This was not of course the cause of her death, any more than it was the cause of the death of my first wife, the mother of my five children, even though, according to the physicians who attended the women during their last days, they both died from the same affliction, a congenitally distressed heart, the physicians called it, worsened by the depredations of poverty and the stress of life and time. My chiefest grief is that I could not be in attendance when these two precious women passed over from their sufferings in life to their comfort in death and that, therefore, my last memories of both my wives are sombered to such a huge degree by the character and intensity of their tribulation in life rather than of their bliss in death. Thus it had been with a certain amount of envy that I had heard my first wife’s father tell me how his daughter had joined the dead, for during the months of her dying I had been compelled by my calling to provide crucial training to the many in the north who wished to become coffin-makers. And it was with a similar envy that I heard my sons tell me of the dying of my second wife, their stepmother, during the winter of the eleventh year of my confinement. Here is how it came about.
My wife had not come to visit me for a long time. I could not say exactly how long, nor could I even be approximate, but I had concluded never the less that she had left off coming to the prison, and the conclusion had filled me with a kind of releasement that I did not at first understand. Since that time I have come to view that releasement, which felt to me like a thick silvery light spreading across my mind, as, first, a secret awareness that my wife at last had more satisfying things to do with her time than to sit in a tiny damp cell with me, and this gladdened and relieved me, and, secondly, as a quiet harbinger of her death. At the time, however, I did not view the presence of that light in either of these ways, I merely opened myself to it, and it was only after my two oldest sons had come and had presented themselves to me that I went back to that light and attempted to interpret it.
One of the assistant jailors, a man whose name I do not know, brought the two boys to me. The older of the pair, my firstborn, had grown into his young manhood, and I did not recognize him. The second so closely resembled his mother that at first I took him to be her in fact, and I gloried in her presence, for I knew her to have been among the dead for many years. But soon they had told me their names and had led me to understand that they were indeed my two oldest children, and we sat down together side by side on my cot and began to speak fondly to one another, albeit somewhat tensely, it seemed, for many years had passed since we had been in each other’s company and we were all three not sure of how best to make ourselves known to one another.
They told me straight out that my wife had died, calling her that, my wife rather than their stepmother. This was due, I am sure, solely to the fact that I had not recognized them at first when they had come in to me and thus I might not have known to whom they were referring if they had said only that their stepmother had died. I asked them if she had died without great pain, and they answered that she had died with eagerness, and I expressed my relief at that, for she had lived with great pain for many years, and they said that their knowledge of her life confirmed this observation.
The older of the two was the spokesman, it seemed, for his younger brother remained mostly silent throughout our interview, except now and again to interject a word or two for emphasis or clarification, such as, when the older brother had told me that the physician attending my wife had pronounced her dead of a congenitally distressed heart exacerbated by the depredations of poverty and a life of stress, the younger added the information that this was also how my first wife had died. That was how he referred to her, as my first wife, rather than as his mother, again doubtless because I had not recognized them when they had first appeared to me and thus I might not know who he was talking about if he had said, My mother.
Here a slight misunderstanding between us arose, for we were as yet unused to each other’s company and our respective ways of expressing ourselves. I wished to know if my wife had died in her coffin, which of course is one of the rites which would have characterized her life and would have lent it meaning, if it had been followed properly, and which thereby would have provided us, her survivors in life, with the greater occasion to praise her, thus lending to our lives also a quantity of meaning they otherwise would lack. This circle is crucial to the maintenance of faith, as are all the rites, for no practice can evolve successfully into the sacred function of rite if it cannot stand the test of circularity. My sons, still boys, of course, probably had not yet arrived at the kind of informed worship of the dead (the faith that sustains itself by knowing itself) that would have let them know immediately my purpose in asking so quickly after being informed of her death if my wife had died in her coffin, because the older of the boys upbraided me with considerable feeling for my lack of feeling, as he saw it, and his brother grew stern.
But I was able to calm and smooth over their bristled words and glowerings against me by elaborating on the texts of several scriptural passages which prescribe the meaningful use of coffins during our life times, such as The Book of Discipline, xxxii, 12: Let the coffin serve up wisdom to the foolish, let it be a buckler for the timorous. For wise is the man who lies down in his coffin early in the day of his life time, and victorious is he who arms himself thereby. Also, xxiii, 4–5: This doth the dead hate, that a man come unto them naked and pretending like a babe that he was surprised by death.
My sons seemed pleased and enlarged by my explication and also by the rigor of my application of the said texts to the particularities of the death of my wife, their stepmother, so that in a short while we were all three quite at ease and hearty together in our praise of the dead, for they had admired their stepmother, my wife, quite as much as I, and it took no puffing up of our imaginations and language for us to tender mercy unto her. I was greatly relieved, needless to say, that my sons were able to give such abundant evidence of my wife’s intellectual capacity and her dauntless energy for teaching them the basic articles of our faith, despite their lack of adult comprehension, for in the modern world where children are so cleverly and constantly cajoled into seeking transient pleasures and relations, it is not an easy or simple thing to drive them to the path of righteousness and meaning, and having got them there, to keep them from wandering off that path and getting all lost among the living.
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HERE I SHALL enter into a description of certain afflictions which have characterized my recent months and have sorely tested me in divers ways. Know, however, that it has not been my belief in the worth of worshipping the dead and the eternal benefits that accrue thereby that has been tested, but my old decision, described early in this relation, not to resist life. I refer to my atonement for having failed my first jailor, John Bethel, so that he went unto death in my stead and bore with him my own coffin. He had not fully comprehended my teachings, even though he had become converted by me to my faith in certain of its aspects, and for that he had willed himself to sacrifice himself for the living, not yet realizing that the only worthwhile and meaningful sacrifice of one’s life is for the dead. (II Carol. iv, 34–35.) In atonement for the cursoriness of my instruction and the stupidity of my plan to alter the court calendar, thus incriminating another in my crime, I had made over to my jailor my own coffin, and as he wished, he was executed while in it, praise the dead. But that was not yet sufficient atonement, I felt, and so I determined to sacrifice myself also. But because of the nature of my offense, and my desire not to make my sacrifice a way of life, which would have been reprehensible to the dead, for my penance thus would have been eternal, as was John Bethel’s sacrifice of himself, I chose instead to limit my penance by a certain measure of time, the which was the natural extension of my life time. Therefore, I moved henceforward to avoid all such activities and practices that could lead me into a fatal encounter with death. It meant that I should not deny myself any sustenance, any food, rest or medication or other physical comfort that in whatsoever way contributed to the further resistence of death. To be sure, I would not chase obsequiously after these substances like some life-clinging wretch, but I could not permit myself to deny them when they were necessary or when they were imposed on me.