August 31: "Writing in the Afterlife," Eternal Punishment, Fluffing Clouds

I grew up with a Catholic concept of the afterlife:  Heaven, Hell, Limbo, Purgatory.  If you've read Dante's The Divine Comedy, you know what I'm talking about.  Of course, other world religions and mythologies have versions of the afterlife, as well.  Most of them involve places of eternal punishment and eternal reward.  

Billy Collins has his own poetic version of what comes after breath and heartbeat . . . 

Writing in the Afterlife

by: Billy Collins

I imagined the atmosphere would be clear,
shot with pristine light,
not this sulfurous haze,
the air ionized as before a thunderstorm.

Many have pictured a river here,
but no one mentioned all the boats,
their benches crowded with naked passengers,
each bent over a writing tablet.

I knew I would not always be a child
with a model train and a model tunnel,
and I knew I would not live forever,
jumping all day through the hoop of myself.

I had heard about the journey to the other side
and the clink of the final coin
in the leather purse of the man holding the oar,
but how could anyone have guessed

that as soon as we arrived
we would be asked to describe this place
and to include as much detail as possible—
not just the water, he insists,

rather the oily, fathomless, rat-happy water,
not simply the shackles, but the rusty,
iron, ankle-shredding shackles—
and that our next assignment would be

to jot down, off the tops of our heads,
our thoughts and feelings about being dead,
not really an assignment,
the man rotating the oar keeps telling us—

think of it more as an exercise, he groans,
think of writing as a process,
a never-ending, infernal process,
and now the boats have become jammed together,

bow against stern, stern locked to bow,
and not a thing is moving, only our diligent pens.

I wouldn't mind if the afterlife was a lot like today.  Sleeping in.  Leisurely breakfast of leftover prime rib on toast.  A walk with my wife and dog.  Cleaning the house (I'm not against a little work in Heaven--polishing stars, fluffing clouds, etc.).  Playing the pipe organ for Mass (no harps or lyres for me, please).  An evening of dinner and a movie with some best friends.  It was kind of perfect.

But I know that perfection for me is not perfection for everyone.  For example, Billy Collins' vision of the afterlife seems far from perfect--ankle-shredding shackles, an eternal sulfurous river of boats, rat-happy water, and a logjam of naked, suffering souls.  The one part of Collins' life-after-death that I wouldn't mind:  the writing.  The poem makes it into a kind of purgatory, scribbling away for eternity.  To others, that may sound like Hell (or at least Purgatory).  To me, it sounds like paradise.

Often, when priests or pastors begin their sermons during worship services, I take out my journal and pen.  For the next 15 or so minutes, I scribble away on a blog post or new poem or essay.  I've always thought of writing as a form of prayer.  Some of the shit that comes out on the page seems divinely inspired.  In fact, I believe that the best poems I write are all gifts from my Higher Power, however you want to define it.  

So, after I die, if I'm trapped naked in a boat with my journal and writing utensil (hopefully a fountain pen), that will be a really, really great afterlife.

In the meantime, Saint Marty will just keep writing poetry here on Earth.  Call it practice.  Hopefully, the River Styx has a few nice waterfalls to describe.

August 4: Farewell, Hello, Close Friend, Grief

Billy Pilgrim says now that this really is the way he is going to die, too.  As a time-traveler, he has seen his own death many times, has described it to a tape recorder.  The tape is locked up with his will and some other valuables in his safe-deposit box at the Ilium Merchants Bank and Trust, he says.

I, Billy Pilgrim, the tape begins, will die, have died, and always will die on February thirteenth, 1976.

At the time of his death, he says, he is in Chicago to address a large crowd on the subject of flying saucers and the true nature of time.  His home is still in Ilium.  He has had to cross three international boundaries in order to reach Chicago.  The United States of America has been Balkanized, has been divided into twenty petty nations so that it will never again be a threat to world peace.  Chicago has been hydrogen-bombed by angry Chinamen.  So it goes.  It is all brand new.

Billy is speaking before a capacity audience in a baseball park, which is covered by a geodesic dome.  The flag of the country is behind him.  It is a Hereford bull on a field of green.  Billy predicts his own death within an hour.  He laughs about it, invites the crowd to laugh with him.  "It is high time I was dead," he says.  "Many years ago," he said, "a certain man promised to have me killed.  He is an old man now, living not far from here.  He has read all the publicity associated with my appearance to your fair city.  He is insane.  Tonight he will keep his promise."

There are protests from the crowd.

Billy Pilgrim rebukes them.  "If you protest, if you think that death is a terrible thing, then you have not understood a word I've said."  Now he closes his speech as he closes every speech--with these words:  "Farewell, hello, farewell, hello."

There are police around him as he leaves the stage.  They are there to protect him from the crush of popularity.  No threats on his life have been made since 1945.  The police offer to stay with him.  They are floridly willing to stand in a circle around him all night, with their zap guns drawn.

