Review: Father James Martin on three books about death and mortality
(iStock)I’m getting old. Who isn’t? But I will avoid the annoying clichés that Valerie Schultz rails against in her new book, Till the Moon Be No More, like “You’re as young as you feel!” Schultz understands that this adage is well-intentioned, but clearly, as she says, “You’re not.” Our bodies begin decaying on the day we’re born; and, especially after 40, anyone with an alert brain can tell that they’re definitely not as young as they feel. (I would add “anyone with good eyes,” but they go as well.)
With my increasing age (in December I turned 64, which my nephews refer to as “Beatles’ Age,” from the McCartney/Lennon song), I am intent on learning as much as I can about how to face the second half of life with grace. So I was delighted to discover that three of my favorite authors, all from extremely different backgrounds and perspectives, have written three extremely different books on aging. Yet even with their differences, they agree on the big points.
Whenever I am at Eastern Point Retreat House in Gloucester, Mass., I find it hard to resist re-reading one of my favorite nonfiction books, The Perfect Storm. This fine work of reportage, by the writer and journalist Sebastian Junger, tells the story of a fishing boat that set sail from Gloucester and sank off the Grand Banks near Nova Scotia during a ferocious storm. (It was later made into a popular film starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg.)
It is not simply the local flavor (some of the book is set at the Crow’s Nest, a bar still extant in downtown Gloucester) that brings me back to the book. It is also Junger’s distinctive style: Hemingway-esque sentences, solid reporting and a propulsive narrative. Since first reading his book the year it was published, 1997, I have been on the lookout for books and articles by Junger. And I’m never disappointed.
So when a friend told me that Junger had written a book on aging, I was intrigued. Junger is known for writing about what you might term a “physical” life, celebrating not only the labors of fishermen (mainly men, in the case of The Perfect Storm) but also the experiences of military personnel both in the heat of battle and in their subsequent lives as veterans. His books also often reflect on his own physical life, including his job as a pruner for a tree company as well as more recreational pursuits as a long-distance runner and as a surfer.
One day in 2020, as he describes in his riveting new book In My Time of Dying, he felt a searing pain in his abdomen and thought, “This is the kind of pain where you later find out you’re going to die.” The pain ebbs and flows over the next few months until an episode sends him, almost incoherent with pain, to a hospital in Cape Cod, near where he was living with his wife and family. The rest of the book is his journey through his treatment for a ruptured aneurysm that, without medical care, could have killed him at age 58.
Junger approaches his topic with all the verve and specificity that have earned him millions of devoted readers: examining the history of the treatment of his particular illness, speaking with the doctors and nurses after his recovery and, perhaps more important for the reader, describing unsparingly his shifting moods and random thoughts. I admit I raced through some of the gorier sections, but I stuck with him because of his fine eye for detail and ear for conversation.
At one point, a doctor asks for permission to insert a transfusion line into the jugular vein in his neck. “You mean in case there is an emergency?” asks Junger. “This is the emergency,” he’s told. A good reporter and writer will remember just those kinds of details.
Yet the heart of the book is telegraphed in the book’s subtitle: “How I Came Face to Face With the Idea of an Afterlife.” While he is in the hospital, he has a surprisingly clear vision of his late father. “He’d been dead eight years,” Junger writes, “but there he was, not so much floating but simply existing above me and slightly to my left.” Junger’s father seems to have a message for him: “It’s okay. There’s nothing to be scared of.”
It is a vivid moment of the supernatural and the religious that makes a no-nonsense memoir about a medical emergency into something more mysterious and beautiful. Toward the end of the book, Junger grapples with what happened, sifting through the evidence for the existence of near-death experiences like his own as well as possible causes. At one point, he even takes a detour into quantum physics, where things can both be and not be. It is an honest and admirable quest, but when I was reading, I wanted to suggest Occam’s razor, that the most elegant solution is the simplest: His father actually appeared to him and there is, indeed, “nothing to be scared of.”
Junger’s book is a valiant, honest and ultimately moving look at one man’s experience of near death and what life now means to him.
