Life Beyond Measure (25 page)

D
earest Ayele,

As your life blossoms, both your great-grandmother Juanita and I will be attending to our final accounts. And let me state for the record that regardless of my differences with her that came many years earlier, she will have enriched you in countless ways. No doubt you will wear the imprint of her affection proudly in all that you will be; and likewise she will take nothing but pleasure in watching you grow up.

You’ve been so fortunate to be raised with the love of three generations of women, starting with your confident and caring mother (my granddaughter Aisha); Beverly, your life-embracing grandmother (my daughter); and your great-grandmother Juanita, who has been blessed with a very long life.

Many of us live to a fairly ripe old age, as I, too, have been fortunate to do. Nevertheless, the possibility of loss of any of your loved ones is a subject that can’t be ignored.

It is easier for me to make comments on death than it will be for you to hear comments on death. At your tender years, you are probably quite unmindful of the fact that death is a part of every life, for every life eventually ends. It falls not to you but to your elders to convey that fact as gently as possible.

Indeed, you may run into a loss as early as among your classmates in elementary school. Death is not off-limits to that area, nor is it off-limits to children in high school and college, and the further you go into adulthood, the greater the chances that you’ll encounter it. Life is certainly not a guarantee.

Many times, the length of our survival on earth depends on circumstances over which we have no control. Quite important is our inherited infrastructure—who we are in terms of our vital organs, how able our cells are to replenish and replace themselves, and whether nature smiles on us with all of the fine work it does in keeping us together in one single unit of life.

I suspect that, with the discoveries of modern medicine and your being mindful of your own life and those things you must do in order to enhance it, protect it, and nurture it, you, Ayele, will live quite a long time beyond my years. As a matter of fact, I’d be disappointed if you didn’t. I don’t want you to be even thinking of having one gray hair until you’re eighty. And for you to have all of your hair go gray, I’d want you to have to live to be at least 125. So, you see, I’m charging you with a responsibility even at these young years of yours.

But death does come, my dear Ayele, and when it does it brings a sadness, a solemn moment. It brings a time when separation and
departure are experienced. It brings contemplation and reflection. It brings back days, wonderfully well spent, that are etched in your memory of all that transpired between you and a loved one or a friend. It does that even when the loss is not yours but is experienced by a close acquaintance. Love and concern and compassion travel across genders, across generations, across ethnicities, across races, across religions—all touched in one way or another by that loss. Death comes not only to the person who has to receive it, but also to those who will experience the absence of that person.

Death is a frequent visitor. The larger the family, the more frequent the visits; sometimes it appears without notice of any kind. Sometimes a simple message is sent to say that it will soon be dropping by. It comes and leaves, always in the company of at least one family member. When a visit is merciful and unbearable pain and suffering are brought to an end, the visitor leaves us to mourn our loss and to heal, until it comes again, as surely it will.

In my lifetime, the number of visits death has made to family members on both my father’s and mother’s sides is sobering: grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins—first, second, and third—and then my dear granddaughter Kamaria, who died at a very early age.

My memory chain of death as a frequent visitor among my family began with my grandparents on my mother’s side. Most of those on my father’s side were gone before I was born. My mother’s mother and father, Mama Gina and Pa Tim, have been locked in my memory since I was five years old.

To this day, I can still draw up images of Mama Gina stooped over a cooking fire just outside the kitchen that her husband, Pa Tim, built for her out of palm leaves that he fastened to a sturdy structure made from the limbs of hardwood trees. The kitchen was for use on days of wind or rain; otherwise, she preferred to do her cooking
outside. I can still see her there, with her hair covered as usual by a white cloth tied behind her head in a knot at the base of her neck.

When I was around the age of six, I watched Pa Tim noticeably change. Where before he had been tall and sinewy, weathered though sturdy from a lifetime of working out in the elements, he declined suddenly before my eyes, growing frail and feeble; his life and times had worn his body down. It could no longer fend for itself. Day after day, whenever I went to see my grandparents, I wondered why he sat quietly, looking for long periods of time at the ocean. I had no idea a process was in motion: his life was drawing to a close. Day by day, dementia was slowly enveloping him. He simply was waiting for release. When it came, with him went portions of the Poitier family history, never to be reclaimed. The frequent visitor death had called on Mama Gina’s husband, and soon thereafter it returned for her.

