The Yoke of Unknowing
Short Story by Mark Christhilf
You can purchase Written Tales Magazine in print or digital format or become a paid subscriber and download your favorite editions. To view our upcoming stories & poems, please visit our publishing schedule calendar.
One by one, she had watched them die, all three of her children between the ages of twenty-five and thirty. All three were girls and had inherited a rare form of breast cancer. The doctors told her and her husband there was little they could do. After the deaths of the first two, they recommended the youngest have her breasts removed. It had been an agonizing decision, but she did it—and died anyway. That was Emily, and her death had been the hardest. Margaret was never quite sure why; she had loved them all. But Emily was different than the others--and she died much differently.
Now, at seventy-eight, she lived alone. Her husband, too, had died early of a heart attack just two years before Emily. Carl had been a banker and left her comfortable in the house where they’d all lived together, and during the day, she sat mostly in its living room, gazing out the window at the street where cars and people passed and at the yard where birds came to the feeder that Emily put up just before she died.
But though her eyes trained on the scene outside, Margaret looked inwardly and backward, thinking, reflecting on the past, hearing the laughter, the quarreling, and the cries coming from the bedrooms where the girls had slept or from the kitchen where they’d made cookies. She could see them playing games on the living room floor peacefully, contentedly or doing homework at the corner desk, often helping one another. She didn’t watch much television except the news at night, but it made her depressed and fearful. Most days, she just sat quietly, thinking how strange it was that what has happened to a person goes on happening throughout their life, and sometimes wondering which had more power, the living or the reliving.
From a picture of the three girls on the wall beside the window, she singled out Connie, the oldest. To this day, she could hardly bear the anguish of remembering the drive with her and Carl to the hospital for the test results. The doctor had given the news to her and her husband privately, and on the way home, Connie had asked in a trembling voice and eyes full of fear, Mother, am I going to die?
And she had responded, Yes. The girl sat silently all the way home, showing almost no emotion. Her face paled and set grimly, and her eyes gazed stonily ahead, and from that day until she died a year later, she took everything the same way, as if in a trance, and far away in some other country. She quit her job, stayed at home, and they had all been with her in her hospital room when she passed away at thirty. Margaret had always felt guilty that she had been unable to give her dying daughter much comfort.
Three years later, the next, Maria died, but unlike her sister’s reaction to the news of impending death, she changed dramatically. Living alone in an apartment across town, she lost all sense of restraint or decency, going out every night to bars and taverns, bringing home strange men, and sleeping with them. She made them buy her expensive gifts, jewelry, fur coats--and one who was rich gave her a lot of money. Desperate to fill every moment with pleasure, she ate and drank too much and took up gambling, going on trips to Las Vegas to have fun, and Margaret thought, Lord knows what she did there. Out of anger, she guessed, Maria had tried to influence Emily to abandon herself to pleasure. But the younger girl had resisted and had been with her at the hospital during Maria’s final hours. Those hours were difficult because Maria barely acknowledged them, and as if in a fever, until the last, kept repeating over and over, breathlessly, “I want, I want, I want. So what am I doing here, living alone, deprived of my loved ones,” Margaret wondered. It was the question she lived with. She thought at times her fate might be a form of punishment for things she’d done wrong in her past, and remembered with guilt times she’d quarreled with Carl, after which, to get revenge, she’d burn his food, or lock him out of the bedroom at night. There’d been times she’d spanked Connie or Maria, and others when she’d been nasty to coworkers at the brokerage firm where she’d worked part-time as an administrative assistant. She hadn’t been raised in any faith, and she and Carl hadn’t brought up the girls to be believers. They’d never discussed God or an afterlife. Could that be a reason for her suffering? The memories and the dreams she had of her girls were so powerful and real, she sometimes imagined they might exist in some other form, somewhere else, perhaps in an afterlife. It was as if they were trying to come back to her. But the idea was preposterous. Death was death, and she had come to hate the believers, who thought there must be life beyond life because God was good.
