But then: I’ve been remembering—as I worked on “Another Elegy” and reviewed the posthumous collection of Tom Williams; as I finished my essay on graveyards—a quatrain that Stanley Kunitz wrote when he was in his twenties about his father who died before he was born:
Observe the wisdom of the Florentine
Who, feeling death upon him, scribbled fast
To make revision of a deathbed scene,
Gloating that he was accurate at last.
If work is no antidote to death, nor a denial of it, death is a powerful stimulus to work. Get done what you can.
When I am sick after my operation, not only sore but bonkers the way anaesthesia leaves you, I will write nothing or at least nothing well, but I can fill the days before the operation with work on Life Work—and I am determined to write about something besides dying. There’s so much I haven’t touched on, like my grandfather’s daily work, my grandmother Kate’s labors—women’s work—and ideas from sociologists of work. I have a list of topics to keep me busy. The alternative is tears, appropriate enough but miserable. I keep thinking of Jane, of my mother, of my children and grandchildren. I’m not exactly afraid but I am surely sad. Talking with a friend today I said that I was surprised not to feel more frightened, I was surprised to feel pity for Jane more than pity for myself—not that I am without self-pity. Quickly I called myself egotistical, for thinking that my death was the worst thing that could happen to Jane. Then both of us said, at the same time, “Yes, but it is the worst thing that could happen to Jane.”
A week from tomorrow John Sutton will remove half my liver. Today is Shakespeare’s birthday and my mother’s, April 23. She is eighty-nine today. Tonight we will telephone her and tomorrow drive to Connecticut to see her for a couple of days. The beginning of next week I will scramble to finish reading proof, to finish revising The Museum of Clear Ideas just in case, to work on new or subsequent poems, and … to make arrangements. Arrangements include a long note to Jane, in case I die on the table, about money and manuscripts, possible posthumous essay-collections or collections of poetry. I could die on the table; I could live twenty years. My health is otherwise excellent, blood pressure 130/70, hemoglobin 18. Yesterday I gave a pint of blood, a possible auto-donation … but my chances of living five years, Dr. Sutton tells me, are one out of three. The likely sequence, after I recover from this lobectomy, is a gradual return to health accompanied by anxious watching for the next CEA spike. Three spikes and you’re out. If cancer comes to my remaining liver, if it comes to my lungs … Statistically speaking, aman of my age with my history is likely to die of recurrence, maybe in two or three years. If I buy two or three years, I figure, the years are well bought. On the other hand, if I suffer this operation and die in six months … But I speculate; I cannot stop speculating—except when I work.