My father had moved the family to Nassau by the time my mother received the news of her mother’s passing. She wailed for hours, uncontrollably: “Oh, God! My Ma, gone! My Ma gone! My Ma gone!” She completely lost it, and ended up in a deep gloom that took her weeks to climb out of.

My mother was destined to eventually mourn a son, a daughter, a sister, a grandchild, and finally her husband—the last a loss that ran so deep she was unable to recover, and she joined him soon thereafter.

In my own case, as I’m sure you will read in my letters to you, I have been so close to death that my salvation was of a nature that I could not possibly understand. I’m alive for reasons I cannot explain. The many close calls I’ve had were of such nature that under normal circumstances they would have taken me away many times over. So that is why I, at this point, choose to talk to you about death.

And let me look at my own demise. It will come, as death comes to all living things; as it arrived for my parents, as it arrived for my brothers, as it arrived for my sisters, cousins, friends, acquaintances, fellow workers. The loss was always registered by me in terms of its totality. It is, and it will be forever, a total loss.

Religion says that we will, we hope, meet up with some of those who left us through having been called by death. My mother believed that very deeply. I have my own thoughts on that, as I’m sure you know by now. And although my thoughts, my expectations, head down a different path, I am respectful of my mother’s deep faith in her beliefs. I’m sure she grants me the prerogative to embrace whatever opinion I have in terms of life and death.

But I raise the question to you now because it’s an exchange that we must have. By all indications, I will precede you in death, and probably by many, many decades. If that is the case, I would like you to know that I am comfortable with whatever lies ahead, and that I am comfortable in my feelings that you will have a long, productive, happy, useful life. It will not be automatically presented to you, however. You will have to carve it for yourself out of all that is around you.

A tiny bit of myself is lost when my friends are gone. A tiny bit of myself was lost when my brothers, all but one, passed away. I experience a loss when friends, relatives, and acquaintances with whom I had a human connection go.

But there are other aspects of death, some of which science and society are just beginning to explore. Do our parents actually live on in us, or does just their memory? If so, is it more than memory? Is inside us the actual resting place of that elusive quality deemed their “soul,” and thus is it passed on from generation to generation?

Somewhat to the contrary, science now indicates that the sum total of our existence resides in our consciousness, and with our passing comes the passing of everything, and so the “soul” as an actual entity does not exist. Since the world’s major religions hold that consciousness is indeed located in the soul, and therefore does not die with the body but goes on to an afterlife of reward or punishment, this presents a ponderous question for those who hang their hopes on a spirit world.

But when does a person actually die? Is it with the last breath that passes from the body; the last beat of the heart; the last fading signal from the brain?

Some people believe that you do not truly die until the last person who knew you dies. In that case, your life could go on for half a century or more beyond the legal declaration of death.

While most of us fear death, there are those who seem to reach a state of calmness when it appears near, and those in great pain welcome it. Some, by virtue of religion or temperament, are stoic in the face of the prospect of death; they see it as merely the next step in the existence of one’s life—a further adventure rather than a sad ending.

Still, until and if we reach that calm state, most of us wish mightily to avoid death. As the phrase often goes in religious circles: “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.”

Woody Allen put it another way. “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work,” he said. “I want to achieve it by not dying.”

But since death is unavoidable, perhaps what we can best seek is a long life that comes peacefully toward its end, and then have that end come swiftly. A lingering death is the most undesirable of all.

Part of the fear of death is the feeling of stepping into the great unknown—a vast, dark void of which no research has been recorded, no news reports sent back. Ah, but what of people who claim to have been there and back? Those who say that, in a time of critical illness, they saw “a white light” unlike any they had ever seen before, and maybe even for a time moved toward it. They believe that they were in that moment at the abyss of death, and somehow, miraculously, stepped back from it. Was this an actual occurrence in the subconscious, or a medical, drug-induced aberration?

