Part 11

FULLER.

“And yet as angels, in some brighter dreams, Call to the soul when man doth sleep, So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes, And into glory peep.” HENRY VAUGHAN.

What subject is so interesting to the full of life as that of death? What taste is so universal in childhood and youth as that for learning all that can be known of the thoughts and feelings of the dying? Did we not all, in our young days, turn to the death part in all biographies; to the death articles in all cyclopædias; to the discourses on sickness and death in all sermon books; to the prayers in the prospect of death in all books of devotion? Do not the most common-place writers of fiction crowd their novels with death scenes, and indifferent tragedy writers kill off almost all their characters? Do not people crowd to executions; and do not those who stay at home learn all they can of the last words and demeanour of the sufferers? Are not the visions of heroic children, (and of many grown children), chiefly about pain and a noble departure? Is there any curiosity more lively than that which we all feel about the revelations of persons resuscitated from drowning? Is it not their nearer position to death which makes sick persons so awful to children who are not familiar with them,--so interesting a subject of speculation to all? How is it then with the invalids themselves?

Nothing need be said here of short, sharp, fatal illness. Most of us know that short, sharp illnesses, not fatal, have not enlightened us much in regard to death and its appropriate feelings. Either pain or exhaustion usually causes, in such cases, an apathy which leaves nothing to be remembered or revealed. I was once told by a child, after some hours of exhausting pain, what she had overheard below,--that if some contingency, which she specified, did not arise, I should die before night. I fully believed it; and I felt nothing, unless it were some wonder at feeling nothing. Almost every person has a similar anecdote to tell; and there remains only the short and pregnant moral, that all preparations for leaving this life, and entering on the next, should be made while the body is well and the spirit alive.

But how does death appear to those who rest half-way between it and life, or are very gradually passing over from the one to the other?

Much depends, of course, on how far the vital forces are impaired--on whether the condition be such as to obscure or to purify the spiritual vision. If we want to know the effect of nearness and realisation, and not the pathology of the case, we must suppose the vital powers to remain faithful, however they may be weakened.

In such cases, I imagine the views of death remain much what they were before, though they must necessarily become more interesting, and the conception of them more clear. I know of no case of any one who before believed, or took for granted, a future life, who began to disbelieve or doubt it through sickness. I have known cases of those who disbelieved it in health, seeing no reason to change their opinion on the approach of death,--being content to have lived--satisfied to leave life when its usefulness and pleasantness are gone--not desiring a renewal of it, but ready to awake again at the word of their Creator, if indeed a further existence be in reserve for them. Such cases I have known: but none of a material change of views in the prospect of death.

To me, the presumption of the inextinguishable vitality of the spirit afforded by the experience of material decay, is the strongest I am acquainted with. No amount of evidence of any fact before the reason, no demonstration of any truth to the understanding, affords to me such a sense of certainty as the action of the spirit yields, with regard to its own immortality, at times when there can be no deception from animal spirits, or from immediate sympathy with other minds, or from what is called the natural desire for life. It is a mistake to say, as is frequently said, that, with regard to a future life, “the wish is father to the thought,” always or generally. Long-suffering invalids can tell that there are seasons, neither few nor short, when the wishes are all the other way,--when life is so oppressive to the frame that the happiest news would be that we should soon be non-existent,--when, thankful as we are that our beloved friends, the departed and the remaining, are to live for evermore with God, and enjoy his universe and its intercourses, we should be glad to, decline it for ourselves, and to lie down in an eternal, unbroken rest. At these seasons, when, though we know all that can be said of renewed powers and relish, and a more elevated and privileged life beyond the grave, we cannot feel it; and, while admitting all such consolations as truth, we cannot enjoy them, but, as a mere matter of inclination, had rather resign our privileges;--in these seasons, when the wish would be father to an opposite thought, the belief in our immortality is at the strongest; the truth of our inability to die becomes overwhelming, and the sleep of the grave appears too light to satisfy our need of rest. I believe it to be owing to this natural and unconquerable belief in our immortality, that suicide is not more common than it is among sufferers. I am persuaded that the almost intolerable weariness of long sicknesses, unrelieved by occasional fits of severe pain, would impel many to put out a hand to the laudanum-bottle, in hours when religious considerations and emotions cannot operate through the indisposition of the frame, if it were not for the intense conviction that life would not thus be extinguished, nor even suspended. I do not believe much in the “natural love of life,” which is usually said to be the preventive in such cases. I do believe in the vast operation of religious affections in withholding from the act: but I also believe in frequent instances of abstinence from death, from a mere despair of getting rid of life--a sense of necessary immortality.