Good! To her, it seemed all those people were denying reality and parading their faith as knowledge. How could they blind themselves to the suffering, the poverty, violence and death, of which life is full? What was their God doing while it went on? What had he done but rob her of the lives she’d made, creating them with her own body, then bringing them forth, and caring for them? If God had any power, why would he be cruel to her, destroying the young lives, but leaving her to live on into old age. It just didn’t make any sense.
She looked out and saw clouds passing overhead, forming and reforming, and people on the street, hurrying by on the way to some meeting, or returning. That was life—the coming and the going—and it all seemed so meaningless. This weekend, she too would go out, gathering with friends for brunch at a restaurant they all liked. And the youngest would chatter on vainly, thoughtlessly, monopolizing the conversation, complaining about her husband, recently divorced, and of her daughter who was doing poorly in school. To Margaret, who listened quietly, her life was a mess, perhaps the result of her selfishness. But there was Delores, who was kind, and whom she depended on for a lift to the hospital or the doctor’s office for her routine check-ups. So some were thoughtless, and others kind, but what did it matter? Death would come the same to all, sooner or later to everyone, as it had for her family. Before Carl died they used to talk about having grandchildren, and both had hoped that through at least one daughter their love would go on in their offspring. But now she saw the futility in that—the mere endless cycle of generations, a pointless relay of life and death.
Whenever she reflected on why she went on living, she thought it must be that, like many of the aged, she was afraid of death. What else could it be but fear of not being here, of coming apart, of having and being nothing? It had to be the most powerful of human emotions only a few people could conquer. That’s what made Emily’s death so perplexing. She hadn’t been afraid at all, and died looking up at me with a smile on her face, a smile that still haunts me. She’d got the faith, Margaret recalled, and could still remember how it had started. At college, while living at home, she’d studied nursing and fell in love with biology. She’d come home from her classes and talk excitedly at dinner about the miracle of life, and how it had started with bacteria in the oceans, and of how that first life had provided the oxygen for proliferation of more life. It’s amazing, she went on, then life itself began to change the entire planet. The new atmosphere shielded newly developing forms from the sun’s harmful radiation, and later the growth of flowering plants provided fruits and nuts for the evolution of ever larger mammals.
Did you know, Mom, she’d asked, that a horse today was once the size of a dog?
It’s astounding, she claimed, it’s as if the universe itself is really a living creature, and when you study it, it’s hard to think it came into being accidentally. Such harmonious complexity is nearly unthinkable unless there is some reason behind it.
When she got her degree, Emily moved into an apartment and got a job at a nearby hospital. There she met her friend, Bonita, who was a believer and took her to church. A little later, she’d joined that congregation, and one night she visited, and asked why they had not exposed her to any faith. Then sensing she might be offending them, she went on tenderly. I only ask because through Bonita I’ve learned all that I’ve been missing. She seems so sure of who she is, and what her life is for. She doesn’t look to others to find out, and doesn’t talk much about it.
It’s more like a quiet sense of her own significance. It’s something I have now.
It brings me joy, and no one can take it from me. Margaret hadn’t been offended.
She loved her daughter too dearly, and together they had watched the others die.
And both had been horrified over Maria’s last hours, after which Emily had said to her, it was because she had no idea of life’s purpose.
When she got the news that Emily too would die in roughly two years, Margaret was heartbroken, wept constantly, and had to be put on medication. Yet the girl hardly changed—which perplexed her. She traded her job at the hospital for one in a hospice, caring for those facing death. She seemed to feel that if she were about to die it would be good to share the remainder of life with others in the same condition. And she’d visited often out of concern for me, Margaret remembered, always bringing flowers, even in the middle of winter. One afternoon she’d brought yellow lilies, and getting a vase out of the cupboard, turned to face her with a pleased, joyful smile, saying, Look, Mom, aren’t they beautiful? What color!
