The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (33 page)

After a bone-chilling coach ride from London (on an outer seat, because the impoverished poet could not afford to sit inside), Keats arrived home seriously ill, flushed and trembling. He climbed the stairs to his room, and as he got into bed a fit of coughing seized him. His friend Charles Brown, who was following him up the stairs with a glass of wine, heard him gasp. Blood was oozing from his lips.

Brown found Keats sitting up in bed, examining the bright red spot on the white sheet. Then, according to Brown’s account, Keats looked very steadily up into his friend’s face, and said, “
I know the colour of that blood. It’s arterial blood. There’s no mistaking that colour.” As calmly as he could, he added, “That blood is my death-warrant. I must die.”

16

In the Fall of 1993, Mark and I went back to Amherst College for Homecoming. I knew that Mark had been sick for some time. But I had never yet really seen him obviously ailing. Now he was clearly ill. He was pale. His face looked strained. He had lost weight.

Still, his mood was exuberant, and he was buoyed by being back at “the fairest college.” So I was stunned when, just as we walked onto the campus, he sprinted to a sewer drain in the parking lot and threw up several times—violently. He didn’t want to talk about it. We just moved on—walking across the campus, kicking through piles of oak leaves, toward the soccer fields, where we would meet some old friends.

Later that afternoon, Mark and I sat again on Memorial Hill—as the skies turned red with the sunset and the throngs of alums moved toward their dorms to prepare for dinner. I looked closely at Mark. I
could see the suffering written on his face. But his exuberance was there as well. There was the regal tilt of the head. The impish grin. Mark was in a mood to reflect on his life. He was glad he had written his plays. They were the chief satisfaction of his life. His many sacrifices for his art had been good and right. “Austen called her books her children,” he said. “I know exactly how she felt.”

Mark talked about the struggle involved in writing. “I know I’m not a brilliant playwright,” he said. “I’m not a natural, really. It didn’t come easy. But it was my work to do.”

He said, “You know, Keats sometimes wondered about where his poetry came from—marveled at it really. I’ve felt the same way about my own work so many times.” And then he quoted a line from Keats I had not heard: “
many a verse from so strange an influence / That we must ever wonder how, and whence It came.”

We looked together—and for the last time—out over the expansive view of the Holyoke Range in the distance. Mark talked jokingly about his withering body. He had never really had more than a modest amount of physical vanity. He talked about how Keats had observed the terrifyingly rapid decline of his own body. And Mark reminded me that Keats had become obsessed with the look of his hands as he failed.

It provoked a question. I had never understood why Mark had quoted the whole of Keats’s poem “This Living Hand” at the end of his play—or why, in fact, he used that line—out of all the fantastic lines he had to choose from—as his title.

“It was ironic,” Mark said. He thought for a moment, looking out at the mountains in the distance. Mark spoke deliberately as he finished his thought. “Keats always had the sense that his greatest poems came from somewhere beyond him. That he was just the channel for them. And his life’s work was to prepare himself to channel these poems. At the end, of course, he was full of despair that he had not fulfilled his destiny. His hand was withering. And yet ‘this living hand’ had written some of the finest poetry in the English language. This living hand, though dying, was now immortal. Through his art, he had conquered time.”

NINE

In the several years leading up to his eightieth birthday, my father—unbelievably, impossibly—developed Alzheimer’s disease. Its onset was rapid, and within a few years he was completely disabled. Well, not just disabled. Gone. Poof. My handsome and charming father—a college president, admired for his wit, impeccably groomed and dressed, affable, commanding—now sitting blankly in a wheelchair looking into vague space, surrounded by other wheelchaired beings in the same disastrous straits.

Here was an energetic man in his late seventies, still vital, who had decidedly found his dharma early in life and had been living it mightily—until he began the long good-bye of Alzheimer’s. It was an unending nightmare for those of us who loved him. I was working on another book at that time—also on dharma—and I wondered as Dad’s Alzheimer’s rapidly progressed: What was his dharma now?

Dad had been born to a poor family in an Ohio River industrial town. He was a short, skinny kid who’d fought his way to high school every day along a route infested with river-town bullies. He won a scholarship to college—then to graduate school. Education lifted him into a life of meaning. And so he fell in love with the power of learning. He became, as he proudly said, “an educator.” This was his dharma. He began his career as a professor of history. Then a dean. Then a college
president. He loved his students. Loved his faculty. The guy was lit up. He had plans.

And then: Alzheimer’s. Dad’s story, of course, is not the least bit unusual. One day we’re cooking along nicely with our dharma, with the work of our lifetime. And then,
wham!
Life knocks it all to Hell. Illness. Natural disasters. Divorce. A friend of mine was well-launched in his career as a concert pianist when an automobile accident destroyed his hand. He was driving himself into New York City for a concert. He reached over to get a bottle of water on the passenger seat, and when he looked up
—bam!
His career was over. Walt Whitman had completed
Leaves of Grass
and was on the way to literary gianthood when the Civil War blew the country apart. Nobody cared much about poetry for a long while. Keats had barely launched himself on his brilliant career when he contracted tuberculosis and died.

Difficulties arise. Some small. Some large enough to blow our boats out of the water. That’s life. But back to our question: What was Dad’s dharma now? He could no longer teach, or even read a book. What would his work be henceforth? What would Krishna say about Dad’s dilemma?

Of course, you already know the answer. You’ve read the title of this chapter.
When difficulties arise, see them as dharma
. Your dharma is the work that is called forth from you at this moment. And like everything in this impermanent world, the work of the moment can change on a dime. Alzheimer’s was Dad’s new dharma.

2

Most of us do not much like change. We get our mitts around the dharma of the moment, and don’t want to let go. Our friend Katherine hung on to her deanship for years, her hands tightly wrapped around the rope as it was painfully pulled through them. Whitman hung on to
Leaves of Grass
for almost a decade—living in the fading glow of his success. Hanging on is our first strategy.

I’ll tell you later on in this chapter how Dad managed his hanging-on challenge. It was pretty magnificent. (In fact, he didn’t hang on much at
all.) But for now, let’s start with Mom. She was a little more prone to hanging on than was Dad.

Here is the story. As you can well imagine, my father’s meltdown hugely affected his partner of fifty years. Mom: the beautiful Barbara Crothers Cope. In fact, it pretty much put the torch to
her
dharma as well as to his. And what was her dharma? She was a wife and a mother. She was also a poet and a writer. But more than anything, her dharma was to love Dad and to support his career and his life. She loved being the wife of a college president. She loved being the wife of Robert S. Cope, period. She was in love with him from the time they met in college. They had kids—five of us—and we were great (naturally) but in a funny way we were optional (which is a difficult story for another time). Dad was not in any way optional. He was essential. So, Mom was particularly savoring this time in their lives. We kids had gone on to lives of our own. She and Dad traveled together. She joined him in his consulting work abroad, and they had many adventures. We saw the pictures. Mom and Dad in Europe. Mom and Dad in the Philippines. Mom sang as she washed the dishes in the evening.

And then: Alzheimer’s. Mom’s immediate instinct for dealing with the meltdown of her life was one we will all recognize: She declared war on it. “We’re going to fight this thing. We’ll get the best doctors.”