A Walk with Jane Austen (21 page)

I am afraid it looked like I was moving into the cathedral for a while. I decided to stop through on my way to Lyme so I had to drag my suitcase and backpack with me the whole way; because of all the terrorism,
the tourist office will no longer hold on to them. So I rolled the whole unbalanced mess through the line, in front of the desk where they plead for a donation, up to the center of the nave, out the side door up the steps and through the turnstile into the bathroom, back in through the exit up the nave and over to the side aisle to look for Austen's memorial, up the steps at the back of the church to try to see the choir loft and chapels. My luggage sat beside me as reverently as possible.

The whole town felt better and more real than Canterbury. The brick streets are wider; there is still commerce but less schmaltz. They seem to be stores that real people use. You can walk through the whole center of town, which is blocked off to traffic. There were people out doing business, and not just hordes of tourists (sneers the girl dragging her suitcase behind her).

I loved the cathedral, in spite of the noise and crowds of schoolchildren, not all of whom had intelligent, good-looking masters keeping them in line.
(“Scuze, scuze
,“I was interrupted by a group of Italian junior-high kids in the middle of my reverie in front of Jane's memorial. They will not remember what it was when they get home and look at the pictures.) And I know this is a building Jane loved. It's so much like Canterbury that I don't know how they could feel so materially different, but Winchester felt open and welcoming; Canterbury felt heavy and dark and oppressive. Huge green spaces around the cathedral were filled with groups of teenagers hanging out, talking, and smoking.

My favorite is the back window, a jumble of colors and patterns. The panes, as most, had portrayed various biblical stories, but they were ruined by the parliamentary forces of William Waller during the Civil War. Waller's troops entered the church during a morning service— some on horseback, with noise and drums and chaos, and decided to use
the window for target practice. The local story is that when the townspeople heard, they rushed in and gathered up all the pieces. Twenty years later, the original pieces of glass were put back in however they could get them to fit, so now it is an entire wall of comforting mess.

They say in the early years after Jane's death people would come to see her grave, and the verger had no idea why they were looking for the grave of this country girl. She was buried here almost a week after she died with the epitaph Henry wrote for her tomb:

“They know their loss to be irreparable.” I love that line. Her nieces and nephews said that they went back to the Chawton Cottage after they had grown up a bit, after Jane was gone and when Cassandra was getting older. They found it had none of the charm they remembered.

Henry, Edward, Frank, and Jane's nephew James Edward carried the coffin. Women did not go to funerals then, for fear of their emotions,
so Cassandra could only watch the procession carry her sister, “the sun of [her] life,” until they went down the street and around the corner and she “had lost her forever.”
¹⁸

Jane's death makes me think of my Aunt Ginny. She was lovely. I mean not in the traditional beautiful person sense, but she was a lovely person. Her face and hair sort of reminded me of a throwback to the forties, maybe because her hair never really changed from when she got married in the middle of World War II just as her fiance was about to ship off—short curls, not entirely natural, carefully put in place. She let me and my sister curl it once when we were staying in a condo on Kauai and she was out of town for her regular hair appointment. She sat there in a chair in front of the mirror, and we laughed and tried to figure out how to do an old persons hair. That was the trip where the police came one night and told us to quiet down because we were being too loud playing spoons and singing old country music. I was fifteen then; Ginny was in her early sixties and already had cancer. I didn't think too much about it, I guess, except that you had to expect stuff like that when you got old.

And when I was seventeen and she, in tears, put her mother's—my grandmother's—pearls around my neck, passing them on to the next generation (I think she must have known too that she was dying, although that would take another year and a half), I felt young and beautiful and deserving, not able to comprehend the greatness, the significance of the gift.

Back then women were still allowed to get old. Ginnys hair had turned gray, her hips were a little wide, her chest a little flat. She was eighteen years older than my mom, so more like a grandmother to me than an aunt. Her eyes danced whenever we came to visit, and she was the one I took my first steps to on my first birthday.

She and Uncle Steve went on cruises and sent us postcards from places like St. Thomas and St. Lucia, and every Valentine's Day without fail she sent a heart-shaped box of Russell Stover candy.

My mom went to stay with Ginny when she was dying since Steve had passed on years before. Her colon cancer had spread, had eaten through her body so that there was a hole to the outside. She was in tremendous pain. Now I realize that she was young, my parents’ age now, and that she could still be here if they had caught the cancer sooner or if they had different treatments.

