Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for aFaith
By Studs Terkel. New Press, 407 pages, $25.95
Studs Terkel, that national treasure, has providedus another gift in Willthe Circle Be Unbroken? As Studs says (to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever called him "Mr. Terkel"), when you're going on 89, death is something you think about a lot. But this is the book that he thought he'd never produce: "It was too big for me; too abstract. It was more in the domain of the metaphysician or the minister," he writes. "My works had been concerned with life and its uncertainties rather than death and its indubitable certainty."
Studs Terkel writes books by letting other people talk. It is his specialgenius to mine gold from "ordinary" people. In an age besotted with celebrity,Studs listens to the "common man"; like Whitman, he hears America singing andcelebrates the song. Since ordinary people are so frequently possessed of richlife experiences and amazing gifts of expression, his books are always a joy. Theman never met a stranger, and the range of people he can call on and get to talk,even about something as big and as abstract as death, is remarkable: pastor,poet, schoolteacher, actress, adman, atheist, old hooker, city sanitation worker,black, white, Hispanic, male, female, and indeterminate.
There are those with some professional relationship to death--fireman,policeman, nurse, doctor, AIDS worker, rabbi--who of necessity have had to find aframework to deal with it. There are those who have come close to death and, ofcourse, all of us who have experienced loss. Studs's wonderful wife Ida died twoyears ago; he recalls a friend who tried to cheer him up by saying, "Forchrissake, you've had sixty great years with her!" To which Studs notes: "Itdoesn't cut the mustard, Charlie." (One of the joys of Studs Terkel is hiseffortless mastery of the American idiom; of his mother, who "fought out her daysin a nursing home," he writes: "She hung up her gloves at eighty-seven.") Justbecause someone dies at a ripe old age is no consolation for the heartbreak.
True to conventional wisdom, the saddest stories are those of parents who havelost their children--stories rivaled by those of parents who disown theirchildren because of AIDS. It may well be that the most grown-up people in thiscountry today are in the gay community, because they have seen so much death,have had to deal with being surrounded by it. I found the story of Tammy Snider,a Hiroshima survivor, almost unbearable and her resolution of how to find meaningin those memories profoundly moving.
One of the few "names" in the book is Kurt Vonnegut, the author, with someastonishingly pertinent things to say about vengeance.
The fact that forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespassagainst us isn't honored more--I blame that on writers. Because the easy story totell is the vengeance story, and it's known to satisfy. This guy shot my brother.How's the story gonna wind up? And what does a reader think? OK, that's settled.So it's just the easiest of all stories to tell. So it in fact encourages, makesreputable vengeance.
And then there's this story told by comedian Mike Betancourt:
I'm afraid that when I die and go to Heaven, I'll walk in and the lights willbe off. All of a sudden the lights come on and all my dead relatives yell,"Surprise!!!" As I'm crying with overflowing joy, the Devil walks out and says,"That trick never gets old. All right you bastards, back to work!"
On the assessment of this extraordinary collection of Everyman and Everywoman,is there any sense to be made of death? Yes; indeed, almost all of them seem tohave found satisfactory answers to it. But they're not the same answers. Thosewith deep religious faith and those who intensely dislike religion seem to findequally useful ways of coping. I especially liked a couple of the storytellerswho are quite cheerful about having no answers. Tom Gates, a retired Brooklynfirefighter, says:
I'm not going to worry about any hereafter.... Suppose somebody said, "Youcan be alive forever, but you gotta drive through the Holland Tunnel the rest ofyour life"? What would you do? Would you want to live forever driving throughthe Holland Tunnel?
In his brilliant work The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker points out that we live in a culture in which death is hidden and discussion of it avoided. We know that control, power, and money will not make us immortal, but we live as though they would. Consequently, we are hungry for ways to make sense of death--as demonstrated in the wake of September 11 by the renewed popularity of Rabbi Harold S. Kushner's book When Bad Things Happen to Good People.
Living in a death-obsessed culture is clearly no better. As Jessica Mitfordonce remarked about ancient Egypt: "Now there was a culture where they let thefuneral directors get completely out of control." I've always liked the Mexican tradition of seeing death in life, grinning at you from the oddest places. And the Irish tradition of laughing and drinking at wakes.
We seem to have arrived at the opposite of Victorian culture, where everybodytalked about death and nobody talked about sex. On the whole, I suppose it's animprovement. But it makes death such a dreadful shock when it does come--a bitlike the September 11 attacks, which were stunning because we had been paying solittle attention. The world didn't change; it just came a lot closer. So willdeath.
