Read The Staircase Letters Online
Authors: Arthur Motyer
The Staircase Letters (7 page)
Provoked by this exchange, I began asking myself the age-old questions that defy easy answers. What is the true nature of happiness? How can we reach it and hold it? Should it even be the ultimate goal? Is anything more important? Is it only a selfish state of being, achieved always at the expense of others? Does every definition of happiness cancel out another? “Even a happy life,” Carl Jung wrote,
“cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”
From Aristotle to Marx, from the Beatitudes of Christ to the words of Saint Augustine, and on to Bobby McFerrin with his catchy little song, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” everyone has said something about what is, after all, a private state of being. “Happiness cannot come from without,” said Helen Keller. “It must come from within.”
It was then I thought to ask my friend Dean Brinton for his views. He had worked with Carol on the Canada Council a few years earlier, and with his background in philosophy and arts management, I knew he would send a thoughtful reply. When it came, I forwarded it to Carol and Elma.
Dear Arthur,
While it all seems terribly grim to wonder whether happiness can or should be possible while dying, it well may be a choice we can make. (It was Abraham Lincoln who claimed that “most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be,” but I doubt that
he would have included the terminally ill.) But is it?
I’ve often wondered whether one might achieve true happiness by following simple prescriptions, much in the way that Pascal thought a non-believer might become a Christian—go to church, sing, pray if you can. While it may be possible to will oneself to be agreeable, to “look as well as one can, dress as becomingly as possible, talk low, act courteously, be liberal with praise, criticize not at all, nor find fault with anything and not try to regulate or improve anyone,” happiness is thought to be quite another matter.
But is it really? Maybe a few months of being agreeable would lead to quite an exquisite form of happiness (having never been agreeable for more than a few hours at a time, I wouldn’t know). Now if we were also to spend a little time every day thinking of God, we might be happy Christians too!
Do you remember the Louis Malle film from the early ’80s titled
My Dinner with Andre?
Quite a treatise on happiness. I had
forgotten all about it until just before Christmas when I opened a fortune cookie in Montreal—“You see beauty in simple things. Do not lose this ability.” Family, friends, things in nature—what more do we need? But we’ve come to expect so much more.
I will always keep our home on St. Margaret’s Bay in Nova Scotia as a constant (lots of birds, pine trees, and water, most importantly a feeling of contentment whenever I’m there) even as I feel compelled to see how much I can get away with in the wider world. This latter motivation is a marvel for me. I’m never sure if I really want to make a contribution of one sort or another or if it’s blind ambition, any more than a miserable person is aware that their misery is for them a form of happiness.
What you might expect often turns out to be the opposite. The saintly Mother Teresa, after all, was narcissistic, and, towards the end of her life, expressed grave doubts about the existence of God. At the other end of the scale, the randy British philosopher A. J. Ayer—he expressed his atheism at every
opportunity throughout his career—saw a bright light while undergoing heart surgery in his eighties, though he later claimed it only “slightly weakened” his conviction that death is truly the end of everything.
So be happy if you can, and if you can’t, as Kurt Vonnegut Jr. put it best, “So it goes.” And so it goes with me.
Love,
Dean
After reading Dean’s reflections, I realized that what Carlyle had written in
Past and Present
was near my own view. For him, in 1843, the awareness that one had been blessed was more important than any feeling of ephemeral happiness.
Does not the whole wretchedness, the whole
Atheism
as I call it, of man’s ways, in these generations, shadow itself for us in that unspeakable Life-philosophy of his: the pretension to be what he calls “happy”? Every pitifulest whipster that walks within a skin has his head filled with the notion that he is, shall be,
or by all human and divine laws ought to be, “happy” …“Happy,” my brother? First of all, what difference is it whether thou art happy or not! Today becomes Yesterday so fast, all Tomorrows become Yesterdays; and then there is no question whatever of the “happiness,” but quite another question.
