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Old 02-01-2006, 09:14 PM   #1 (permalink)
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And death shall have no dominion

http://www.canada.com/victoriatimesc...7-b637f6d1b527


interesting read...


definaltey made me think quite a bit.
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Old 02-02-2006, 08:15 AM   #2 (permalink)
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Full text, please insert instead of just a link

Quote:
And Death shall have no dominion
Death's domain must encompass us all ... at some point or another ...
Click here to find out more!


Lynne Van Luven, Special to Times Colonist
Published: Sunday, January 15, 2006

"And death shall have no dominion.

Dead men naked they shall be one

With the man in the wind and the west moon;

When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone."

It occurred to me yesterday that Dylan Thomas's wonderful poem might at first glance ring false for many contemporary readers. Death invades our consciousness daily through headlines and nightly news and podcasts; it sweeps people aside far afield and right at home; it is caused indiscriminately by nature and humankind alike. Its domain must encompass us all, surely, at some point or another -- and secular citizens may lack the comfort of a belief in immortality.

Perhaps I have been thinking about mortality more than usual lately, in the wake of the old year's demise and time's relentless tread. The recent deaths of B.C. writer-activist Patricia Van Tighem and Montreal poet Irving Layton have only intensified my focus.

I imagine them communing in the great writerly hereafter: Literary lion Layton railing about the dearth of sexy bars and coffee shops; skilled nurse Van Tighem trying to exert a calming influence while pointing out the undeniably lovely views.

"Smell that air, Irving," she suggests, but he snorts and lurches off in search of a noisy, smoke-filled dive.

Death certainly is the Great Leveller: writers of two such opposite experiences and temperaments, and yet both irrefutably dead -- Layton at 93 after a full life and much acclaim; Van Tighem at 47 after more than 20 years of unrelenting pain. Yet people do go into that good night in their own unique ways -- Layton claimed by complications of Alzheimer's, Van Tighem by suicide.

And look at how differently their deaths were handled by that other relentless machine, the media: front-page photographs and headlines across the country for Layton, much more modest and localized coverage for Van Tighem. Yet, were these not, as human lives, two commodities of equal intrinsic value?

Long gone are the days of my shock at age 11 upon discovering that life's spoils and punishments are almost never divided fairly -- a fact I loudly bemoaned to my mother when I learned that while I faced a minimum 40-year sentence of menstruation, my wise-acre younger brother did not, not, not.

"Life," my mother intoned, "isn't fair." How absolutely right she turned out to be.

And yet, we go on expecting it to be so, despite ourselves. A while ago I could empathize with a friend's anger when her mother, an intelligent, artistic woman who had devoted her life to her husband and family, happened to die around the same time as an internationally renowned novelist. The discrepancy in attention paid the two women was immensely distressing to my friend, and I understood why this upset her. "Isn't my mother as worthy of mourning?" she was asking. And, yes indeed, she was; but my friend's mother had largely confined her efforts to the private realm, while the novelist had been a public figure.

Irving Layton, all who knew him agree, courted controversy, loved making a fuss and revelled in publicity. He was a founding force in Canadian literature, an influential teacher and within his 40 books are poems that, as Leonard Cohen said, will live forever.
But Van Tighem, a gentle woman who trained as a nurse, never intended to live her life in the public gaze. That role was forced upon her in 1983 when she was mauled by a grizzly bear while hiking with her husband in Waterton Lakes Park. Despite losing her left eye and receiving horrible head wounds, she survived the attack, which was really just the start of her ordeal. In the aftermath, she endured dozens of surgeries to treat her wounds and rebuild her face. Following the trauma, she tried to get on with her life: She gave birth to four children and worked with others suffering disfigurement. She learned to live with strangers' stares and whispers. And she struggled, with anger, with depression, with addiction to painkillers, with other suicide attempts, with marriage breakdown.

Looking at it pragmatically, as she always did, suicide must have seemed a logical step for her to take last month, just before Christmas. At Van Tighem's memorial service in Nelson, friends who called her Trish testified to her engagement with life and her careful preparation for her own death. She left her affairs in order, named an executor; she wrote numerous letters to friends and family in which she spoke of her regret at leaving her children and her infinite weariness of pain. She even left handmade Christmas presents for her closest friends.

Some may condemn her for ending her own life, but I cannot: I admire her clarity, her sense of self-possession to the end.

Van Tighem told her story in The Bear's Embrace, published by Greystone Books in 2000; it is a memoir in which her courage and her anguish contend equally. When I first read it, I was astounded by Van Tighem's determination; I knew I could never be even half as strong in the face of such adversity.

At the end of her book she writes: "I am 40 and looking at it in the mirror. Mountains and a sea of evergreens are reflected in the glass from the window behind me. I consider my patched face, one blue eye, brown hair, small smile with a bit of overbite. Beautiful, strong, courageous; disfigured, weak, cowardly; I have to see and decide for myself."

And now she has.

"They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

Though they go mad they shall be sane;

Though lovers be lost love shall not,

And death shall have no dominion."

Lynne Van Luven teaches creative non-fiction at the University of Victoria

lvluven@finearts.uvic.ca
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Old 02-02-2006, 08:32 AM   #3 (permalink)
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OP Think about what? What's to prompt and frame this as a discussion?

Please try again, and also please make sure to include the full text and not just a link.
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