I arrived at the final chapter last night before going to bed, and found it, like everyone else who has read the novel must have found it, unforseeable, extraordinary, abrupt, and exquisitely moving. I got out of bed this morning and prepared myself for an errand in town. Returning home before lunchtime, I sat down in my sala, reached for my tablet and opened Facebook. The first thing I saw was a message from an old friend telling everyone he knew that his 13-year-old son's mother had died and that the boy’s heart was broken. My friend took the time to explain the circumstances of the woman's death, and he thanked individuals who had helped him through the arrangements of the woman's passing.
I didn't know the woman nor did I know anything about her life or her illnesses. She was a complete stranger to me when my friend announced her death this morning. But I suddenly found myself crying, as someone would cry at the news that a dear friend had been terribly hurt. And in the midst of my tears I remembered Tommy Wilhelm in the last chapter of Seize the Day. Walking down a Manhattan street, after fleeing his hotel after his estranged wife, Margaret, had hung up on him, he thought he recognized the man who had cheated him out of the little money he had left and somehow found himself helplessly swept up in a crowd of mourners entering a synagogue. Bewildered, feeling lost and hopeless, he was in the line of people filing past the open coffin:
He stood along the wall with others and looked toward the coffin and the slow line that was moving past it, gazing at the face of the dead. Presently he too was in this line, and slowly, slowly, foot by foot, the beating of his heart anxious, thick, frightening, but somehow also rich, he neared the coffin and paused for his turn, and gazed down. He caught his breath when he looked at the corpse, and his face swelled, his eyes shone hugely with instant tears.
The dead man was gray-haired. He had two large waves of gray hair at the front. But he was not old. His face was long, and he had a bony nose, slightly, delicate twisted. His brows were raised as though he had sunk in to the final thought. Now at last he was with it, after the end of all distractions, and when his flesh was no longer flesh. And by this meditative look Wilhelm was so struck that he could not go away. In spite of the tinge of horror, and then the splash of heartsickness that he felt, he could not go. He stepped out of line and remained beside the coffin; his eyes filled silently and through his still tears he studied the man as the line of visitors moved with veiled looks past the satin coffin toward the standing bank of lilies, lilacs, roses. With great stifling sorrow, almost admiration, Wilhelm nodded and nodded. On the surface, the dead man with his formal shirt and his tie and silk lapels and his powdered skin looked so proper; only a little beneath so--black, Wilhelm thought, so fallen in the eyes.
Standing a little apart, Wilhelm began to cry. He cried at first softly and from sentiment, but soon from deeper feeling. He sobbed loudly and his face grew distorted and hot, and the tears stung his skin. A man--another human creature, was what first went through his thoughts, but other and different things were torn from him. What'll I do? I'm stripped and kicked out.... Oh, Father, what do I ask of you? What'll I do about the kids--Tommy, Paul? My children. And Olive? My dear! Why, why, why--you must protect me against that devil who wants my life. If you want it, then kill me. Take, take it, take it from me.
Soon he was past words, past reason, coherence. He could not stop. The source of all tears had suddenly sprung open within him, black, deep, and hot, and they were pouring out and convulsed his body, bending his stubborn head, bowing his shoulders, twisting his face, crippling the very hands with which he held the handkerchief. His efforts to collect himself were useless. The great knot of ill and grief in his throat swelled upward and he gave in utterly and held his face and wept. He cried with all his heart.
He, alone of all the people in the chapel, was sobbing. No one knew who he was.
One woman said, "Is that perhaps the cousin from New Orleans they were expecting?"
"It must be somebody real close to carry on so."
"Oh my, oh my! To be mourned like that," said one man and looked at Wilhelm's heavy shaken shoulders, his clutched face and whitened fair hair, with wide, glinting, jealous eyes.
"The man's brother, maybe?"
"Oh, I doubt that very much," said another bystander. "They're not alike at all. Night and day."
The flowers and lights fused ecstatically in Wilhelm's blind, wet eyes; the heavy sea-like music came up to his ears. It poured into him where he had hidden himself in the center of a crowd by the great and happy oblivion of tears. He heard it and sank deeper than sorrow, through torn sobs and cries toward the consummation of his heart's ultimate need.
It is the strangeness and suddenness of the novel's last scene that catches the reader by surprise. Having lived through Tommy Wilhelm's long day alongside him, feeling his rising frustration and the congestion in his chest, and his inability to explain to his father or his wife or to Tamkin, the charlatan whose cockeyed wisdom causes Tommy to trust him enough to invest his remaining savings in the trading fortunes of lard on Wall Street, what he is feeling, what he wants in his life, made the release of his tears, at the side of a strange man's coffin, provoked by his love and his fear and his grief at the waste of half his life, an utterly convincing and uplifting conclusion to his day.
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