Yesterday evening we ran into a friend whom we haven't seen in a while.
"You look fantastic!" I told her.
"Really?" she replied -- and I thought she might dissolve into laughter. Apparently, the idea was utterly absurd to her.
It turns out that her father died a week ago. Not entirely unexpected, she said, as he had been ill for some time. But somehow he kept rallying, so when it finally happened it was still a shock. I never met him, but I was able to go home and read about him that evening: he was eulogized in the New York Times.
Weird issue to bond over. My mother died five weeks ago today.
But as Anna pointed out, there is something about death that resembles other issues we've bonded over in the past. "When you are pregnant," she noted, "you get all kinds of clues that things will be changing. The baby kicks and moves, and you can't wait to meet it. Someone throws you a baby shower, you prepare a crib and buy a car seat, and then the baby arrives. And even though you knew it was coming, you still can't believe it's actually there, and you say to yourself: 'really? who are you? and what am I supposed to do with you?'"
That's the way we feel about death. Okay, we knew you were coming. The end of the story was clear all along. But now that you are here (and my beloved mother is not), what do I do with you?
I've been reading a new book by a colleague about the literary rivalry of Vladimir Nabokov and Ivan Bunin. Bunin won the Nobel Prize in 1933, and Nabokov never did.
Bunin was a master of the old world: born in 1870, he had won many prizes even before he emigrated from Russia to France in 1920. He was the reigning prose writer in the Russian language, inheriting the legacies of Turgenev and Chekhov and creating the short story anew for a new century. As Shreyer documents, Nabokov was appropriately fawning toward the master when he was first publishing his own poetry and fiction in the mid-1920s, but by the early 1930s he believed he had surpassed Bunin, and by 1951 he was openly disdainful of an author he called "worse even than Turgenev."
One of the topics about which Nabokov disagreed with Bunin was the structure of a short story, specifically how to use the plot motif of death. Shreyer argues that for Bunin, death was the "crowning glory of a story," while for Nabokov death was a "matter of style," of "literary technique."
Certainly Bunin's late stories follow the pattern Shreyer articulates: "desire brings tragedy and death." In many of the post-emigration stories, love (and sex) do not end well. Instead, they almost always precipitate tragedy: suicide, fatal illness, accident, catastrophe. My students usually bristle at the sudden death of the hero who has found love with a waitress in Bunin's 1940 story "In Paris." I love it. And while Nabokov may have found it too pat, too naturalistic, and too divorced from the ideas he propounded in his own fiction, the sense that this world is coterminous with another world, the "otherworld," I'm afraid I find Bunin's notion more convincing.
Death is sudden, inexplicable, incomprehensible. Even when you know it's coming (and it is coming, for all of us), you cannot prepare for it. A sudden heart attack on the subway, a traffic accident, a terminal illness that drags out -- and we are grateful for the gift of days -- but then suddenly ends. Nothing really helps us prepare for the inevitable: the loss, the gaping absence, and what fills that absence: a sudden need to learn how to co-exist with death.
When my mother realized it was time to go into hospice, I understood what that meant. No more treatments. I was proud of her for being able to make this choice, although medically it wasn't so much a choice as an inevitability. At the same time, the first words out of my mouth were "can't they give you something for that cough?"
In talking about how she was trying to come to terms with her father's death, my friend Anna evoked her own two pregnancies. I immediately thought of our two children. When we were expecting our daughter, and when she arrived, my husband published a piece in the Chicago Tribune in which he dubbed us members of a "Very Planned Parenthood Club." Because she is adopted, everything we did to bring our daughter into our life we did deliberately, from the notarized documents to the home study to the trip to China. Way more trouble, and thus more forethought, than getting a baby the old-fashioned way.
Even so, the look on our faces when we received our daughter says it all: wonder, and excitement, and shock. "Now what do we do?" we asked each other. We had no idea.
At the time, I was pregnant, and when our son arrived seven months later we were really confused. Not until he reached 11 months (our daughter's age when we got her) did I think to myself: "oh, okay, I know what to do. I've done this before."
Losing a parent is something that one usually does twice, I suppose, but never in the same way. My guess is that it is always sudden, and almost always difficult. But you have to come to terms with it -- and even if you don't, your story can't just end the way a Bunin story does.