Again, science seeks to provide an answer. Those “near death” or out-of-body experiences are symptoms of eye and brain oxygen deprivation, we are now told.

So most of us are left to deal with the known aspects of death, and among our fears is the pain associated with demise. For that reason there are legal and moral issues surrounding death. Do we wait for the inevitable, no matter how intense the suffering, in the belief that the date and time of the cessation of life can be set only by a supreme power? Or should such moments rest in our own hands? What of families, seeing agony or probable irreversible coma endured by a loved one, who seek to bring an end to it, often as a result of conversations held with the soon-to-be-departed long before such time arrives? “I do not wish to be kept alive if that time ever comes” is not an uncommon expression.

The legal and religious ramifications of these questions will likely be fought in American courts for years to come.

I shan’t stay on this question any longer. I just wanted to make a point of discussing it with you, and having you know what my thoughts and feelings are about death. As you are likely to experience my own, I want you to know that, however much sadness it
might visit upon you, the sadness will be temporary. But I will be peaceful. If my mother is right, I fully expect to visit with her and my dad. And if that is not the case, I’ll find myself closer to what my thoughts have been all these years in that regard.

In either event, here I will always be, on these pages, living on through you, lifting you up through these memories to show you to the heavens, lowering you for your feet to rest on mine, and then setting you down onto the earth and watching you go.

I love you, and I wish for you all the best that I can imagine.

Y
our time, Ayele, might not necessarily cross with my time. I see you now at almost two and a half years old, and by the time you are fifteen or twenty, the likelihood is that my time will have ended. And in that regard, I want to talk to you about the world I am leaving you, the world my compatriots are leaving you.

Unfortunately, we are leaving you a world with much of it fractionalized far beyond the point to which it was when I was a boy. Much of it is infinitely more threatening to the overall survival of the human family than ever before. The devastation found in the weaponry of today is such that one weapon—one single weapon—can destroy a city. Two such weapons could irreparably damage a country.

The world that we are leaving you as I write this is a world of wars, genocide, terrorists’ attacks, unrelenting street violence, financial uncertainties, unbridled greed, and the lingering stain of racism. Calamity seems to lurk at every shadowed doorway.

But if you will recall, my dear, from our earlier discussion of the beginnings of our civilization, the odds against human survival were similarly slim: no language, no scientific knowledge of the world around us, fearful ignorance of the calamitous forces of nature, and our lot as innocent prey for the beasts with whom we shared the earth.

Yet we survived, enduring an evolutionary process that brought us to a civilized state in which we evolved bartering and currency systems, amazing geographical discoveries, stunning science, and a system of social intercourse between individuals and nations.

In truth, Ayele, while much about my present time seems dismal, there has never been a perfect period for human existence. When I was born, in 1927, while life was meager for my family and me, much of the world outside our known boundaries was suffering.

Before I came into the world, there were challenges, danger, and hunger. I don’t know if there was as much hope then, Ayele, as there might appear to be now. By the same token, I can’t say that hope now is much more substantive than it was then. I do know that the world as it is today is much more dangerous than it ever was in past years.

The population eighty years ago was 2 billion. The question of life and death itself was vastly different. A child today has the opportunity, due to modern medicine and modern protection of our food supply, to live a long and productive life.

In contrast, in my day death was a frequent visitor. It came to most men in their early years: forties and fifties, some few in their sixties. When I was a child on Cat Island, we had absolutely no such
thing as modern medicine. We had no aspirin; we had nothing that was manufactured in an industrialized country and made available to those citizens for a very small amount of money. Populations in those countries could relieve a headache with aspirin, or heal broken skin with a salve or other medicine. We, on the other hand, had no painkillers—nothing. What happened was that someone, usually a mother, would go into the forest and gather leaves, certain plants, and the bark of certain trees. Then they would bake or boil them; the residue was usually a dark, thick substance. That residue was then used for colds, for anyone who had stomach difficulties, or as a diuretic or for other ailments. It’s possible that some of those seeds or plants were brought with the slaves from Africa.

In the year I was born, a black man, with luck, could expect to live only forty years, yet here I sit at eighty-one. Discoveries in medical techniques and chemistry, and healthier lifestyles, can claim a large amount of credit. But luck and geography played parts as well.

