Post Script #4: Our Town

My oldest friend and newest acquaintance told me about seeing a stage production of Thorton Wilder's Our Town. (It's the story of life and death in an idyllic little New England town in the early 1900's.) Oldest friend/newest acquaintance said that she was moved by it.

I got the Paul Newman version from Netflix and watched it yesterday.

I was also moved - often in tears. (Although I never once considered turning the TV off.)

The part that affected me most was in the third act when the character Emily (who between acts 2 and 3 had died in childbirth) returned to her family to relive her 12th birthday. She was saddened by the realization that living humans are incapable of appreciating the value of life - even (or especially) the little moments. Beginning then to accept her condition as a dead person who must forget and no longer care, Emily said a wistful goodbye to all the little things - to sleeping and waking and eating and all the rest (something like the Buddhist "suchness").

That is the part of Brenda's death that makes me most sad. Because almost to the very end she found some aspect of her life to value - if nothing more than sitting slumped at the kitchen table, half awake but still aware of the food channel on the little TV. And that night at the Hospice House when the male nurse who looked like a sad pirate told her she was probably dying and her eyes bright and aware darted around the room, I know that she was saying goodbye to life. Like Emily in the play, she was resigning herself to the final loss - to the moment when all stuff, all love,all everything would be gone. When there would be nothing.