In the story "In Paris" Olga Alexandrovna, the young woman, who has finally found love and financial security in a difficult pre-war European world, feels as though her life, too, has ended. After the funeral, she returns home and begins to clean the apartment. She finds her beloved's old coat and grasps it, breathing in the scent of him, and collapses in anguish. Those sobs, that pain, resonate with the immediacy of loss. But then what? Bunin doesn't have to tell us what Olga does the next day, when the sun rises and the milk is going sour.
It's just something that as human beings we have to figure out for ourselves. Oddly enough, I suppose I've just joined a new club.
"You look fantastic!" I told her.
"Really?" she replied -- and I thought she might dissolve into laughter. Apparently, the idea was utterly absurd to her.
It turns out that her father died a week ago. Not entirely unexpected, she said, as he had been ill for some time. But somehow he kept rallying, so when it finally happened it was still a shock. I never met him, but I was able to go home and read about him that evening: he was eulogized in the New York Times.
Weird issue to bond over. My mother died five weeks ago today.
But as Anna pointed out, there is something about death that resembles other issues we've bonded over in the past. "When you are pregnant," she noted, "you get all kinds of clues that things will be changing. The baby kicks and moves, and you can't wait to meet it. Someone throws you a baby shower, you prepare a crib and buy a car seat, and then the baby arrives. And even though you knew it was coming, you still can't believe it's actually there, and you say to yourself: 'really? who are you? and what am I supposed to do with you?'"
That's the way we feel about death. Okay, we knew you were coming. The end of the story was clear all along. But now that you are here (and my beloved mother is not), what do I do with you?
 |
| Maxim Shreyer's new book Bunin and Nabokov: A Story of Rivalry (2014) |
I've been reading a new book by a colleague about the literary rivalry of Vladimir Nabokov and Ivan Bunin. Bunin won the Nobel Prize in 1933, and Nabokov never did.
Bunin was a master of the old world: born in 1870, he had won many prizes even before he emigrated from Russia to France in 1920. He was the reigning prose writer in the Russian language, inheriting the legacies of Turgenev and Chekhov and creating the short story anew for a new century. As Shreyer documents, Nabokov was appropriately fawning toward the master when he was first publishing his own poetry and fiction in the mid-1920s, but by the early 1930s he believed he had surpassed Bunin, and by 1951 he was openly disdainful of an author he called "worse even than Turgenev."
One of the topics about which Nabokov disagreed with Bunin was the structure of a short story, specifically how to use the plot motif of death. Shreyer argues that for Bunin, death was the "crowning glory of a story," while for Nabokov death was a "matter of style," of "literary technique."
Certainly Bunin's late stories follow the pattern Shreyer articulates: "desire brings tragedy and death." In many of the post-emigration stories, love (and sex) do not end well. Instead, they almost always precipitate tragedy: suicide, fatal illness, accident, catastrophe. My students usually bristle at the sudden death of the hero who has found love with a waitress in Bunin's 1940 story "In Paris." I love it. And while Nabokov may have found it too pat, too naturalistic, and too divorced from the ideas he propounded in his own fiction, the sense that this world is coterminous with another world, the "otherworld," I'm afraid I find Bunin's notion more convincing.
 |
| Mikhail Baryshnikov with Anna Sinyakina in "In Paris," 2011 |
When my mother realized it was time to go into hospice, I understood what that meant. No more treatments. I was proud of her for being able to make this choice, although medically it wasn't so much a choice as an inevitability. At the same time, the first words out of my mouth were "can't they give you something for that cough?"
 |
| Parents for five minutes, in a hotel lobby in China (March 2000) |
At the time, I was pregnant, and when our son arrived seven months later we were really confused. Not until he reached 11 months (our daughter's age when we got her) did I think to myself: "oh, okay, I know what to do. I've done this before."
Losing a parent is something that one usually does twice, I suppose, but never in the same way. My guess is that it is always sudden, and almost always difficult. But you have to come to terms with it -- and even if you don't, your story can't just end the way a Bunin story does.
In the story "In Paris" Olga Alexandrovna, the young woman, who has finally found love and financial security in a difficult pre-war European world, feels as though her life, too, has ended. After the funeral, she returns home and begins to clean the apartment. She finds her beloved's old coat and grasps it, breathing in the scent of him, and collapses in anguish. Those sobs, that pain, resonate with the immediacy of loss. But then what? Bunin doesn't have to tell us what Olga does the next day, when the sun rises and the milk is going sour.
It's just something that as human beings we have to figure out for ourselves. Oddly enough, I suppose I've just joined a new club.
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