The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas died the year I was born. He was just 39 years old. His death was almost a cliché: A poet burning his candle at both ends and dying too young. In Thomas’ case, he literally drank himself to an early grave while on tour in America.
When I was young and starry-eyed, my favorite poem of his was “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” It was a compelling exhortation to his father, “there on that sad height,” to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
One of the paradoxes of a youth spent reading was that I was perhaps too aware of death’s inevitability, too entranced by life’s brevity, even as it seemed the unknown future stretched out limitless before me. I took Thomas’ poem as a call to live life with passionate abandon. It was a very romanticized understanding, I’ll admit, as I hauled myself to classes and did minimum-wage jobs to have a little spending money. I loved that poem nonetheless.
I thought of Thomas’ poem when I visited my Mom earlier this year. Last December, she turned 100 years old. That I know of, she received no congratulatory letters from the president or the weatherman acknowledging what, admittedly, has become a slightly more common feat these days. My Mom took the news in stride, particularly appreciative that it arrived with cake.
My mother once lived for months in Greece with my father and later traveled on the Amazon in a canoe with a daughter. More impressively, she gave birth to eight children, seven of whom lived to adulthood and still gather with her to celebrate her milestones.
Yet as the decades mount, her world has shrunk, inevitably. Her universe consists in large part of a bedroom, her family, and her dedicated caregivers. Her memories of Rhodes or Ecuador have been packed away for now.
And as I look at my Mom in the course of her days — eating her meals with gusto, reading, watching television, telling us all she loves us madly — it occurred to me that Thomas’ exhortation to resist the dying of the light was the plea of a young man who has so much he wants to do. Even as Thomas drank away his liver, he must have found it impossible to accept that his gift, his voice, his Welsh genius could be stilled. It was of his rage he sang, not his father’s.
Old, old age is something else entirely. Friends and spouses may be gone. Memories too. There is something beautiful in the resilience of the human spirit even after a century of life, yet it is characterized more by patience than rage. God’s will and time have not yet allowed my Mom to put off her burdened flesh and ascend to brighter heights. She waits with good humor the destiny her faith tells her will come.
I am much older than Thomas was when he wrote that poem, and I should be wiser now as well. Yet it is more me than my Mom who is tempted to rage. St. Francis called Death his Sister, but I still resent those who she has taken too early. As their numbers mount, I keep their names and contact information in my phone, as if deleting them might delete their memory.
Perhaps for the same reason I pray regularly for those I’ve lost. We should take seriously the injunction of our faith to remember the souls of those who have died. It is also my way of staying connected with them. If I cannot immortalize my departed friends with a poem, I can at least remember them in prayer.
I often envy those who have some sense or receive some sign that a loved one is safe, that a deceased friend is still present. And I wonder now more than ever what heaven and purgatory and hell may be like, and when, if ever, these planes intersect our own.
When I was young, my Mom taught me to pray for the souls in purgatory. Her lesson for me now is patience and trust.
Because One Person conquered death, we now all trust that death is more than just a “good night.” And while we can’t imagine what this world will be without us, we are allowed the grace of believing our journey does not end here.
Perhaps we leave Dylan Thomas the final word in another poem he wrote titled, “And Death Shall Have No Dominion”:
“Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.”
