Reflections on the Dead

I am writing this on the shortest day of the year thinking of The Dead. James Joyce’s short-story about friends and family gathered for a holiday celebration in Dublin is one of my favorites. The main character, Gabriel, arrives at the home of his two aunts, who live with their younger niece. The three support themselves by offering music lessons. As Gabriel takes off his galoshes, he encounters a servant girl, now grown up. “I suppose we’ll be going to your wedding one of these fine days ,” Gabriel tells her. She replies with bitterness,“The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.” This loss of innocence, and loss in general, sets the underlying theme for the story.

The discussion at dinner later in the story turns to the loss of great Irish singers of the past. Gabriel notices the gray pallor of his elderly aunt Julia’s face and realizes she will die soon. He observes the mortality of everyone around him. “One by one they were all becoming shades.”

After Gabriel and his wife return to the hotel where they spend the night after the party, Greta confides a youthful passion that a young man named Michael Furey once held for her. Gabriel’s asks sarcastically what happened to the boy, thinking he and his wife were lovers. “He is dead,” she answers. “I think he died for me.”

The Dead, like Dickens’ Christmas Carol, reminds us the departed are with us. They haunt our memories with lost chances and regrets even, if we’re lucky, as they inspire us with happy memories and hope.

The most skeptical among us exchange gifts with friends, relatives and children this time of year. We make the rounds of parties and raise a glass (or two or three) in honor of the hope for peace, joy and redemption for the New Year. Maybe we volunteer our time or spare a compassionate thought to those absent or who have little reason to celebrate this year (perhaps living in a cardboard box or looking forward to a lifetime of drudgery to make ends meet after having lost their life savings in the ongoing financial unpleasantness). Perhaps we are in need ourselves, damaged by our experiences or betrayal by others. We sing the songs and carols out of habit, even if we don’t believe them. Some of the lyrics have a decidedly unfestive air:

Through the years we all will be together if the fates allow… Until then we’ll have to muddle through”

Or

Fast away, the old year passes…

As if we want to move on from the past as quickly as possible. Achieve closure.

But you don’t achieve closure by denying reality. We confront the bitter with the sweet in this world, unless we are especially privileged or well-medicated, It’s not news that the Yuletide message has been perverted and co-opted to benefit commercial interests and consumerism. But believing Yuletide is only about candy canes and Santa Claus robs it of a deeper meaning and more ancient purpose in guiding us through the darker, difficult passages of life and the season. Even most Christians interpret Christmas exclusively as a joyous time filled with angels and presents and birth of the baby Jesus. But the Biblical story is a prologue to Christ’s suffering and death on the cross and the passing of this world. Christmas tradition echoes the Norse and Germanic Yuletide traditions (as well as Greek and Roman myths) recognizing death and dormancy as part of the cycle of the seasons and of life. A time when earth becomes hard as iron and water like a stone. We anticipate the hope of life and rebirth after a long, dark passage.

Our bronze age ancestors venerated the dead by holding a ceremony of bonfires and feasting during the winter solstice. They did this to invoke their help in surviving the long dark, northern winter. We, on the other hand, feed off of our dead in a mercenary fashion. The novels of David Foster Wallace are no doubt selling briskly after his death. Has anyone spared a thought to how Randy Pausch’s wife and children are faring this holiday season without their husband and father? We are happy to exploit the tragedies and sadness of the world as entertainment to make a buck or advance our particular emotional and institutional agenda. (Terry Schiavo springs to mind.) We would do much better exercising our humanity by paying attention to peoples’ lives and acting with humility to the extent we are able while they are here rather than waiting until after they are gone.

I keep a list of the dead, an informal necrology to memorialize the loss of those close to me or with whom I feel an affinity. The list includes my father, who died in 1997. It includes a man with whom I used to go Christmas caroling. It includes a daughter who never got a chance to celebrate her first Christmas. Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) is on the list as well. The losses Clemens experienced in his life (including the death of two daughters) resonate with me, even as his humor and humanity provide redemption. Some day perhaps I will be on someone’s list. Or I will be one of the faceless generations dead, unknown and unremembered.

For those of us who feel betrayed by religion, damaged by life, or even actively hostile to the God of our fathers, it is easy to resent the commercial din, the pleas to charity, even the cards we receive from friends and relatives, as palaver designed to get what they can out of us. They’re so seductive: just share a little cup of cheer, they say, in return for the platitudes we’ve heard before. We may feel superior to the poor fools who get suckered in every year by doorbuster holiday sales, saccharine Christmas TV specials, and simplistic sermons even as we yearn for the answers they offer. Perhaps we protest too much against this need for human comfort and connection (however misguided). It’s worth keeping in mind Gabriel’s speech in The Dead:

…we are living in a skeptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day.

I hope in our skepticism and emphasis on rationality we do not lose our humanity. The final, somber passage of The Dead is strangely comforting:

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

We are all becoming shades. But that fact can serve to motivate rather than depress us during this season. We can choose not to become completely enmeshed in the endlessly cheerful and desperate cycle of getting and spending. We don’t need to wait for the birth of a baby to aspire to our better selves. We can be present to a deeper vision as we interact with our fellow human beings. Acknowledging the long dark season ahead is not incompatible with the joys life has to offer with others whose company we find worthwhile today. We gain nothing by denying the fact, and I believe lose a good deal.

About: My interests include collaboration, knowledge-sharing, writing and promoting mindfulness. I like outdoor activities including bicycling and backpacking. Read more from this author