“Each day is a little life, every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death. —Arthur Schopenahauer
Like the flickering flame of a hearth too distant to warm yet near enough to seduce, the eventide horizon burns like a red and orange nebula as the sun sinks beneath the waves along the Manasquan coastline. Against the backdrop of the waves caressing the shore and the occasional plaintive cry of a lone seagull, little else breaks the silence save the low hum of a clam boat’s engine as it returns through the inlet. One can sit on the beach on a fall day in November and feel alone but not lonely, alive but not harried, reflective but not preoccupied. This much I learned as a young boy the year my Aunt Rose died.
I had come to the shore that fall with my father and uncle to close the shore house for the winter, the home she had filled with laughter, love, and life. Of little use around the house, I eventually found my way to the beach chaperoned by my constant companion: my mutt, Spot. The solitude of a deserted beach resonated with the emptiness I was feeling as I contemplated what summers at the shore would be like without my Aunt Rose. She had ruled as a queen over her little acre of heaven on the beach, staked out with a tableau of multicolored blankets, where my cousins and I ate our ice-cream bars and footlongs, built sandcastles and moats, and, in our quieter moments, read The Hardy Boys and Tom Swift. And, with the noontime sun baking us from above, we’d slam our golden bodies into the chilly water of a cresting wave, our high-pitched screams competing for air time with the cacophony rising from the breakers, the gulls, and dueling radios blaring out the play-by-play of a Mets game. Could those summers really have passed so quickly?
Sitting alone on the dunes that late fall afternoon, absentmindedly watching Spot toy with a fiddler crab, I faced, for the first time in my short life, questions about life and death. Looking back on the imprint of my small footsteps in the wet sand, I imagined I was looking back in time; that if I gazed hard enough along the path I had walked, I might catch, in the fading light and gathering mist, a glimpse of my Aunt Rose’s smile.
There is a melancholy that I inevitably attach to the sea, a mixture of fond, joyous memories and a stifling sadness. The ocean has been a part of the cycle of life on our blue island in space from its origin. Life emerged from the sea, and we appear to be inexorably drawn to our farrowing ground. Here I have watched the seasons pass, just as I have watched those whose memories I hold so dear pass through the seasons of their lives. I learned of the death of both of my grandmothers while I was at the shore. Just a few weeks after my father helped my uncle close up the shore house the year my Aunt Rose died, my uncle, too, died. My cousin Sue, who made the Manasquan shore her home, died of the same disease that had claimed her mother, my Aunt Rose, and was cremated. Her ashes were cast upon the sea exactly one mile due east of the Manasquan Inlet. My last fond memories of my father are of the pilgrimage back to Manasquan that my sister and I took with him in the last month of his life. Crippled by the cancer that was corroding his body and shackled to his wheelchair by an oxygen tube, he asked me to remove the nasal cannula supplying his air so that he could breathe the ocean scent again. As the salt air filled his lungs, I saw him transformed and transported to a different time and place. I saw for the briefest of moments life breathed back into him. Three short weeks later, he, too, took his last breath.
Five years have passed since I lost my father, and I find myself compelled to return to the shore, not just because it is fall, but because death is once again casting a pale shadow over my coastline, the twilight of seasons heralding the twilight of another life, as cancer claims yet another unwilling victim. I do not know how one faces one’s own mortality. I do not know by what miracle of neurochemistry one can confront the surety of one’s own impending demise and not go insane. I can only envy the grace and dignity of those who do so. By that measure, I am in awe of my brother Chris. I am in awe of his strength, his humanity, his unfailing compassion for those who suffered with him but could not possibly suffer more than him.
Sure, it is easy to dread the long shadows on the beach that foretell the passing of another life. But I have learned to dread neither the fall nor the shadow. I will miss Chris, as I have missed all who have passed from my physical reality. But I do not give in to despair. How can we despair of the natural cycle that defines our humanity? Do we despair of the fall as if to wish we had never seen the summer? Are we to despair of loss as if to wish we had never had anything to lose? No. For in his last weeks, I saw in my friend, my brother Chris, the same coolness and serenity of the fall day I sensed nearly four decades ago as a ten-year-old on the beach.
The twilight of any life is, like the ending of a season, a special moment graciously afforded by nature, in which we are given the opportunity to quiet our minds and our souls—an opportunity to pause, to reflect, to value, and to cherish the moments that life has shared with us and given to us.
And so it is that we experience the end of a life journey as not unlike autumn at the shore. Moments spent recalling the joy of summer tinged with sadness at the recognition that now only the memories remain. Joy and sadness: one cannot exist without the other; one can hardly be defined without reference to the other. Life and death are just as inextricably linked. For what is fall without the memory of summer, and what is twilight without the memory of dawn?
Author’s note: on October 15, 2003, Chris—who, as my brother-in-law for nearly twenty years, was as much a brother as any that might have been linked by blood—passed from this world, leaving behind a treasury of memories, love, and good will to sustain the many lives he touched.
CFI SUMMIT
OCTOBER 24-27 2013
TACOMA, WASHINGTON
Joint Conference of the Council for Secular Humanism, Center for Inquiry, and Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
The transnational secular humanist magazine
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