Remember, Remember

Something I read a couple of days ago asked if we should live for our resume’ or our eulogy? And, I might add, shouldn’t we all have crowds of respectful mourners at our wakes? Real life and death, though, is different than we hope for. I am haunted by a stanza I read recently in a kind of prose/poem by Mary Ruefle. It is titled “I Remember, I Remember” and is in the July/August, 2012, issue of Poetry.

“I remember meeting an Irish poet who had just come from Georgie Yeat’s funeral and was still drunk, though he had also just flown from Ireland to the United States. He was furious and maudlin because Georgie, who outlived her husband by thirty years, died only weeks after she had given all her husband’s manuscripts to the Irish State, manuscripts she could have sold to an American university for millions of dollars; she did this because she had no money, was an alcoholic, and very much afraid in a moment of weakness she would break down and sell the manuscripts after all; the thought of such a betrayal she could not bear, so she gave the papers to the Irish State, died a few weeks later, and had a three-hundred-mile funeral cortege with only six people present – the poet who told me this was one of them – and not a single representative of the Irish State was among them”.

Georgie Yeats died in 1968, making this an almost contemporaneous story. How sad to think that only six people, one from another continent, might accompany you to your last presence on the surface of this earth.

William Butler and Georgie Yeats,

National Portrait Gallery, London

I once was at an internment in a military cemetery where only other person present was the man’s son. These kind of dark thoughts haunt many of us in the twilight. In retrospect, how should we have lived our lives? But it’s mostly too late now to correct it. Perhaps we can compensate by sharing this story with the youths in our lives, with the suggestion that they not only save for retirement but also save for their wake.

Roger Doherty