I have spoken of the relief afforded by visitations of severe pain. These rally the vital forces, and dismiss the temptation, by substituting torture for weariness--at times a welcome change. The healthy are astonished at the good spirits of sufferers under tormenting complaints; and the most strait-laced preachers of fortitude and patience admit an occasional wonder that there is no suicide among that class of sufferers. The truth is, however, that the influence of acute pain, when only occasional, and not extremely protracted, is vivifying and cheering on the whole. The immediate anguish causes a temporary despair: but the reaction, when the pain departs, causes a relish of life such as the healthy and the gay hardly enjoy. Though a slow death by a torturing disease is a lot unspeakably awful to meet, and even to contemplate, there can be no question to the experienced, that illness in which severe pain sometimes occurs is less trying than some in which a different kind of suffering is not relieved by such a stimulus and its consequent sensations.

Thus much it is useful to know,--useful to the student of human nature, to the nurse, and to a sufferer under sentence of lasting disease. But instances have been known, perplexing to those inexperienced in pain, of devout thankfulness for the suffering itself, under its immediate and agonising pressure; and this in men far superior to the superstition of believing present pain the purchase-money of future ease,--the fine paid down here for admission to heavenly benefits hereafter.

Strange as this rejoicing in misery may appear, it is to some minds as natural and authorised by the laws of our being, as the joy which attends the acquisition of a great idea, or the verification of a potent truth. It is as verification that such pain is welcome. To men of the most spiritual tone of mind, every attestation of the reality of unseen objects is a boon of the highest order; and no such attestation can surpass in clearness that which is afforded by the sensible progress of decay in the material part of the sufferer’s frame. All attempt at description is here vain. Nothing but experience can convey a conception of the intense reality in which God appears supreme, Christ and his gospel divine, and holiness the one worthy aim and chief good, when our frame is refusing its offices, and we can lay hold on no immediate outward support and solace. It is conceivable to the healthy and happy, that, if waked up from sleep by a tremendous earthquake, the first recoil of terror might be followed by an intense perception of the fixity and tranquillity of the spiritual world, in immediate contact with the turbulence of the outward and lower scene. It is conceivable to us all that the drowning man may, as is recorded, see his whole life, in all its minute details, presented to him, as in clear vision, in one instant of time, as he lapses into death. Well,--something like both these experiences is that of extreme and dissolving pain, to a certain order of minds. The vision and the attestation are present, without the horrors caused, amidst an earthquake, by the misery of a perishing multitude, though at the cost of more bodily anguish than in the case of the drowning man. Though there may be keen doubts in a modest sufferer how long such anguish can be decently endured,--whether the filial submission will hold out against torment,--there is through, above and beyond such doubts, so overpowering an impression of the vitality of the conscious part of us, and of the reality of the highest objects for which it was created and has lived,--so inexpressible a sense of the value of what we have prayed for, and of the evanescence of what we are losing,--that it is no wonder if the dying have been known to call for aid in their thanksgivings, and to struggle for sympathy even in their incommunicable convictions. If the shadows of the dark valley part, and disclose to such an one the regions that lie in the light of God’s countenance, it is no wonder that he calls on those near him to look and see, though he is making the transit alone.

Those who speculate outside on the experience of the sick-room, are eager to know whether this solitary transit is often gone over in imagination, and whether with more or less relish and success than by those at ease and in full vigour. In my childhood, I attended, as an observer, one fine morning, at the funeral of a person with whom I was well acquainted, without feeling any strong affection. I was somewhat moved by the solemnity, and by the tears of the family; but the most powerful feeling of the day was excited when the evening closed in, gusty and rainy, and I thought of the form I knew so well, left alone in the cold and the darkness, while everybody else was warm and sheltered. I felt that, if I had been one of the family, I could not have neglectfully and selfishly gone to bed that night, but must have passed the hours till daylight by the grave. Every child has felt this: and every child longs to know whether a sick friend contemplates that first night in the cold grave, and whether the prospect excites any emotions.