Two years after my birth, the United States fell victim to the Great Depression, a decade of high unemployment and brutal poverty, which touched most places around the globe. Pneumonia, influenza, tuberculosis, and diarrhea took lives by the thousands, and countless children died of malnutrition.

As you have read in previous letters, my good fortune at surviving those often-catastrophic illnesses of childhood was also with me when I was brought face-to-face with more dangers of life itself. It was not, and has never been, a world without opportunities or appointments with destiny waiting for us all.

Then again, you’ll recall by now that when I was sixteen years old, if I had had the presence of mind to foresee opportunities, I would have seen absolutely nothing. If I had not been at the intersection of 145th Street and Seventh Avenue, had I not looked at a local
newspaper, the
Amsterdam News,
picked it up, thumbed through it to the want-ad pages, looking for a job as a dishwasher, which was my profession, and stumbled onto an ad headed “Actors Wanted,” my chances of finding my ultimate path would have been pretty slim.

Had I looked in any direction, whatever I would have seen would have been off-limits to me, not just because of race, but because I didn’t know anything. It wasn’t just that I was in culture shock in a totally new, huge environment—a big, bustling, world-famous American city; it was that I had no education, guidance, or tools that I could use to improve my chances of survival.

All those things that I gradually learned from listening to other people were things that should have been learned in kindergarten. That is the environment that I came out of, and that’s what I took with me to that corner where I bought the newspaper. I came to that corner with the aggregate of my experiences. As to resources to chart my way into the future day by day, I had none.

How did I manage? Serendipity was a friend; the universe was a friend. Was it planned? I certainly didn’t have a plan for myself. It is more likely that the universe had a plan for me. It is more likely that I was surrounded by all kinds of energy forces that were having an effect on me. We’ve talked about God in those terms, of course, but now we get down to the nuts and bolts, the practical, moment-to-moment planning of the force of the universe. I was not smart enough, and I don’t think anybody is smart enough, to know how those forces conspire to create opportunities in our lives, because they are a part of the universe, a part of nature. And nature doesn’t tell you, “I’m going to have one of my guys tap you on the shoulder, and everything is going to be all right for the rest of the day.”

You have seen all along that curiosity was also my friend. My survival, I understood, was totally up to me, however many friends
I might have had looking out for me in the universe. I had no knowledge, no proof, no instinct of their existence, so naturally my survival rested with me.

And maybe figuring it out wasn’t so different from my father deciding how to get the bat dung from the caves in order to enrich the soil for growing tomatoes that would ensure his survival and that of his family.

Through trial and error, I found that if I earned fifteen dollars a week and ate my meals at the restaurant where I worked, with five dollars paid for weekly rent on a room with bathroom privileges, I couldn’t afford to buy clothes or go anywhere—except occasionally to the movies, which cost twenty-five cents during the day and thirty-five cents at night.

So there I was, and what do you do? I was driven by a life that forced me to think for myself in the world that I had inherited.

But you will have your life in the world I leave you, and while I have spoken of its many problems, you will have many advantages undreamed of in my time. I see you, Ayele, at fifteen in a far more advantageous place than I at the same age.

At fifteen, I see you with not only fifteen years of life experience, but at least twelve years of, I believe, strong, consistent, dimensional, encompassing education, a part of which will be an understanding of the world. If you live in the city, in a very short time, perhaps at four or five years of age, you will be conversant with the city, sufficiently so that you will not be overwhelmed and can tell anyone where you live, who your parents are, what the phone number is at your house, and why you might be by yourself if you have wandered away in a shopping mall.

You will have all the tools necessary to think for yourself. At fifteen, you will know about mathematics, history, the geography
of the American continent and other continents, and the countries that are on those continents. You will know about modern medicine, and such medicine as you have been exposed to will have been explained to you by family members.

So I would expect you, Ayele, at fifteen to be very close to being an independent, resourceful young woman, conversant with communications, possessing the skills for maneuvering through all of the vast, seemingly endless fields of information and knowledge.