What life! How could they exist so radiantly if there wasn’t a source of goodness behind all life? And it had been Emily who, one Saturday afternoon, spent hours putting in the small flower garden in the yard just outside the window. She’d planted the daffodils that came up every Spring, and now Margaret could see them, nodding in the breeze, reminding her of her child’s sweetness.
On another occasion, Emily brought the bird feeder, and while hanging it, had almost fallen off the ladder. She thought the bright colorful creatures might give her comfort—but they rarely did. That day in the evening they’d dined together, and she had talked freely of her approaching death. It’s merely a separation, Mother, only the end of one life. All that lives face it. And it’s been intended from the moment you gave me birth. Why should I fear going back into the darkness out of which I came? I feel there’s something more there, in that eternity, a fullness, a plenitude, more profound than any we know here. For me, it’s as if some bliss is promised, and it will be a release, a comfort that life doesn’t hold with all its striving, competition for more and more life, and the suffering that comes from that. Margaret said nothing, but Emily, seeing the doubt in her face, went on quickly with assurance. Mother, things have been good for me here—the wonderful life you and Dad gave me, my sisters’ love, and the people at work, doing their best everyday to help others even when they have their own problems, and it’s hard for them. So why shouldn’t I hope for a good hereafter? It’s not impossible at all, it’s not. I think it best to be hopeful, and I am planning to die that way.
And that’s not all, Mom, she’d continued. I think what I’ve learned here is somehow what’s expected. It’s as though whatever good is the source of my life and is waiting for me when it ends, has always waited, wanting me to acknowledge my faults, to atone for errors, and to avoid living solely for myself, the way Maria did at the end. So that’s what I’ve been doing at the hospice, and in the evening when I come home tired, or sick from my medications, I am confident I’m meeting that expectation life makes, and feel elevated, happy even, sure of who I am—and how I’ll feel when I die. And sometimes when I pause in the midst of my work, and think about my death, it’s as if there’s someone whispering, Come on, you’re doing fine, the end won’t be bad, you’ll see. Don’t brood or worry. Everything is good.
And that’s the way she died, Margaret recalled—serene and hopeful—looking back at me with that blessed smile of hers. And while two nurses stood around, worried about her reaction, she’d watched as her daughter’s face begin to change after the moment of death. The lips parted, and her eyes looked away, upward, as if she were seeing something beyond the room. And over her features came an expression of awe and peace, like nothing Margaret had seen before. How beautiful she’d looked in death! So sitting there beside the window, she puzzled over life and its end. With Emily’s passing, her anger toward believers had subsided, and had been replaced by curiosity about why some had faith and others did not. Why, among her daughters, had Emily been different when they had all been raised the same way? Were some born believers, and others nonbelievers, as if disposed by temperament toward one view or the other? Maybe it was natural, a fact of human life. And maybe it had always been that way from the beginning of human time. If so, there were two kinds of humans, one needing evidence for belief more than the other, one being unable to see or feel the certainties which moved the other. It was a mystery, but she guessed that life would be poorer if all people were made the same. She’d felt the expectation to serve something beyond and greater than her life, which Emily had talked about that night. But to her, it seemed groundless, an emptiness—as if her mind was simply playing tricks.
Despite her affirmations, her daughter couldn’t say what, if anything, lay beyond in death. No one, not the greatest of prophets, had been able to solve that ultimate enigma. So Margaret thought it best to remain doubtful and continue as the skeptic she’d always been. To surrender to the urge for belief simply from need of comfort, and as a relief from fear of death, seemed to her to be weakness, even cowardice. Wasn’t it better to be brave?
Mark, a professor emeritus at Eastern Illinois University, Christhilf, has published a book of poetry, Gracious Is the Earth, and a book of criticism, W. S. Merwin the Mythmaker. His poems, essays, and reviews appear in numerous journals, including The Yale Literary Magazine.
So many approaches to the inevitable.