Surely;--we do contemplate it--frequently--eagerly. In the dark night, we picture the whole scene, under every condition the imagination can originate. By day, we hold up before our eyes that most wondrous piece of our worldly wealth--our own right-hand; examine its curious texture and mechanism, and call up the image of its sure deadness and decay, And with what emotions? Each must answer for himself. As for me, it is with mere curiosity, and without any concern, about the lonely, cold grave. I doubt whether any one’s imagination rests there,--whether there is ever any panic about the darkness and the worm of the narrow house.

As for our real future home,--the scene where our living selves are to be,--how is it possible that we should not be often resorting thither in imagination, when it is to be our next excursion from our little abode of sickness and helplessness,--when it is so certain that we cannot be disappointed of it, however wearily long it may be before we go,--when all that has been best in our lives, our sabbaths, all sunset evenings and starry nights, all our reverence and love that are sanctified by death,--when all these things have always pointed to our future life and been associated with it, how is it possible that we should not be ever looking forward to it, now when our days are low and weary, and our pleasures few? The liability is to too great familiarity with the subject. When our words make children look abashed, and call a constraint over the manners of those we are conversing with, and cause even the most familiar eyes to be averted, we find ourselves reminded that the subject of a person’s death is one usually thought not easy to discuss with him. In our retirement, we are apt to forget, till expressly reminded, the importance of distinctions of rank and property in society, so nearly as they vanish in our survey of life, in comparison with moral differences; and, in like manner, we have to recal an almost lost idea, that death is an awkward topic, except in the abstract, when our casual mention of a will, or of some transaction to follow our death, introduces an awe and constraint into conversation.

Such familiarity may be, and often is, condemned as presumptuous. There may be cases in which it is so; but I think it would be hard to make the censure general. The confident reckoning on the joys of heaven for one’s self, on any grounds, while others are supposed to be condemned to a contrary lot, is a superstition more offensive to my feelings than that which renders a trembling soul, clinging to life, aghast at the idea of meeting its Maker and Father. But a soul without any self-complacency, or ignorant confidence, may yet be easy and eager in the prospect of entering upon that awful new scene. Setting aside all the inducements from the hope of relief and rest, the humblest spirit may be conceived of as tranquil and aspiring in full view of the transition; and this under a full sense of its sins and failures, and without reliance on any imaginary security,--without need of other reliance than its Father in Heaven. There may be--there is--in some, so continual a regard to God in life, that there cannot seem anything very new and strange in going anywhere where He is. There maybe--and there is--in some, so earnest a desire to be purified from sin, that they would undergo anything on earth to be freed from it, and therefore fear nothing, but rather welcome any discipline which may be reserved beyond. Knowing that the revelation of the evil of their sin must be most painful, but also most necessary to their progress, they are ready, even eager for it, pressing forward to the suffering through which they hope to be made perfect. If with such dispositions is joined that ardent, reverential filial love which generates perfect trust, and rejects any interposition between itself and the benign countenance in whose light it lives, there may be nothing blameable or dangerous in the readiness for death, or in the happy familiarity with which the event may be spoken of. It is a case in which every man should be slow to judge his neighbour, while the natural verdict of thoughtful observers would seem to be that a sufferer under irremediable illness, who preserves a general patience, cares for others’ happiness more than for his own, and has always lived in view of an eternal life, can hardly be wrong in anticipating that life with ease and cheerfulness, whatever analysis or judgment dogmatists may make of his state of mind.

Whether our imaginings of Death are more or less a true anticipation of it, can be proved only by experience. It may be found that they are no more just than my idea of the matter when I was a child, when my brother and I dug a grave, and then lay down in it, by turns, and shut our eyes, to try what dying was like. Practically, such failures of conception cannot matter much. A person who is setting out on foreign travel for the first time, takes no harm by expecting the voyage and the landing among foreigners to be something very unlike what they prove. His preconceptions answered their purpose, by rendering him ready and willing to go, and preventing his being taken by surprise by the summons. Still, those of us have greatly the advantage whose minds are enlarged by knowledge, and their imaginations animated and strengthened by exercise. Some of the most innocent and kind-hearted people I have known have been the most afraid of death,--not from consciousness of sin, but from dread of overpowering novelty--from a horror of feeling lost among scenes where there is nothing familiar; while, in opposite cases, a philosophic interest and wonder have been known to go far in reconciling a highly intellectual man to leaving the companions he loved best in life.