In time, you will understand the world and all its contradictory parts, and what power is and how it is applied, and who the men and women are who have the reins of power and to what use they put it. All those things you will have a good fix on. Not the ultimate fix, but a very good fix.

And I might hope that you become, or aspire to become, one of the people at the table where the big questions of the world are dealt with. I am sure there will be questions that will concern you personally and culturally, racially, ethnically, universally. The world is going to need all the young people who have a knowledge of it, who understand how it works, what its frailties are, where its faults lie and where its strengths lie, how its strengths are representative of a power that is very well used to the benefit of the human family. And in instances where they are not very well used, it will be a part of your and your compatriots’ job to question. And not only to question, but to force the world to take the ethical and moral stand needed to assure the continuance of the entire family of mankind.

That’s where I would like to see you. Now, this is a great-grandfather speaking. You may be even better applied in another arena. There are many in modern life: medicine, mathematics, science of all kinds; there are professional people well versed in one or two disciplines who can spread their understanding, experience,
and knowledge in such ways that they are useful contributors to the organizing and the functioning of a healthy cultural society.

As I draw this last letter of several in this series to a close, I will echo some thoughts with which I began, many letters ago, by saying that in the world that I leave you there will remain that part of myself for you and fellow readers to have and with which to know me better—not only from what happened to me but as an imprint left behind so that you can know who I was, what my values were, what I believed. What I understood, what I misunderstood; the times I was wrong, and why; the times I was right, and why. The many times I aimed and missed the intended mark. The few times I didn’t. All that I was and was not, I hope to leave glimmering here just below the surface of these letters written to you and to the world that will succeed me. I hope to leave you some of the music that has played for me whenever I’ve put my ear to the mysteries of the universe that have never ceased to catch my attention. You have heard me mention many of them: how did the fish get into the sea, the birds into the air? Where do thunder and lightning come from? Why was I so petrified by the bogeyman when I had never even seen one? How do we stand our ground in the face of legitimate fear?

After all, how can an old grandfather make himself available to his great-grandchildren and others after he’s gone other than to leave something of himself that he hopes will be useful?

To that end, in addition to the larger questions that I’ve already explored—who, what, where, why we are and how we got here—there is one more I’d like to raise, one that will bring us full circle. It is the question of our human drive to reach beyond the limits of our potential, and how, even in the face of unanswered questions and unfinished lives, our search manages to go on.

There is the scientific answer that says we do it because it is in our wiring to do so, and has been since the beginning of creation, the aftermath of the violent detonation of an object far smaller than a grain of sand that resulted in an explosion so massive that it marked the birth of time and the universe. Or so modern science would tell us 13.7 billion years later.

The search goes on because we go on. Within this world I leave you, there are still enormous and nagging questions, most of whose answers lie in secrets tucked away at a frustrating distance beyond the reach of the multitudes still struggling in the dark, waiting for answers to point them toward the light. And that, my dearest Ayele, is exciting!

Yes, life is tough. It offers no guarantee that one road will lead to another, no promise that we won’t get lost. And when we do, as surely we will from time to time, be advised that we’ll stand alone. Whenever trouble strikes and we find ourselves abandoned where disaster of some unimaginable kind is feared to be roaming the darkness, listening for the aimless wandering of unsure footsteps, no protection is extended.

When we have no place to run, no place to hide, and our hearts scream in anguish for rescue, relief, salvation, we are left with only instinct for guidance and trial and error for judgment.

But the tools for meeting life head-on, as I see it, are acquired knowledge, belief, and hope. No one knows all that there is to know. (This despite Mark Twain’s observation that between him and Albert Einstein, they encompassed all human knowledge. As he put it, “Einstein knows all that there is to know, and I know the rest.”) The task is to learn as much as you can about as much as you can; the great disease of mankind is ignorance.

With knowledge you can grasp tight a belief: that you can be better, that the world can be better. With that, you can claim hope.

Hope is the eternal tool in the survival kit for mankind. We hope for a little luck, we hope for a better tomorrow, we hope—although it is an impossible hope—to somehow get out of this world alive.

And if we can’t and don’t, then it is enough to rejoice in our short time here and to remember how much we loved the view.