry of the bird, thinking how I had seen my grandmother and my father borne hither, and that I was about to follow my mother's coffin hither. And I remember how one day the silence of the wood was broken by the sound of building; and how, on making inquiry of a passing workman, I learnt that the vault was not large enough to admit another coffin, and that they were enlarging it, making a place for me here too, I thought. For here I shall go, unless I clamor against it, in twenty years! The middle-aged cannot desire to live longer than that. In twenty years my generation will have vanished as foam vanishes. The world of shows will have passed, the foam of my dreams, — it is no more, — and I shall be laid, unless I intervene, above my mother, my father, my grandmother, my grandfather, below and about me.

IV.

To moulder in some populous graveyard where villagers are about, where folles pass on their daily errands, would be an endurable end, but to moulder in that lonely wood, under those dark pines, laid on a shelf, and no one near except the generations, closed up with my grandfather, who wrote histories, — and about whose histories I have spoken slight­ingly, — is the unendurable thought.

So I planned my escape from that vault while attending my mother's funeral. The first thing to do was to break the entail and to Ieave my property conditionally on the strict carrying out of my funeral arrangements, as written in my last will and testament. Therefore I hastened, leaving that waning land of gray stone and mountain blue still shimmering in the dim summer weather; and my first visit on arriving in Dublin was to the family solicitor.

He sought to dissuade me from cremation, and, though he refrained from giving his reasons, I gathered that cremation presented some difficulties to his mind regarding the resurrection of the body; and he was, I am afraid, shocked, I may even say seriously startled, when I unfolded to him my scheme for the disposal of my ashes. I invited him to give me a reason for thinking that Hampstead Heath on Bank Holiday was a less suitable place than the seashore, or the sea itself. He could give none, but, nevertheless, he advised me not to specify how and where my ashes should be scattered. He even feared that such cinerary vanities as mine might allow my will to be contested, and I saw that, though he would probably be on the other side of the grave, he did not like a will drawn up by him to be set aside upon any plea. But he could only protest; he could discover no reason why the sea was a more suitable place than Hampstead Heath on Bank Holi­day.

I fear that the white-haired family solicitor hungered after con­secrated ground; but the will was, nevertheless, made, and my mind is now free from hope and fear. A lingering death I can avoid, and, purged of dread and gloom, of funeral rites, my disposal has become a pleasant subject of fireside meditation. My eyes consider the gracile design of the Wedgwood vase which will contain all my body in a few weeks, or at latest in five-and-twenty years. The pale wistfulness of a late evening sky arises, and I see upon it my heir in silhouette, making his way through the crowd, and scattering, with the antique gesture of the sower, handfuls of me, as he goes, under the passing feet of the donkeys.