Coming from an entirely different perspective is Valerie Schultz, a frequent America contributor and the author of a wonderful book on married life called Closer, who has written a breezy but profound book on the joys and challenges of aging called Till the Moon Be No More. As much as I enjoyed Junger’s book, it was somewhat of a relief with Schultz not to have to wade too deeply into a person’s abdomen or aorta. But Schultz does not quail from the physical, describing the travails visited on women’s bodies, including wrinkly necks, sagging breasts and a bladder that prompts frequent nighttime visits to the bathroom. There is also a detailed description of precisely what a hot flash feels like that made me grateful I would never have to live through one.
This is by no means a book focused purely on the physical, nor is it a sad or depressing book in any way. Rather, it’s like a conversation with a wise (dare I say “old”?) friend who helps you to navigate with a healthy dose of reality and grace the move into middle, late-middle and old age. She writes feelingly about her successes and disappointments as a wife, mother, grandmother, writer and Catholic. I was especially impressed by her courageous honesty over some failed relationships with her siblings and, now, among her own children.
A chapter called “Outrages and Acceptance” notes that Schultz now enjoys what she has long wanted as a writer: time. (She recently retired from a position working at a local prison library.) But now she wonders, “Do I have anything to say?”
Yes, she does, on topics as disparate as marriage, motherhood, family life, facing a slowed-down body (and a husband who is also slowing down), empty nesting, clearing out a parent’s belongings after their death, keeping fit, learning something new and finding hope in her faith. And laughing. Her humor always shines through. After sharing a poem in one chapter, she writes dryly, “One can see why my career as a poet never took off.”
In an echo of Junger’s book, Schultz’s father provides a surprising moment as he nears his own death. Her father had an on-again, off-again relationship with his faith and the church. Yet at the end of his life, as he is dying, he looks toward the window and says, “It’s incredible. It’s unbelievable.” And then, “They’re all around me.” As Junger writes in his book, an experience like this is a common feature of both near-death and death experiences, recorded in almost every culture and not only by family members but medical professionals as well. As for me, I believe it. So does Schultz, who believes in an “actual, if ineffable, God.”
Joyce Rupp believes it too. She is a rare combination of a Catholic woman religious (a member of the Servite Order), spiritual writer and poet. Her 1988 book Praying Our Goodbyes is by now a classic in the genre of “leaving behind and moving on,” as she puts it; and her 2011 book Fragments of Your Ancient Name, which offers 365 poetic perspectives on God, is one of my favorite spirituality books, one I recommend frequently while directing retreats and offering spiritual direction.
Rupp is in some ways the opposite of Sebastian Junger, at least in her new book Vessels of Love—less concerned with the occasionally bloody physicality of growing older and more concerned with encountering God as one ages. She is also more focused on old age than middle age. “During the times I doubt my significance,” she writes in “Prayer of an Older Person,” “show me how I truly matter to you.”
“You,” of course, is God, the unseen recipient of this book of prayers and poems. Vessels of Love is a book not meant to be rushed through, but “savored,” as St. Ignatius Loyola would say. I’ve found it helpful to read one prayer or poem a day, as a jumpstart to prayer.
Rupp’s book offers a treasury of wisdom on some of the same topics as those covered by Junger and Schultz: gratitude, physical change, loss, laughter, regrets, fulfillment, children and so on. Perhaps my favorite prayer is one called “Litany of the Heart,” which includes the following lines: “May my heart be free of disgruntlements/ that reach deeply and taunt inner peace.” Amen.
Over the course of a long weekend (after some minor surgery, a fruit of aging), I read these three books in sequence, Junger’s first, then Schultz’s, then Rupp’s, and was amazed that while they had such different experiences and perspectives, all seem to agree on the same things: Be grateful for what (and who) has come and gone. Learn from those who have gone before you (both what to do and what not to do). Love those around you. Enjoy the world that is “too precious to be ordinary,” as Junger says. Be brave in facing “with grit and grace,” to quote Schultz’s subtitle, the challenges of aging, with as little complaining as possible—always preparing yourself for the moment we will all face, what Rupp calls “the gate of letting go.”
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