Earthly experiences can make most of us happy—good food, good music, good sex, having our basic needs met, driving a reliable car, being physically fit, growing a rare blue Himalayan poppy, all such things and more on an endless list— but unless a deep inner sense of continued well-being comes as a blessed result, that happiness can only be shallow and fleeting. Sitting contemplatively under a tree, however, in search of enlightenment, may bring a deep inner happiness, just as climbing a mountain to discover the truth of the Beatitudes may bring a lasting joy. Being happy and being blessed can then become fused.
Elma wrote again the next day, bearing good news:
Dear A.,
On a note of serendipity—last summer, I wrote a letter of appreciation to Eleanor Wachtel, thanking her for the many hours of pleasure she has given me, and now she has sent me a copy of her book
More Writers and Company
, which contains a long section on Carol. Gee—if only I could arrange for that fate to befall my letters at will, I could build up quite a library!
I saw my radiologist today, and although of course she can give me no predictions, etc., she seems very happy with the symptomatic results of the brain radiation (i.e., I can walk and talk, I guess!). What she said was, “Get back to me when you develop a problem—you’re too good for me now.”
Ever … ever … ever …
E.
Dear E,
Good news from your radiologist: why shouldn’t you be the one to defy all the odds?
“Be happy!” as Carol’s daughter says.
Ever … ever … ever …
A.
Almost two years after Carol’s diagnosis, Eleanor Wachtel conducted the beautifully sensitive interview, aired first on CBC Radio on February 27, 2000, and later included in
More Writers and Company
. What Carol had so openly said in that interview about living with cancer must have got through to Elma in some personal way, binding her yet more closely to Carol.
Carol had admitted to Eleanor she could hardly breathe from the shock she had felt at first, and how an air of unreality had accompanied the shock. She had “very naively thought [she] was not the breast cancer type;” but recognizing that she “couldn’t turn it back,” she had gone on to accept it, surprised at how good people were to her, even as she had to face some loss of her self-sovereignty. To be in touch with others, however, had been extremely helpful: she “needed so badly the experience of other people so that you don’t feel so alone in that sorrow.” In order to enlarge her world, she read more novels than she
was in the habit of doing, and hoped to find some that were funny, because “life is very rich in comedy.”
Carol looked for the same thing that Charles Darwin looked for when he got members of his family to read a novel to him in the afternoon, after he had done his scientific work in the morning, in the hope of finding a person he could love. Carol herself needed to escape the terrible introspection that accompanied any diagnosis of cancer. She could now see it as “a natural rhythm in your life,” though it also made her “more conscious of mortality.”
No wonder Eleanor Wachtel spoke later of Carol’s “particular kind of humanity … the foundation of her commitment to writing as a form of redemption.” And no wonder Carol and Elma had bonded as they did.
The happiness I had urged upon Elma was all too soon turned into something more like resignation when, just three days before Christmas, she wrote to tell Carol and me of the death from cancer of one of their mutual friends in Winnipeg.
Dear A.,
This is about the death yesterday of our friend Lynn McLean, who battled incredibly heroically for about fifteen years against what began as breast cancer. Her remissions and reprieves were simply off any known medical charts, but she had many other problems which developed over the years. She was ultimately on home dialysis, and during the last year had suffered from a terrible clinical depression. Her husband, Murdith, who teaches with Martin in the philosophy department, is, of course, anguished, but I think it will be a relief, ultimately, as it will be for her two children, and the grandchildren whose Nana, as they knew her, had all but vanished.
Ever … ever … ever …
E.
Dear Carol,
Murdith phoned us this morning, and he said he was going to e-mail you. He sounded very accepting, and he probably told you that the whole family was able to be there at the
end, at the Palliative Care Ward at St. Boniface, when she just quietly stopped breathing.
I am very glad she is finally at peace, after these last months especially. There is nothing more to say, really.
But the circle somehow seems to stay unbroken.