There can be no question as to the difference in the ease of departure (moral conditions being supposed the same) of the housewife, whose days and faculties have been occupied with the market, the shop, and the home where her whole life has been passed, and the philosopher, whose nerves thrill with delight, unmixed with terror, at the very first view of the new wonders revealed by Lord Rosse’s speculum. It is striking, that a man about to be thrust forth from life for a plot of murder on an enormous scale, should, while waiting for death the next moment, whisper to a fellow-sufferer, “Now we shall soon know the great secret;” while a pure and beneficent being, beloved by God and his neighbour, should pray to be loaded with any weight of years and sufferings rather than go from the familiar scene on which he has opened his eyes every day for sixty years. “Grand secrets” have no charms for him, but only horrors; and as for new scenes, even within our own corner of the earth, mountains and waterfalls overpower him, and he shuffles back to shops and streets.

Let persons so constitutionally different be shut into a sick-room, knowing that they will issue from it only by death, and what will they do? By the habit of looking forward to this exit for relief, the timid may come to speak and think of it as tranquilly as the speculative; but then, when the sensation overtakes him, the difference is again apparent. It does seem as if there were in the seizure of death a sensation wholly peculiar, and which cannot be mistaken. Cases of unconsciousness are no evidence to the contrary; and there are so many instances of decisive declaration by the dying, as to make the fact pretty certain. Then finally appears (supposing both conscious) the distinction in the act of dying, between the enlarged and speculative mind and the contracted one which clings to details. Then the harassed sufferer, who has a hundred times exclaimed, in the struggles of disease, “O! this is dying many times over!” shudders out at last, in quite another tone, “O God! this is death!” Then the exhausted debauchee, after every hollow show of preparation by decorous prayer, mutters, in the terror of the reality, “O God! this is death!” At such a time, the philosophic physician, seizing his sole opportunity of experience of the phenomena of death, keeps his finger on his pulse as his heart is coming to a stop, and notifies its last beat as a fact in useful science. At such a time, the diligent Christian--a judge, a rich man, without a crook in his lot--suddenly sentenced, struggles to breathe into his wife’s bending ear his last words: “This is death! Our children ... tell them--I have had everything man could enjoy ... and all is nothing in comparison with holiness. Pure and holy--make them. Care for nothing else! O! all is well!” When he could no longer speak or move, his countenance was full of soul; not a trace of fear upon it, but a whole heaven of joyful expectation. Here are differences!

Of course, there is no waiting till the last moment for these differences to show themselves. Outside enquirers may be satisfied that invalids’ anticipation of death varies with their habits of mind. Some merely anticipate; some contemplate. With some, the anticipation is merely of relief and rest; with others it is worthier of our human and Christian hope. In no case of permanent illness can I conceive the idea to be otherwise than familiar, under one aspect or another; so familiar, as that it is astonishing to us that we can obtain so little conversation upon it as a reality--a certainty in full view. To us this seems more extraordinary than it would be if the friends of Parry, and Franklin, or Back, were, as the season for a Polar expedition drew nigh, to talk to them about everything else, but be constrained and shy on that. I say “more extraordinary,” because it is not everybody that is bound, sooner or later, to the North Pole, but only a few crews; whereas, all have an interest in the passage of that other, that “narrow sea,” and in the “better country” which is its further shore.