"No, no," says Billy serenely.  "It is time for you to go home to your wives and children, and it is time for me to be dead for a little while--and then live again."  At that moment, Billy's high forehead is in the cross hairs of a high-powered laser gun.  It is aimed at him from the darkened press box.  In the next moment, Billy Pilgrim is dead.  So it goes.

So Billy experiences death for a while.  It is simply violet light and a hum.  There isn't anybody else there.  Not even Billy Pilgrim is there.

In Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse universe, death is not an end.  It's merely a moment that, like all other moments, has happened, is happening, will happen over and over and over.  Billy doesn't try to prevent his death.  He walks into it willingly, treats it like the opportunity for an afternoon nap.  And then he simply dies.

For the second time in about a week, I have a very close friend whose brother passed away.  I just found out this afternoon.  There really aren't any words that will provide comfort to my friend.  She is hurting.  I know.  No matter what I say, I'm not going to be able to make her feel any better.

Unlike Vonnegut, my version of death isn't non-existence.  As a Christian, I believe in the soul and heaven and angels.  So, I could say something to my friend like "he's in a better place now" or "he's free of all his pain" or "he's with God."  I firmly accept the truth of those statements.  That doesn't really make them comforting for my friend.

Grief is terrible.  It can keep you in bed with the covers over your head.  It can sneak up on you when you're playing a game of Trivial Pursuit with your daughter.  It can greet you at the front door when you come home from work.  It doesn't really go away.  Ever.  It may take vacations every once in a while, but it always returns, sometimes rawer than before.

So, my words to my friend tonight are, "It sucks.  Let's drink soon."

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for the laughter of his kids, and he prays for laughter to be in his friend's life soon, as well.

August 15: Heaven, Poet of the Week, Maya Angelou, "Preacher, Don't Send Me"

For some reason, Maya Angelou has been on my mind for the last few weeks or so.  It could be a television commercial that has been playing during the Olympics broadcasts, featuring Angelou's distinctive voice reading a poem about what unites us as a people.  It could be that every time I see Hillary Clinton in the newspaper or on TV, I think about her husband's first inauguration, when Angelou read her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" in the clear January day, her words rising in clouds of breath.

I have featured Angelou as Poet of the Week before.  However, not to sound childish but . . . my blog, my rules.

It's a beautiful August night.  My daughter is out with her dance friends.  My son is in need of a bath after a day of dirt and sweat.  My wife is working, and I have half a bottle of wine at home.  It's going to be a good night.  Not heaven.  I'll leave that to Angelou tonight.

Saint Marty is hoping to find some leftover Cheetos.  That would be heaven.

Preacher, Don't Send Me

by:  Maya Angelou

when I die
to some big ghetto
in the sky
where rats eat cats
of the leopard type
and Sunday brunch
is grits and tripe.

I've known those rats
I've seen them kill
and grits I've had
would make a hill,
or maybe a mountain,
so what I need
from you on Sunday
is a different creed.

Preacher, please don't
promise me
streets of gold
and milk for free.
I stopped all milk
at four years old
and once I'm dead
I won't need gold.

I'd call a place
pure paradise
where families are loyal
and strangers are nice,
where the music is jazz
and the season is fall.
Promise me that
or nothing at all.

July 31: Something Beautiful, George Burns, A Frank Fairy Tale, Sharon Olds, "The Struggle"

On his back, Robert must have had time to see something beautiful, and not just the ugliness of a city street at the end of life.  Even with the tremendous pain in his badly gutted belly he would have looked up beyond the fire escapes and the windows with their glittery trees and television glows, to the sky above the rooftops.  A sky shimmery with the possibilities of death; light exaggerated, the heavens peeled back--a swirling haze of nebulae and comets--in some distant place, intimations of the new beginning into which he would soon journey.  He would have seen a few pale stars, maybe a planet or two, Jupiter or Venus. Remembering his Catholic schoolboy's mythology he might have imagined Apollo and his chariot, somewhere "out there."  And he would have seen the moon and its sad expression and imagined in its pocked luminous surface the faces of his mother and father and sister . . . The moon?  Was it out that night?  Ives tried to remember.

Ives is trying to picture his son's last moments of life, on the sidewalk, bleeding, struggling for breath, staring up at the starry night.  He imagines that Robert saw something beautiful and comforting--meteors and stars and planets, clouds of cosmic gases, a Greek god.  Above all, Ives wants to believe that Robert wasn't alone, that, in the bright face of the moon, he saw his family smiling down on him.

As a Christian, I believe that death is an entry into something better.  That's what I've been taught my whole life.  When I was younger, I really liked the image of God as George Burns, smoking cigars and telling jokes.  Vaudeville.  I imagined God performing in the Catskills.  "Did you hear the one about the snake and the naked woman?" He would say.

Something better.  That's what Heaven is supposed to be.  The other day, one of my best friends said this about my sister:  "She's only 54.  She's not ready to die yet."  I guess my friend is right.  My sister had the same Catholic upbringing I had.  The Virgin Mary and the manger and Jesus and all.  Every night when I was a kid, my family would get down on its knees and pray the rosary.  Clouds and angels and harp music.  We all believed in God's goodness and mercy.

