The invisible Twin or the Paradox of Life and Death
It was a short story: it was a long story. Four cold, clipped words and two numbers hid a world of wounds. ‘No 4: Male – Estimated age, 2.’ A very ordinary sign that still plays havoc with countless hearts – and will continue to do so for a very long time. I’m standing near a small boy’s grave in Fairview Lawn Cemetery in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He was a victim of the Titanic disaster, April 14th, 1912.
Something happens to the faces of the visitors here who silently struggle with the impact of the minimalist message. Are they thinking of the heart-breaking loss of the young couple that gave birth to their beautiful boy? Are they thinking of their own children? Are they reflecting on the strange and tragic irony that for those two years of the precious baby’s emerging stature, the big ship that would kill him was also taking it’s epic shape?
Last October I visited the newly completed Titanic Quarter in Belfast. Many searing memories of a thousand lives and deaths filled the nine interactive galleries. And in another episode of irony during ‘the Experience’, as the tour is called, I noticed a quotation from Thomas Hardy’s ‘Convergence of the Twain: Lines on the Loss of the Titanic’;
‘ . . .as the smart ship grew
in stature, grace and hue,
in shadowy, silent distance
grew the iceberg too’.
‘The convergence of the twain.’ How chilling, haunting it is to think of a beguiling baby beginning his life’s adventure, and at the same time, the careful construction of the floating phenomenon that would suddenly end that journey. And equally, how strange to realise that as that most spectacular symbol of power and beauty was being prepared for a thousand voyages, there was a growing iceberg of greater power and beauty that would utterly destroy it all in a few fate-filled minutes.
Like the baby and the ship, our hearts and hopes will instinctively grow ‘in stature, grace and hue’ – and somewhere, simultaneously, totally out of sight, and growing too, will be the circumstances, the conditions, the fate that will ambush and annihilate those blessed endeavours. There is a strange counter-force that stalks and threatens our every aspiration. It strikes without warning. And then, stunned by loss, we find ourselves on the ocean floor of our dreams, trying to comprehend the sudden collapse, lying, like the Titanic, too deep for life-boats.
Is there any defence, some sixth sense perhaps, that signals the presence of this invisible enemy, this silent assassin? Can some people sense the presence of a waiting death? Do they have some premonition of an approaching, inevitable disaster? We hear, for instance, of people who luckily switch planes at the last moment. Scotsman Norman Craig had booked his passage aboard the Titanic – but suddenly changed his mind. After the tragedy he could not explain the reasons for his decision. He said he had not dreamt of any disaster ‘but I do know that, at practically the last moment, I did not want to go . . . I cannot tell you why; there was simply no reason for it’.
People have puzzled over something Pope Francis mentioned in an interview with Antonio Spadaro SJ in 2013. It concerned an experience he had during lunch on March 13th, 2013, hours before his acceptance of the Papacy. He recalled that he was suddenly filled with ‘a deep and inexplicable inner peace and comfort – along with a great darkness’. Now that the Pope is revamping and refitting the great Ship of Peter for its new voyage into a stormy, unpredictable future, what might his intimation of an impending darkness mean? Is it a reference to himself, to the Church, to the world? Does he live each day in the shadow of this paradox?
The mystery of opposites. The small baby and the big ship. The big ship and the bigger iceberg. In the complexity of our lives nothing is ever simple. Wherever there is light there has to be a shadow. ‘But I say unto you,’ wrote Kahlil Gilbran, ‘they are inseparable. Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your table, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.’ Like an invisible twin, death is present at every birth. As we grow through the ages and stages of our lives, death too, at every single step, is growing apace. Life and death, angels and demons – they share the same first breath, the same DNA, the same last moment.
In ‘Making all Things New: An Invitation to the Spiritual Life’ Henri Nouwen writes about the ever-present and opposite realities of all experiences and emotions. He tried, unsuccessfully, to find in his life a ‘clear-cut, pure joy’ without a pervading, inevitable shadow of loss or failure. ‘Our life is a short time of expectation,’ he wrote, ’a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment . . . In every satisfaction there is an awareness of limitations. In every success there is a fear of jealousy. Behind every smile there is a tear. In every embrace there is loneliness. In every friendship, distance. And in all forms of life, the intimations of approaching darkness.’
At the end of ‘The Ancient Grief’ the poet Kalichi subtly hints at the parallels and the paradox.
And the ancient grief?
It is like a soft echo
heard
underneath the surface of things.
All that appears
is twinned
to what will disappear.
Does our Christian faith help explain this complicated truth? Not really. But it hints at the mystery of it all. Overcome with joy Simeon held the Bethlehem baby closely and prophesied a terrible death and a terrible beauty. The cross-shaped cradle. The womb of Christmas and Good Friday’s tomb are one simultaneous moment, forever inseparable. And, intrinsic to his divine and wounded humanity, the Risen Human One is recognised by his perfect limp as he walks the roads of heaven and of earth.
- (Author’s Note.) I was born at home one dark January afternoon, even as my uncle Fr Michael was being buried right across the road from our house. My father was up and down the stairs, between grave and cot, urgent between beginnings and endings. At that very time, too, raging through my mother’s body, the visceral powers of life and death were inseparable in my coming to be. And since that moment, the shadow of my own invisible twin, Sr Death, has walked with me every step along the bright road of my life. One day soon we will finally face each other with love – and embrace.