Ten Years

Today marks the tenth anniversary of Andrew Joel’s death on a tennis court in Lilburn, Georgia.  His business partner told me, “We had just finished a game and it was my serve.  I turned around to retrieve a ball and when I turned back, Andrew was lying on the court motionless.  It was already over.”  When he called to tell me what had happened, he began by saying, “I don’t know how to find the words to say this…….”  But of course he did.

The photo of Andrew and me is from 1974 in Boulder, Colorado.  Click here for audio of a poem for Andrew.

Paul Sebastian Joel (1954--2008)

This photo of Paul, one of my favorites, was taken about a year before he died, seven years ago today.  I’ve been reading about the life/death cycle on earth in its earliest days---before insects, long before dinosaurs and birds and mammals and flowers---and clearly from the beginning the main story is life perpetually recreating itself out of its own dying.  It’s consoling, at least for a moment, to see individual and personal extinction as yet another example in that grand default scheme.  As Robinson Jeffers says, “If millions are born, millions must die.”  Stars do it, even galaxies.  Certainly that child born sixty-one years ago in Urbana, Illinois, never had a chance, along with the rest of us.

Daniela Christina Joel 1995--2010

Today is the fourth anniversary of the death of my granddaughter Daniela Joel.  At death we become the totality of what we had been, our entire life from beginning to end.  All our breathes can be summed now, all our hours and days, the experiment over.  But not done with, for what we were includes what we leave behind, the consequences of what we’ve done in our lives and the things we’ve made or built that endure.  In some true and marvelous sense, Daniela still inhabits the words and sentences she wrote as a child of 13 and 14 as she confronted the malignancy in her brain.  She has become what she chose to say to us, surviving for her survivors. 

Andrew Hyam Joel: August 11, 1958--February 15, 2005

Andrew and son Christopher (c. 1984)

 

The novelist Vladimir Nabokov begins his autobiography Speak, Memory with this:  “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.  Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five heartbeats an hour.)” 

More and more since Andrew’s death I see how the present recapitulates the time of the world before he existed:  both periods are equally void of his being and presence.  In that sense, before and after his life are indeed twinned and identical.

But from Andrew’s point of view, there was no before and no after.  There was only the time of his life between coming into being and dying forty-seven years later.  For Andrew, that’s all the time there was (the time of his life!) and therefore those years were a kind of forever, his own private forever.  Evidently that is what we all have to settle for, the gift of that kind of life everlasting.

Globular Cluster M15

                                                                                    [Photo by NASA / ESA]

“M15 is about 35,000 light years away, and something less than 200 light years across. Over 100,000 stars call M15 home, packed tightly into that ball. How tightly? The nearest star to the Sun is Alpha Centauri, a little over four light years away. M15 would crowd over 2000 stars in a cube that size!”  Phil Plait