ONE DARK MILE
A Widower's Story
Eric Robinson
Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989
188 pp., $19.95
IN THE FACE OF DEATH
Peter Noll
New York: Viking, 1989
254 pp., $19.95
Memento mori: Remember that you must die. In an earlier age much more anchored in religious faith and its confidence in an afterlife, such a maxim was simply a sensible reminder of the obvious temporariness of life. In a modern age absolutely determined to set up paradise in the world, the old maxim is unacceptable. This paradise here should have no end, and in large part, society lives in rebellious denial of death's supremacy. And so death still takes us by surprise, it comes as the destroyer of dreams laboriously fulfilled over a lifetime. The more affluent and comfortable the man-made paradise, the more virulent the denial. Often only when a medical death sentence is passed, such as diagnosis of terminal cancer, does all the mental evasion cease and the first real confrontation with death take place.
Lives lived in the face and in the wake of death have generated their own small literary genre. The dying or the bereaved survivors explore the meaning of death or attempt to give comfort, counsel, and strength to others similarly struggling with terminal illness or its aftershocks. There is, of course, inspiration to be gained from such works, and there is comfort to be taken from them, if only the comfort to company. But beyond that, every death is agonizingly individual, every loss of a loved one inexpressibly unique, every grief experience an empty stretch of desert no one else can cross.
Two very distinct chronicles of dying and death are One Dark Mile: A Widower's Story, by Eric Robinson, and In the Face of Death, by Peter Noll. Both take the form of journals, begun by the two men after terminal cancer invaded their lives, the first killing Robinson's wife, and the second, Noll himself.
Deciding to marry
Eric Robinson, an Englishman and professor of history at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, was in America for about three years when he met Joan, the woman whom he felt to be, in his own words, "My own true destiny…the 'lost domain' for which I have been seeking since my boyhood." They began to see each other often and shared many interests and activities. Then one day Joan told him that he ought to know, since they seemed to be getting closer, that she had had ovarian cancer for three years, that she had a colostomy, and that her prognosis was quite poor.
Robinson took the news in the manner of a proper Englishman, listening quietly and gravely, asking for as much information as he decently could at the time. Later that night alone in his apartment, he took out his dictionary and looked up the word colostomy. Then he went to sleep. It was not until the following morning, when he stood staring at his image in a mirror, that he began to weep. Not for Joan, but for
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