Ars Moriendi

Be praised, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death, from whose embrace no living person can escape. Woe to those who die in mortal sin! Happy those she finds doing your most holy will. The second death can do no harm to them.

—St. Francis of Assisi, Canticle of the Sun

Perhaps I will regret writing this, but it has to be done. About a week before I left Rome, I received an email from my parents about the bad news. Rosy Morell, my grandmother was lying in a hospital bed, her left side virtually paralyzed, her liver seeping blood. She had been riding with a friend when they’d run a stop sign.

The impact had come directly behind my grandmother’s seat, wreaking havoc with her spine. I would later see in the insurance report diagrams showing that the collision at the intersection had thrown the little car almost thirty feet. It was a miracle she was even alive.

And now, almost three weeks later, she’s in another hospital in rehab, her body half-mended and I wonder if we’ll be the ones to die instead, from the continuing carnival of stress and high blood pressure that daily romps through our lives.

We’re all no stranger to this; it’s been only a little less than a year since my grandfather, Rosy’s husband, passed away amid complications involving a burst gallbladder. Complications involving a burst gallbladder. Complications is about the best euphemism you can put to it, though it’s far too timid. He was a tiger in those last months, ranting, raving, shouting at the nurses—some of which seemed to be imaginary—as the chaos of sickness crumpled a mind that for his age had been almost startling in its lucidity and a soul even more remarkable in its fortitude.

Which in this case had been transmuted into full-blown pig-headedness.

Yet, somehow it was a peaceful death—deep down I had to face the fact it was finally his time to go. He was, in his own singular way, ready to be with God. He passed away one fall morning at the hospital just as the sun was coming over the treetops. I was blessed to be there, home on fall break.

His death itself seems surreal, still—he was an immutable fixture of my life for so many years, it’s hard to shake the thought he’s still just around the corner, perhaps napping in his favorite chair or listening to some Miami radio station entirely too loudly. It was the last way we would have expected him to go—he’d survived almost a century’s worth of crises spiritual and physical and executed a fair share of death-defying leaps in his time.

José Morell Romero was born in rural Camaguëy Province, Cuba in 1906 and died in Tallahassee in September 2003. We called him Abi, short for abuelo, grandfather in Spanish. In between he’d been a revolutionary, a lawyer, a supreme court justice, an exile for liberty. Not to mention surviving a plane crash in the Yucatan jungle, a couple of rather spectacular falls, and the more prosaic dangers of a score of Nebraska winters. Going quietly (more or less) in bed was about the last thing you’d expect with that resume. I know we didn’t.

The Latin world sees death in a variety of ways, sometimes familiar, sometimes strange and disconcerting. The warriors of ancient Spain, the Spain of El Cid Campeador and the Reconquista, lived with her fetid stench in nostrils. Death had a Moorish face then, and they paid her little heed. They were ready to lay down their lives for God and Santiago, and trusted in God’s mercy to accept this sacrifice from their hands. Sometimes even dying didn’t stop them. St. Emilian came back from the dead one last time to turn back the Saracens, and Ruy Díaz de Bivar, El Cid, achieved his greatest victory shortly after being killed in battle.

The inbred, decaying world of the so-called Siglo de Oro saw Sister Death differently, carrying on a vast and bizarre courtly love-affair with her. Philip II, the most elementally Spanish of the Spanish Hapsburgs, virtually spent the last years of his life living in his own tomb—the vast, melancholic echoing passages of the gridiron of El Escorial, a vast palace built in the shape of the instrument that roasted St. Lawrence to death.

We used to joke that Abi would climb into the coffin to make sure he was running on schedule, but with strange Philip, it’s hard to say what precisely was going through his mind.

Renaissance Spain obsessed gloomily over her like Hamlet standing on the brink. Mexico chummied up to her instead. Looking at the Day of the Dead it seems almost like they want to take her out for dinner and dancing and give her a good time for all her trouble. And thus was born from that union the Day of the Dead with its sugar skulls, zombie mariachis and funereal banquets. Weird.

Sister Death—what are we to make of her? There’s a golden mean somewhere amid all this morbidity. Her embrace—the embrace of a happy death—is a bridal one; the Mexicans are right to laugh with her. Though I’ll pass on the skull candy. Perhaps Philip was right to keep her in mind, to wait in readiness by the altar where they would sing his Requiem in black vestments. Though he could have smiled in between the tears. But El Cid’s warriors, perhaps they treated her, treated our sister bodily Death, the best, the way she expects to be encountered. Simply and solemnly.