Perhaps the familiarity of the idea of death is by nothing so much enhanced to us as by the departure before us of those who have sympathised in our prospect. The close domestic interest thus imparted to that other life is such as I certainly never conceived of when in health, and such as I observe people in health do not conceive of now. It seems but the other day that I was receiving letters of sympathy and solace, and also of religious and philosophical investigation as to how life here and hereafter appeared to me; letters which told of activity, of labours, and journeyings, which humbled me by a sense of idleness and uselessness, while they spoke of humbling feelings in regarding the privileges of my seclusion. All this is as if it were yesterday: and now, these correspondents have been gone for years. For years we have thought of them as knowing “the grand secret,” as familiarized with those scenes we are for ever prying into, while I lie no wiser (in such a comparison) than when they endeavoured to learn somewhat of these matters from me. And besides these close and dear companions, what departures are continually taking place! Every new year there are several--friends, acquaintance, or strangers--who shake their heads when I am mentioned, in friendly regret at another year opening before me without prospect of health--who send me comforts or luxuries, or words of sympathy, amidst the pauses of their busy lives; and before another year comes round, they have dropped out of our world--have learned quickly far more than I can acquire by my leisure--and from being merely outside my little spot of life, have passed to above and beyond it. Little ones who speculated on me with awe--youthful ones who ministered to me with pity--- busy and important persons, who gave a cordial but passing sigh to the lot of the idle and helpless; some of all these have outstripped me, and left me looking wistfully after them. Such incidents make the future at least as real and familiar to me as the outside world; and every permanent invalid will say the same: and we must not be wondered at if we speak of that great interest of ours oftener, and with more familiarity, than others use.

Neither should we be wondered at if we speak with a confidence which some cannot share, of meeting these our friends, and communing with them, when we ourselves depart. We have no power to doubt of this, if we believe at all that we shall live hereafter. I have said how intensely we feel that our spiritual part is indestructible. We feel no less vividly that of that spiritual part the affections are the true vitality; that they are the soul within the soul--our inmost life. The affections cannot exist without their objects; and our congenial friends--the brethren of our soul--therefore survive as surely as God survives. If God is recognisable by the worshipper, and Christ by the Christian, the beloved are recognisable by those who love. To demur to this to the sufferer who (all other life being weakened and embittered) lives by the affections, divine and human, is, to him, much like doubting whether the atmosphere bears any relation to music, or the human understanding to truth.

If there are hours when, through pain and weakness, we would fain decline existence altogether, as a sick and wearied child frets at sunshine and music, and would rather sleep in darkness and silence, there is no moment in which we do not believe, as if we saw, that the departed righteous are in communion, full and active, in exact proportion as the ardour and fidelity of their mutual love deserves and necessitates. We believe this as if we saw it, whatever be our own immediate mood, as, on every night of winter, however cloudy, we are well assured that the constellations are in the sky,--that Orion and the Wain have risen and are circling, steady, clear and serene, whatever be the state of the elements below them. As the life of the sick-room must necessarily be, whether its objects be high or low, one of faith and not of sight, those who visit it may easily perceive that it is not the appropriate field for demonstration. In its own province Demonstration is supreme. There let it dictate and pronounce. But we sufferers inhabit a separate region of human experience, where there is another and a prophetic oracle; where the voice of Demonstration itself must be dumb before that of the steadfast, incommunicable assurance of the soul.

Here are some of the aspects of Death to the long-suffering Invalid.

TEMPER.

“We are not ourselves When nature, being oppressed, commands the mind To suffer with the body.” SHAKSPERE.

“Behold thy trophies within thee, not without thee. Lead thine own captivity captive, and be Cæsar unto thyself.”

SIR THOMAS BROWN.

It is very surprising, and rather amusing, to invalids whose constitution and disease dispose them to other kinds of ill-temper rather than irritability, to perceive how this tendency, and no other, is set up as a test of temper by persons inexperienced in sickness. There are cases, and they are not few, where an invalid’s freedom from irritability of temper is a merit of a very high order indeed: but there are many,--perhaps more,--where, to award praise on this ground, is like extolling the sick person for being worthy of trust with untold gold, or for his being never known to game or get drunk. This last, indeed, may,--amidst the sinkings of illness, with wine and laudanum in the closet,--often be actually the greater merit. It is a case in which every thing depends on the existence of temptation. Persons suffering under frequent fever, or certain kinds of pain or nervous disturbance, or afflicted with ill-qualified nurses, may be pardoned for almost any degree of irritability, or may be unspeakably meritorious in resisting the tendency, with more or less steadiness. But there are some of us who cannot but smile at compliments on our freedom from irritability, when we feel that we never have the slightest inclination to be cross, nor have the least excuse for being so,--while we may be most abasingly aware of other kinds of frailty of temper.