My sister isn't ready to be measured for her wings just yet.  Even in her diminished state, she's been pretty adamant about that.  The doctors have asked her if she wants to be kept alive by any means possible, and my sister has answered very clearly, "Yes."  So George Burns is going to have to wait for a little bit, if my sister has her way.

I saw a picture of my sister this evening.  She was sitting on the side of her hospital bed, a nurse kneeling in front of her, in case she should fall.  I haven't seen my sister out of bed for over six or seven months.  She's thin, having lost close to 120 pounds over the last half year.  She looked pretty exhausted to me.  When my sister goes to the bathroom, there's blood in her stool.  That's to be expected with the chemo.  She's probably going to need a transfusion.

She's weak but determined to stick around.

Once upon a time, a little angel named Frank was put in charge of sweeping Heaven every night.  Frank had to clean up after all the archangels and cherubim and seraphim.  After choir practices, he spent hours putting away sheet music and musical instruments.  Frank never got a day off.

The day Jesus was born, Frank dusted all the stars.  He polished the angel harps and trumpets.  He counted all the halos.  Fluffed all the wings.  Frank made sure that first Christmas was perfect.

After all the shepherd and star and magi crap was done, Frank sat down to rest a little.

But God, who looked a little like George Burns, said, "Nice work, Frank.  I like this Christmas stuff.  We should do this every year."

Frank looked at God and said, "I don't think it'll catch on.  But let me tell You about a little thing I cooked up called an iPhone."

Moral of the story:  Heaven is just an app away.

And Saint Marty lived happily ever after.

The Struggle

by:  Sharon Olds

When the minister would come into the hospital room
my father would try to sit up, he would cry out
Up!  Up! for us to raise his bed-head, then
silently he would wrestle himself
up, sweating, he would end up
leaning on the pillows, panting, a man, erect.
The minister would kiss him, they would pray, then chat,
he would hold his eyes open unblinking,
rigid adherent to the protocol of the living,
he would sit for the whole visit, and then,
the minute the man was out the door, cry
out Down!  Down! and we would lower him
down, and he would pass out.
Later the doctor wold pay a call and as
soon as my father saw that white coat
he would start to labor up, desperate
to honor the coat, at a glimpse of it he would
start to stir like a dog who could not
not obey.  He would lurch, pause,
then thrust up slowly, and unevenly, like a
camel, a half-born animal--the way,
they say, his soul will pull itself up
out of his dead body and wobblingly
walk.  And then, one day, he tried,
his brain ordered his body to heave up,
the sweat rose in his pores but he was not
moving, he cast up his eyes as the minister
leaned to kiss him, he lay and stared, it was
nothing like the nights he had lain on the couch passed
out, nothing.  Now he was alive,
awake, the raw boy of his heart stood
up each time a grown man
entered his death room.

God bless you all!

April 9: Gratitude Thirty-Six

Tonight, I am grateful for a clean house.

I spent a good portion of my evening sweeping, mopping, vacuuming, and scrubbing.  The air smells like citrus, and the water in the toilet bowl is blue.  I love sitting in a clean home.  It makes me feel calm, in control.  Even if the world is falling apart.

I know I'm not in control of my life.  That's been proven to me over and over these last few months.  But I'm pretty sure that, when I get to heaven, it's going to smell like Lemon Pledge.  Maybe Pine Sol.  And the sky will be clean as Windex.

Saint Marty's sure of that.

The smell of paradise

October 18: Heaven, and the Christmas Time

"...Heaven, and the Christmas Time be praised for this!..."

Scrooge says this little ejaculation of praise on Christmas morning, right after the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come returns him to his the "real" world.  Scrooge is grateful to be alive.  He is grateful for the cold, snowy morning.  He is grateful for his dark, dusty apartment.  He is grateful for everything in his life.

Last night, I found myself in a very dark place.  I was contemplating a few issues in my life, and I just couldn't shake off the negative thoughts.  Therefore, I have decided this morning to focus on the blessings in my life.  I know I have done this exercise several times already on this blog.  However, I think it's a good thing to repeat.

Thus, on to the blessings:

My son, who is funny and healthy and full of energy.  (Maybe a little too full of energy, but that's OK.)

My daughter, who is smart and beautiful and graceful as a swan.

My wife, who is smart and beautiful and employed.  (That's a double blessing.)

My house, which keeps my family warm and comfortable.

My car, which runs and gets me to work.

My job in the medical office, where I'm surrounded by people I love.

My job at the university, where I get to talk about things that I love.

Cheetos, because I love them.

Diet Mountain Dew, because I love it.

My friends, who bring me so much joy.

My family, because they're crazy and loving.

My wife's family, because they're crazy and loving.

My health, which is good.

Poetry, which makes me see beauty in everything.

God, Who is the source of all of the above.

Saint Marty's cup overflows.