Nearing prepared for death> ‘Words’ brings back fond recollections

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LIGHT ON AGING AND DYING: Wise Words Selected by Helen Nearing, Tilbury House Publishers, Gardiner, Maine, 153 pages, $14.95.

Helen and Scott Nearing thought a lot about death, not in a morbid way, but in a practical way. They were prepared.

I remember in the early 1960s, sitting in their living room at the first Forest Farm in Harborside. It was one of those Monday night meetings when Helen read aloud from a pile of clippings she had saved from the week’s New York Times, and Scott sat silently on a hard wooden stool by the fireplace, his hands clasped around his knees.

Helen chose provocative stuff to read, and when she was done, she took up her knitting, knitting and purling, knitting and purling, while Scott and whoever else had come that evening discussed the topic of the night.

That particular evening, the one that Helen’s recent death reminded me of, we were talking about death, and I was sitting on one of the two long wooden storage boxes that served as horizontal file cabinets. Even covered with red vinyl cushions, they weren’t comfortable. There were no comfortable chairs in the Nearings’ house.

Anyway, we were talking about death, and Helen, looking up from her knitting, said, “Scotto and I are prepared.”

“What do you mean?” someone asked.

Scott chuckled and said in his more accurate way, “Our coffins are prepared, at least.”

“Your coffins?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “You’re sitting on one of them now.”

I remember another time, around the lunch table in the old house, snowy fields and the distant bay sparkling out the window, soup steaming in our wooden bowls, when the subject of death came up.

“When I die,” I said, “I’m going to haunt this land because I love it so much.” (I blush to write this, but it was a naive 20-year-old saying that.)

Scott stopped spooning soup from bowl to mouth and looked at me. “Well, that would be a waste of your time,” he said and resumed eating.

“Why?”

“Because there are more important things to do after you die,” he replied and went back to his soup.

“For instance … ,” Helen baited him.

“For instance,” he said, “when I die I know I have a job waiting for me. My job is to help those who have died unprepared or have died suddenly or violently. I will help them make the transition.”

He resumed eating his soup while the rest of us at the table, Helen excepted, looked at each other astounded.

Now they are both dead, Scott and Helen. Their “coffins,” however, remain behind, more useful as furniture, more useful, perhaps, as reminders for the living than containers for the dead.

I don’t know if Scott took up his new “job” after his slow and tortuous death by starvation that was so difficult to watch. But Helen might know, for she went around that last curve in her car and met a tree, and died soon after. Violently. Unexpectedly. Not unprepared, though, as her little book of “wise words” proves.

“If only I could secure a violent death, what a fine success! I wish to die in my boots; no more Land of Counterpane for me. … To be thrown from my horse, … rather than pass again through that slow dissolution.” Helen placed this quote from Robert Louis Stevenson in the middle section of the book, the section on “The Art of Dying,” and you could say she had mastered the art of dying in her boots.

Divided into three parts, “Good Old Age,” “The Art of Dying,” and “Death, the Great Good,” Helen’s last book is a collection of sayings, maxims from writers, sages, mystics, scoundrels even, quotations from the famous and the obscure.

Leo Tolstoy, whom Scott admired, rubs elbows with New Age guru Gay Luce; a paragraph from Goethe follows one from Mencken. Much of writing is about what hasn’t been experienced, the Great Unknown. It’s an eccentric, eclectic mix that reflects Helen’s wide reading, her voluminous library, and her sense that truth, or signposts to truth, can be found in the strangest places. What seems missing, at first glance, is Helen, herself.

Helen Knothe Nearing was a quotable woman.

But the wise words she gives us in “Light on Aging and Dying” come mostly from others’ mouths. In the short “Foreward,” however, she leaves us some of the quotable Helen.

“It is here and now that we make the conditions of any future life,” she writes. “It does not matter much if we continue as our present personal entities. More important is what we have learned and what we have contributed to the general welfare. The more aware we become, the more we participate productively, the more lessons we can learn, the more we enhance the whole.”

In some of the selections from other quotables, Helen, the personal entity, shines through. In a verse, again from “The Art of Dying” section, Helen seems to sweep by, her skates flashing, her head bent into the winter wind, arms clasped behind her back: “Smile, Death, as you fasten the blades to my feet for me. /On, on let us skate past the sleeping willows dusted with snow; /Show me your face. Why, the eyes are kind! /And we will not speak of life or believe in it or remember it as we go” (Charlotte New, The Farmer’s Bride, 1920).

Perhaps Helen shows herself most clearly in the arrangement of the wise words, particularly at the end of the book. Sometimes the reader is left to puzzle out connections between quotes, sometimes the connections are transparent.

Helen and her editors obviously cared about creating a sense of process in the book, and the reader is rewarded at the end with profundity from the Bhagavad Gita (“Never the Spirit was born/The Spirit shall cease to be, never…”), and, finally, with a challenge to participate in the mystery of life, of death, of “cosmic consciousness.”

The shortcomings of this collection are not to be found on a cosmic scale. Readers must be wary of the dates that supposedly fix these wise words in time.

For instance, all the verses from Emily Dickinson (now there was a woman who was an expert on death and dying!) are dated in the 1890s, after Dickinson’s death.

In fact, some of the poems selected by Helen for this book were written in the 1850s, and worse yet, the 1890 edition of Dickinson’s poetry is notoriously inaccurate and just plain bad, too bad to quote from. Not all the wise words included here will seem wise to everyone.

I tagged a few because they were awful to the point of being funny. Jane Roberts, the Seth channeler was one of my favorites in this category. The lack of inclusive language, particularly by Helen herself, seems odd, if not dated. But these are minor points.

Read this collection of wise words. Better still, don’t read just these bits and pieces of wisdom; go to the original sources. Then, in the spirit of Scott and Helen, make your own collection of wise words. Grow your own food for your soul as you would cultivate a garden. And be fearless in moving contrary to a society that all too often denies justice and honor and fair passage to the old, the weak, the dying, the downtrodden, the … Well, you get the picture.

And while you do it, perhaps this will be helpful to remember: “Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If you’re alive, it isn’t,” (Richard Bach, 1977).

Mary Lou Dietrich lives on Cape Rosier.