Are You Afraid to Die?
Poem Review: “Antidotes to Fear of Death” by Rebecca Elson
“Antidotes to Fear of Death” is a necessary read as we emerge from the darkest months of 2020 and 2021. Like many, I’ve been wallowing in all the filth that bubbled up from under our “everyday reality.” There’s been so much suffering, struggling, misery, and fear. We’ve seen a deadly virus ravage the globe. We’ve seen protestors fighting for racial and civic justice. We’ve seen insane political turmoil, the breaching of walls.
With the introduction of vaccines and enhanced safety measures, there are now more freedoms: the slow peeking out of doors, the outside patio dinner, the hug from your mother after months of not seeing her. It’s nice to see a light at the end of a very long tunnel. But we’re not out of it yet. And even if the end of a terrible presidency and pandemic comes, what about the past? What about the present? The suffering? The death? The misery? How do I arrange this all into some sort of meaningful existential experience? How am I supposed to gather up all of that horror and just let it go?
“Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,”
This poem might have an answer. It fell into my lap the other day during one of my usual journeys across the Internet. I read it twice and thought, “Yes, this exactly.” Then I went ahead and read a little more about the author. I usually don’t do this right away. I prefer poems and stories and art to be their own thing without too much authorial intrusion. But in this case, the site’s summary of the poem caught my attention. It described the poem thus: “an intense engagement with mortality, by a young writer taken too soon, blends religious and scientific imagery.” The phrase “young writer taken too soon” piqued my curiosity, so I looked up Rebecca Elson, the poem’s author.
Rebecca Elson was an astronomer/writer who died in May of 1999 at the age of thirty-nine of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. According to Maria Popva, “the astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson (January 2, 1960 — May 19, 1999) was twenty-nine when she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma — a blood cancer that typically invades people in their sixties and seventies. Throughout the bodily brutality of the treatment, throughout the haunting uncertainty of life in remission, she met reality on its own terms — reality creaturely and cosmic, terms chance-dealt by impartial laws — and made of that terrifying meeting something uncommonly beautiful.” This quote captures what I enjoyed about Elson’s poem and the images and ideas she presents to us. (P.S. Read Popva’s article about this poem and Elson. It’s beautiful and links out to even more of Elson’s work)
Much of Elson’s work focuses on science and astronomy, but she also wrote about the “human experience.” This poem is absolutely about that. And, of course, it’s about death. The antidote to death. It makes me sad that she wrote this poem knowing that her own death was not an “if” but a “when.” Which, of course, we all know, but we don’t often feel it coming. But this poem isn’t about despair. It’s about antidotes to the things we fear, specifically (but not really limited to) our fear of death. She knows how poisonous this fear is. So, she offers up a list of antidotes that might counteract the effects of this fear.
“I eat the stars.”
One antidote is this: eat the stars. Come nightfall, when the fear of death settles on her shoulder and is too persistent to shoo away, our narrator goes out into the night and lies on her back, face upturned to the stars. Then she sucks them in from the “quenching dark” until they are inside of her, hot and sharp. The word “suck” is interesting. Does she mean suck like a vacuum: harsh, loud, desperate? Or does she suck like it’s a deep breath of air, perhaps like in Yoga or in meditation? Is it sexual? A sucking to find or give pleasure? To extract the fluids that can create life? Or is she suckling as if from a nourishing teat, like a tiny, growing infant?
Another antidote can be found in the action of stirring herself up “into a universe still young, still warm as blood.” Again, the word “stir” brings us so many images. There are many choices for that action. Does she stir up the universe with her presence? With her attention? Does she stir it up like a toe in water, muddying, agitating, exciting? Or does she stir herself into the universe like powder into liquid? Where she and the universe mix and meld into the other, inextricable from the other and wholly changed at the same time?
And then there’s the choice of a young universe (warm and full of potential) versus an old, withered universe at the end of its cycle. The end of its flashing light. This young universe has lots to offer. There are no boundaries, just space, and it’s bright and misty with the light of stars that aren’t yet stars. She’s there, and so is everyone else, but not one thing is fully defined. Nothing is set in stone. Nothing is cemented into place. Just like I imagine it was before the big bang or whatever cosmic event catapulted the world into creation. Before whatever big unknowable hand wound up the clock. Formless. Just being.
“But unconstrained by form.”
A third antidote can be found on Earth. Lying down on the ground alongside the bones of our ancestors, the bones and sediment and dust of all who have gone before us. It’s comforting to be in the footprint of others. It’s comforting to know that you are following an already traveled path. That you are not alone in the darkness, but merely part of a road stretching out into infinity.
And if lying down on the Earth isn’t working, the final antidote to the fear of death can be found with a walk across fields cobbled by the skulls of the dead. What may seem at first a gruesome image is transformed into an image of re-birth. Elson writes that each skull is “like a treasure, like a chrysalis.” The body is just a body. And the real person, the real soul, the real entity has already emerged from the no longer viable physical form. It’s flown off. Flown off into the vastness of its original home.
“…Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.”
This poem is a reminder that what happens on Earth is simply that: an event that happened on Earth. Human existence and even death are not the final word. The candle might have been blown out, but that does not mean the fire will never exist again. Where does fire come from? A spark. Friction between two things. Fire is there always, waiting, just beyond the periphery of sight. Elson captures this beautifully. She raises our eyes to the heavens. She instructs us to suck in their physical orbs. She mixes us into the universe. And then, once we’ve reveled in the mist and stars and the peppery fire of their light, she brings us back to Earth to feel the weight and texture of the bones of our dead. The bones remind us that they are gone, existing now in the excitable infinity of space. Instead of fearing skulls and bones and the trappings of death, she reminds us that we can think of our decaying bodies like a chrysalis. Whatever leaves it behind is now capable of what we were never able to achieve: brightly winged flight.
Read the poem at the link below. Then come back here and let me know what you think. What did it inspire you to feel? To think? Is there peace to be found within its lines?
