Departure Rehearses Death

Who’s turned us round like this, so that we always,

do what we may, retain the attitude
of someone who’s departing? Just as he,
on the last hill, that shows him all this valley
for the last time, will turn and stop and linger,
we live our lives, for ever taking leave.

- Rilke, "Eighth Duino Elegy," Leishman & Spender translation



For some lucky people, life is full of nothing but arrivals. A new house, a new place to explore, a new view to take in and make one's own. But for me, as I grow older, it's the departures that matter more, as I find myself looking back over my shoulder at where I've been rather than forward at what is ahead. Nearly ten years later, I think about my departure from the United States. My sister drove me to the airport on a typically icebound November morning in Anchorage. I was in a hurry, which is how journeys always affect us. There is no time to relax until we are safely waiting outside the gate. My sister drove past all the airline entrances without finding the one for my airline. I got angry with her when we had to go all the way back around to look again. Having found it, I got out of her burgundy Ford Explorer - that she had named "Victoria" - and we embraced on the sidewalk, my two overstuffed duffel bags beside me. She must have been crushed with me leaving her alone in Alaska for an uncertain duration. I felt the rush of travel, the impatience to be off. But all I have ever been able to think about in the decade since that day is my sister's long drive home across Anchorage to a house empty but for her little dog. No one told me what became of "Lucky," a Scottish Terrier, when my sister died last October. I wonder if her friends didn't simply return him to the shelter where she found him.

Tomorrow my small family and I are moving kit & caboodle, from a large two-storey house into a small two-bedroom apartment a little more than a hundred yards down the highway. It's my sixth move in nine years here on my Philippine island. Moving is always a sad affair - packing up memories, all the while having to quickly decide which mementos are worth saving and which ones have lost their lustre and are ok to throw away. It is also a cleansing experience, a chance to make an accounting of where I am in my life, how far I've come and how much farther I'm prepared to go before I quit all my wandering and try and find home. Having learned a long time ago to "travel light," I 'm afraid that a memento must have more than mere sentimental value to convince me to save it.

Reading The Collected Stories of John Updike, at least half of which I first read about thirty-five years ago, my memory guided me to one particular story. According to the Note on the Texts in the back of the first volume, Collected Early Stories, the story '"I Will Not Let Thee Go, Except Thou Bless Me" was written in London. It was submitted to The New Yorker on May 4, 1969, and was published in the issue of October 11, 1969. It was collected in Museums and Women (1972) [where I first discovered it] and The Early Stories (2003). The text from The Early Stories is used here." That means it was revised by Updike, who liked to revise. So it wasn't the same text I read thirty-five years ago after all. Evidently, Updike didn't believe in the development of his art, not in its ascent and definitely not in its decline. He expanded on his great mentor's [John Cheever's] brilliant pictures of life in the American suburbs with the addition of sex.

In "I Will Not Let Thee Go...," Updike tells of the Bridesons and their last days in Connecticut before they move to Texas where Tom Brideson, in computer software, has a job waiting for him. They are both visited by bad dreams inspired by their imminent move from the comfort of the familiar to the disturbing unfamiliar. "Lou (for Louise) had been sorting and packing and destroying for days, and her sleep was gouged by nightmares of trunks that would not close, of doors that opened to reveal forgotten secret rooms crammed with yet more debris from ten years' residence - with unmended furniture and outgrown toys and stacked Lifes and National Geographics and hundreds, thousands, of children's drawings, each one a moment, a memory, impossible to keep, impossible to discard."

"And Tom, hurriedly tying up loose ends in the city, lunching one day with his old employers and the next day with representatives of his new, returning each evening to an emptier house and increasingly apprehensive children, slept badly also. The familiar lulling noises - car horn and dog bark, the late commuter train's slither and the main drag's murmur - had become irritants; the town had unravelled into tugging threads of love. Departure rehearses death."

Their "friends of over a decade" throw the Bridesons a going away party. Tom looks at them as if for the last time, knowing that in a week they will all still be there but he will not. "These women: he had seen their beauty pass from the smooth bodily complacence of young motherhood to the angular self-possession, slightly gray and wry, of veteran wives. To have witnessed this, to have seen in the sides of his vision so many pregnancies and births and quarrels and near-divorces and divorces and affairs and near-affairs and arrivals in vans and departures in vans, loomed, in retrospect, as the one accomplishment of his tenancy here - a heap of organic incident that in a village of old would have moldered into wisdom. But he was not wise, merely older."

We inhabit places for a time and the places inhabit us. Robert Graves once wrote about having some friends stay in his house. Sleeping in the guest room, they told him the following morning of the strange, unfamiliar dreams that visited them during the night. "Ah," Graves told them, "Norman left those behind for you." The bi-polar poet Norman Cameron had been the last guest to sleep in the guest room.

I can't say that I encountered anyone's left-behind dreams in this house. There were stories of a ghost, but none of us encountered it. In another house I lived in nine years ago, I was positive (or as positive as one can be about such things) that there was a dwende (from the Spanish "duende") in the house. I had several encounters with a very small invisible something touching me where I slept and even shoving me in the sala.

No such thing here. The twenty-three months of our stay here have given us two memorable Christmases. My girlfriend placed our little Christmas tree in the corner of the upstairs landing and bedecked the balustrade with Christmas lights colored red, green, and a color somewhere between orange and yellow (the Chinese manufacturer couldn't afford quality control). 

So much - too much - drama inside these walls. The news of the deaths of three people dear to my girlfriend and I arrived over the course of eight months last year. What if Updike got it wrong? Maybe it's death that rehearses departure?

I suppose I should be happy to leave, but I am not. The photo above was taken by me on the day I moved in. It shows the view looking east from my bedroom window upstairs. Every morning I looked at that view over the rooftops, past the power lines and the palm trees, at the weather that might be coming, or that was going away. Ready or not, here we go.


(1) Rilke, Eighth Duino Elegy, Leishman & Spender translation.