Regarding death, the Cuba where Abi grew up—a young nation full of hope, a love-hate relationship with America and plenty of cheery Protestant missionaries to further confuse an ill-catechized population—had no stake either in Iberian stoicism or romanticism or good-humored Mexican morbidity. Nonetheless, history has slowly brought the floating world of the Cuban exiles into conjunction with the ancestral memory of that early Spain, the melancholic Spain of the first days of the Reconquista where it seemed as if the green standard of Mohammed would fly over the peaks of Castille until the end of time.

Perhaps it’s a fanciful connection for a man whose heroes were industrious empiricists like Cesare Beccaria. Still, I can’t help thinking during his days as a professor teaching Spanish literature in the snowy reaches of Nebraska that he couldn’t ignore the similarity between the horsebacked figures of José Marti, Cuba’s warrior-poet founding father, and the knightly hero of the Poema del mío Cid of eight centuries earlier.

History—both his own and that of Cuba and Spain—had taught him to be ready to go at any moment. Flicking through the pages of his autobiography Revolution in Cuba it is mind-boggling to think of the number of times he could have died over the last ninety-odd years. In the three years from 1930 to 1933, every moment he passed through could have been his last.

In that year, he had enrolled at the University of Havana at the worst possible moment in its history, in the middle of a student revolution against the Cuban dictator Machado. He helped organize the resistance, smuggled opposition newspapers, survived a harrowing imprisonment, and even survived a terrifying, stormy boat-passage smuggling guns from Florida. And he was ready to die for Cuban liberty at any second.

He did the best with the time given to him, not knowing whether it’d be ten minutes or ten years. Perhaps that was why he was always so punctual. Now he’s off the clock and can finally get some rest.

***
And now, here we are again, sitting by another sickbed. I hesitate. I can’t say whether anything we learned before with Abi can help us here. The accident was severe, but her body is slowly recovering. Slowly. She’s lucid, unlike Abi. She can walk again, she can eat again—it’s not hopeless. That’s what makes it all the more frustrating, and what makes us more tempted to give up hope.

I know she wants to recover. I’m not sure she knows how anymore. The pain discourages her, and sends her back to the bed after an hour or two of sitting up. But she has to bear it—quite simply there’s no other choice if she expects to get over this hill to recovery.

I don’t know if she expects death. She doesn’t want it—and I think she’s right. It’s not her time. She thinks the pain is killing her, but—but I’m not sure if her mind has drawn out the logical conclusion of that sentence. Death. She’s lived so long for others—for me, for my mother, for Abi—I don’t know if she understands how to live for herself.

It’s a monument to the resilience of the human body and the fragility of the human soul, perhaps. Or perhaps they’re both fragile; but the fact she could survive the accident, much less get to where she is now, physically at least, is mind-blowing.

It also makes you wonder how you want to go. Perhaps it isn’t a good thing, but I’ve never thought much about death—besides maybe some half-flippant Catholic-nerd aesthetic thoughts about hoping I live long enough to die at a time with better liturgies so I can get the choir to sing Tomás Luis de Victoria’s Requiem over the coffin and the priest to wear black vestments. Just like crazy old Philip Hapsburg’s funeral. But that’s not what we should be focusing on, I have to grudgingly admit.

Do we have the fortitude to linger, or should we pray for the grace of a quick death with just enough time to ask for forgiveness. Seeing all this pain, maybe it’s best to get knifed in the confessional (right after saying our contrition, of course). Like Flannery O’Connor said, “She didn’t think she could be a saint, but maybe a martyr if they killed her quick.” Or perhaps we should hope for the grace to accept whatever God has laid out for us. Yes, that’s the best, but we’re still weak little creatures, and the question still lurks in the shadows of our mind.

While perhaps the Ars Moriendi, the medieval art of dying, is a bit much for today, it’s still worth thinking about. Today death is a dirty word: a little spot of meditation on it might go a long way to changing that. Right now, amid all these crises, we’ve had our fill. Your turn.

Life’s messy. Death shouldn’t be. That’s why I don’t think this is over, my grandmother’s struggle. She’s still fighting, even if maybe sometimes she’s a bit confused as to which side we’re on when we try and get her to eat more of her orange hospital mush. Let me tell you, those of you who think visiting the sick is one of the wimpier corporal acts of mercy. You don’t know nothing. It’s a struggle, and I hope each and every one of you prays that the three of us don’t end up sicker than she is once this is all over with.

We can’t fathom how she feels, we just see her familiar face looking weepy, imprisoned in a preposterously-designed neck brace. But she’s gotta do something herself. She can move, she can shuffle, she doesn’t have to be shifted every time there’s a pain in her spine or in her side. She has to let herself be distracted from the pain—to at least try. She has to teach herself now. We can’t do it for her anymore.

We’re stuck in a vacuum between tough love and that even tougher virtue, charity. And right now, I’m not sure which she needs more.