I was a sophomore in college. My mother called and said there would only be a very small memorial service, that I shouldn't come. Reluctantly I let her persuade me. I regretted it even then. So Ginny was cremated, her possessions gone through, the house with the lovely hardwood floors sold. A small group of friends gathered to remember her, and I cried myself to sleep in a metal bunk bed in a sterile dorm room in gray, rainy Ohio.

I can only imagine how Cassandra felt watching Jane's coffin proceed from the house on College Street toward the cathedral, through the ancient Kingsgate Arch, where she wouldn't be able to watch any further.

The first time I wanted to die I was driving by Chestnut Grove Cemetery off Drainesville Road, which I drive by all the time. I was sick then—I mean, I hadn't fully recovered from that mono-like virus, so I was exhausted all the time and working full time and trying to be a writer (I think I was finishing my first book) and training on the weekends for the upcoming week-long backpacking trip to Montana. More than
anything else I wanted rest, and in that moment death seemed attractive, like the only way to stop doing and just rest, for ages and ages. Strangely, there was nothing depressing about it. I just envied the silence and stillness of the dead.

Then when I was flying home from my grandfather's funeral—irascible old Granddaddy Bob, who was mean with a tinge of sweetness and sometimes the other way around (“Do you know why you aren't married, Lori?” he said once. “Its because you're too religious.”)—it hit me that death is our destination, which I had always known but had never really believed or maybe had never really believed for myself. This time I felt it with a kind of surety, like death is the main point. Bob was gone, and everyone else who had ever lived before me was gone, and all of us on the plane, all of us living, will someday be gone, and waves of people after us will all be heading for death. There is this great destination no one will escape, as if life were a churning assembly line sending us all on to death and dying. “A patient willing descent into the grass,”
¹⁹
Wendell Berry more graciously calls it. In that moment, whatever comes after this seemed to be the main point.

I was tired then—I still am—so maybe my thinking was slightly off. Since then I have turned the tables a bit and seen that in the face of the constant presence of death, there is irrepressible Life. But that realization never really left me.

Jack and I talked about heaven one night, sitting with Spencer on the Wycliffe back lawn. I don't know entirely what to make of the idea of heaven, but I do believe I'll see Jesus (which sounds terribly cheesy somehow) and that all the bad stuff in me will be gone so that in that moment I will finally have a right perspective of myself, that standing there I will be known, truly, and be able to worship, truly, without my
muck and tainted heart getting in the way. The pride will be gone, and I will finally be true and put right again.

Anyway, Jack and I were talking with Spencer about how if heaven is this eternal hymn sing, then, please, just send me to hell (only writing that feels very sacrilegious). And how could we think that the God who gave us Bach and physics and the entire world of the oceans with their tiny tidal pools and extravagant creature-filled depths could have something boring planned? Why is it we suspect God of giving us less in the next world than he's given us in this?

All the same, I'm not really comfortable with the idea of death. I try to be, but I'm not.

This is what keeps me up at night, the mystery of what happens in that dying moment and my fear of God. Actually I think I am not that spiritual, and my much greater fear is simply the unknown. I am the girl, after all, who didn't go to the school cafeteria for an entire year because I wasn't entirely sure how it worked. I sat there with my nerdy brown bag, wanting tater tots and wondering what it looked like behind the wall in the kitchen. So contemplating a shift from here to eternity is a stretch for me. But I have “a firm though humble hope”
²⁰
that in the face of my Redeemer, all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

For Jane's sake I'm sitting on a bench overlooking the beach in the cold gray mist, trying to love Lyme but not being very successful. I didn't expect this when the bus tipped over the edge of the hill and down into town last night. Suddenly we were out from beneath the overgrowth, the tiny roads that seemed to be carved into the edge of the cliff, running down the main street. Suddenly there was the comforting ocean, the quaint town with bright buildings and little stores. I expected to love it.

But my room was dirty and smelly, with white lacquered furniture from the seventies and only big enough for a twin bed, small walkway, dresser, desk, and sink lining the opposite wall. The sink and shower were growing black mold. The fabric headboard had a dark outline where people rubbed their dirty heads against it. I'm sure the carpet was filthy, but the colors were so dark that you couldn't see the dirt. The more I thought about that, the more I obsessively dropped things—my hairbrush, my socks, my pajamas. My room was right over the pub, so
it reeked of frying oil from the fish and chips; I couldn't sleep for fear that I would touch something.