“Michael has a clean burial in the far north, by the grace of the Almighty God. Bartley will have a fine coffin out of the white boards, and a deep grave surely. What more can we want than that? No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied.”

John Millington Synge, Riders to the Sea

Aretha Franklin sings “Skylark,” by Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer, on The New Steve Allen Show. This episode was originally taped on May 19, 1964, for syndicated telecast:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Of course I knew I could rely on your sympathy. I am reconciled by the certainty that a continuance of life would have meant only a continuance of pain and suffering of which my wife had had too much before the final accident. (She fell and broke her hip bone.) We have had our share. For sixty years she made life poetry for me and at 88 one must be ready for the end. I shall keep at work and interested while it lasts—though not caring very much for how long.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., letter to Frederick Pollock, May 24, 1929

Hilary Dyson Teachout, the “Mrs. T” of this blog, suffered throughout the decade and a half of our life together from pulmonary hypertension, a rare and devastating illness that gnawed inexorably at her body without touching her soul. She was smart, funny, generous, and gallant, a perfect companion and the love of my life. Indeed, we fell in love at first sight, a thing I had never thought possible until, at the improbable age of forty-nine, it happened to me, followed in the shortest order that I could manage by a middle age full of shared joy. Alas, Hilary lacked the strength to survive the double-lung transplant that we had hoped would give her more life, and now she is gone.

Loss is the price of love: I knew from the start that I was likely to lose her too soon, though I was lucky beyond belief to have her for far longer than her doctors foresaw. But merely to know such a thing cannot begin to ready us for its coming. Raymond Aron said it: “There is no apprenticeship to misfortune. When it strikes us, we still have everything to learn.” I shall now try to learn the lesson of misfortune in a manner as worthy as possible of my beloved Hilary, who faced death as she faced life, with indomitable courage.

Here’s a special memory of my life with Hilary. She was struck by the last sentence:

For those of us still on earth, straining to make something of ourselves, it seems there is no weaning away from the people we love and lose: they are always there, dissolved into the completeness of eternity, waiting patiently—and, I suspect, indifferently—for the little resurrection that is memory.

I am blessed with many, many memories.

*  *  *

Nancy LaMott sings a medley of “Good Thing Going” and “Not a Day Goes By,” written by Stephen Sondheim for the score of Merrily We Go Along:

From 2017:

The same friend asked me the other day to sum up my life. “I had a mother who believed I could do anything I wanted,” I replied. “Now I have a wife who believes the same thing. That’s the whole story, right there.” We make ourselves, but without the steadfast love of those two women, I’d be unimaginably different. Not many people get that lucky twice in a lifetime….

Read the whole thing here.

“If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

If you haven’t seen my Facebook posting about Mrs. T, here it is:

Dear Friends: I can’t believe I’m posting this message, but…after looking at this morning’s stats, Mrs. T’s doctors now believe there is still some chance that she will start to respond to the new antibiotics, and they want to give the drugs more time to work. I was able to communicate this to Hilary, and she responded unambiguously by blinking: she’s not ready to give up. We both understand that the odds are against her, but we’re prepared to keep on fighting. I will continue to keep you posted.

And so I shall. Here’s hoping….

UPDATE: As of Tuesday morning, Mrs. T remains in critical condition but is holding fairly steady: there are no unambiguous signs either of improvement or decline. The doctors expect to have a clearer sense of things tonight. Again, I will keep you posted.

Ton Koopman plays Bach’s Chorale Prelude ”Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele,” BWV 654: 

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)