The Column I Sent to Updike
The Life is the Light
I was at the beauty parlor a few months ago, and Randy was washing my hair before cutting it. As I lay back in the chair passive, inert, feeling his fingers working in my scalp, a question came into my mind:“Have you ever done a dead person’s hair?” I asked. “Sure,” he answered.“And was it scary?”“Not really,” came his reply. “In a way it’s easy. You just do the front, of course.”We were silent then. As he worked, I thought about my own little skull and how the day would come when it would lie all quiet beneath that Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone that Emily Dickinson refers to in one of her poems.“Do you believe in the resurrection of the body?” I asked.He looked at me for a long moment. This was not, I knew, standard beauty parlor gab. But Randy is not your standard person.“I don’t know about the body,” he said. “But the Bible says the dead are a great crowd of witnesses.”“Where are they though?” I asked, a question I have thought about every day of my adult life.He took a breath.“What I think,” he said, “is that it’s like theater here, and we’re on the stage and the dead are in the audience. They can see us but we can’t see them. You know how that is on a stage? We can’t see them because of a bright light in between...”“And they’re watching us?” I interrupted, “and thinking, ‘such a fevered dream, this living of theirs. Such tiny strivings’? Do they look at us and think, of our actions, ‘how paltry and insignificant?’”“Oh, not at all,” said Randy emphatically. “They’re watching us because our actions are significant. We’re the ones now. It matters very much what we do.”I’ve thought about this conversation many times since we had it back in June.A few people are as clear as Randy is as to our place in the grand scheme of things. Many more aren’t.A young person said to me the other day, “You’re born and then you die. And the whole time you’re here you don’t have a clue as to what it’s all about.”I look around myself, to see what it’s about:A little cat hops quick as an eighth-note to the kitchen window sill, arranges herself in a pool of sun that shines on the white stone slab of counter. I see the bright China blue of a fruit bowl next to her, the dazzling large-pored orbs of orange within it, her soft pelt electric with life, as she smoothes it with a wedge of pink tongue.A cellist rises from her chair in the symphony orchestra and sits in front, to perform an extended solo. Seated again, she takes the instrument between her legs. As she draws the bow over its strings, and the deep rich tones of the cello roll out over the audience, her throat constricts, as if with great emotion. Her nostrils flare. She keeps her eyes closed as if against the insupportable beauty of the music. When for a brief moment in the piece she opens them, she does not see the audience.A young man, full of life and high spirits, goes on a youth retreat the first September weekend of his Senior year. Boarding the bus to return home at week’s end, he collapses and dies within minutes of what the autopsy will later show to be a cardiac infection. Another young man, unknown to him before that week away, speaks at his memorial service. He has worked with the sick at a nursing home, he says; he knows this is no fainting spell. He holds the dying boy, in the few seconds remaining. “God loves you, Jermaine,” he tells him. “I love you too.”If the dead are all around us; if they are watching, as Randy believes, they may say, “See how they shone, at their moment in the light: the little cat; the cellist; the boy who left life early, and the one who helped him to leave it.”Mother Theresa cradles yet another sickly infant brought in from a dumpster on the streets of Calcutta. She presents him like a bouquet of flowers to the visiting British journalist.“See!” she says with shining eyes, “There is Life in the child!”The life is the light. And to all those who feel the light—in them and upon them—this world is shot through with glory.