Much love, Elma
Dear Elma,
Yes, the circle does seem unbroken. I’ve relived a series of memories since hearing from you, once dropping in on Lynn and Murdith in the evening. She was rather sleepy, and said, “Murdith was just brushing my hair.” What an amazing image. It has been such a long struggle, and I half-know what people mean when they say ‘being at peace.’
much love,
c.
Christmas in Sackville that year for Alasdair and me happened to be quieter than usual, without house guests, and I sent two lines on Christmas Eve to let Elma know I was thinking of her. When we held our traditional Boxing Day lunch for a number of friends, first singing carols around the piano, drinking rum eggnog, and then eating Bermuda cassava pie—a native dish introduced from the West Indies, with a filling of chicken and veal contained in a sweet and nutmeg-spicy pudding-like crust made from the grated root of cassava—I yet wondered how Elma was coping with Lynn’s death in Winnipeg.
The children and grandchildren were home. Santa Claus would come. Life had to go on. Her son James had just got engaged. They would all have dinner, but no cassava pie. They might even sing. But Christmas for her would never happen again. She must have known that. “Falls the shadow. For thine is the kingdom … This is the way the world ends … This is the way the world ends …” T. S. Eliot now in her head, and the Magi:
A cold coming we had of it
,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp
,
The very dead of winter
.
Everyman had said it already: “I am to go a journey, a long way, hard and dangerous.” She knew that.
Make the most of it.
Be happy.
And she was.
Shortly before Christmas, her radiologist had said, “Get back to me when you develop a problem. You’re too good for me now.” So instead of singing “Fails my heart I know not how / I can go no longer,” she had done the opposite: she had gone boldly on with her family. “Thanks in part to having no chemo to deal with, I have had a fair bit of energy and the whole visit has gone
very
well,” she wrote, after the children had left.
It was all “poignantly beautiful,” Martin told me later, and everyone had a great time. But even with all this personal happiness, Elma had vowed that
“barring unforeseen disasters,” she would go to Lynn’s funeral two days after Christmas. She described it to Carol early in the New Year.
Dear Carol,
There were a great number of people at Lynn McLean’s funeral on the 27th. The Anglican service is always rather cold and formal, to my Anglican-raised way of thinking, and I have come to prefer a memorial service where people speak more informally. But it was moving all the same.
For me, it was also kind of eerie. For one thing, I was wearing the same pants I wore at Beth’s wedding, and had once more to walk (wobble?) up a very long aisle (in order to take communion), divided by a casket instead of a font this time. Also, all the McLean clan were in plaids and kilts, as the Scots and our own family had been for the wedding.
The other strange thing was that it gave me almost a “dress-rehearsal” feeling. Virtually everyone there was connected with the philosophy department or St. John’s
College, so they all were aware of my situation.
The closing hymn was “Morning Has Broken,” with which I was not very familiar, but as hymns go, it’s rather lovely. The melody is an old Gaelic air, and adds a great deal. It’s definitely Lynn.
Carol, I send you love as always, and wish you peace, and rest for tired eyes, tired mind, tired body—whatever needs it most. And I wish you sunlit grass, and the vision of each day as a new creation. Elma
Dear Elma,
Thank you so much for letting us know what Lynn’s service was like: I do love “Morning Has Broken,” and it does sound like Lynn. Yes, we too have found the St. George’s services somewhat cold, without the voice of the one who has gone. And yes, I do know what you mean by the strange sense of “dress rehearsal.”
All “this” has made my usual rejoicing in
the new year, new resolutions, new projects, quite different, and so I did, as you suspected, finish the holiday with a sense of exhaustion and not much clarity. (I asked Don, one morning when I was overwhelmed, whether I had to pay attention to the situation in Argentina, and he said No.)
Random House is sending you (probably already have) a galley of
Unless
, as you requested. Please don’t ever hesitate to write. It is important to feel I have a partner in “this.” Going along and sharing insights.
I am about to go off with my daughter Sara for her birthday lunch. She is thirty-four today. I will write more later.
Much love, dear friend,
carol