Essays After Eighty by Donald Hall Page A

the farm, cash out. All euphemisms conceal how we gasp and choke turning blue.
    Cremation hides the cadaver; ashes preclude rot. Neanderthals and
Homo sapiens
stuck their dead underground or in mounds. Pyramids sealed up pharaohs. Romans shifted by the century between incineration and burial. Commonly Hindus burnt dead bodies by the Ganges, in the old days performing
sati
by adding a live widow to the pyre. Cinders clogged the river, along with dead babies of families too poor to buy wood. Zoroastrians and Tibetans tended to raise corpses onto platforms for vultures to eat. My favorite anecdote of ash disposal is recent. After I finished a poetry reading, a generous admirer presented me a jar of her late husband’s remains.
    Myself, I’ll be a molderer, like my wife Jane.
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    At some point in my seventies, death stopped being interesting. I no longer checked out ages in obituaries. Earlier, if I was fifty-one and the cadaver was fifty-three, for a moment I felt anxious. If the dead man was fifty-one and I was fifty-three, I felt relief. If a person lives into old age, there’s a moment when he or she becomes eldest in the family, perched on top of a hill as night rises. My mother at ninety left me the survivor. Soon I will provide that honor to my son. When he was born, I was twenty-five and wrote a poem called “My Son My Executioner.” A decade ago I went to the emergency room when I fell and hurt myself. It was no big deal. The resident doctor dropped by and we chatted. When I asked about blood pressure numbers, he said I had nothing to worry about. “How many years do you want to live anyway?” Without thinking I grabbed a number out of the air. “Oh, until eighty-three,” I told him. On my eighty-fourth birthday I was quietly relieved.
    In my eighties, the days have narrowed as they must. I live on one floor eating frozen dinners. Louise the postwoman brings letters to my porch, opens the door, and tosses the mail on a chair. I get around—bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, new chair by the window, electrical reclining (or lifting) chair for Chris Matthews and baseball—by spasming from one place to another pushing a four-wheeled roller. I try not to break my neck. I write letters, I take naps, I write essays.
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    The people I love will mourn me, but I won’t be around to commiserate. I become gloomy thinking of insensate things I will leave behind. My survivors will cram into plastic bags the tchotchkes I have lived with, expanding a landfill. I needn’t worry about my Andy Warhols. I fret over the striped stone that my daughter picked up at the pond, or my father’s desk lamp from college, or a miniature wooden milk wagon from the family dairy. My mother approaching ninety feared that we would junk the Hummel figurines that decorated her mantelpiece, kitsch porcelain dolls popular from the forties to the sixties. Thus, a box of them rests in my daughter’s attic. More important to me is this house, which my great-grandfather moved to in 1865—the family place for almost a century and a half. In the back chamber the generations stored everything broken or useless, because no one knew when they might come in handy. My kids and grandkids don’t want to live in rural isolation—why should they?—but it’s melancholy to think of the house emptied out. Better it should burn down. Remaining in the old place, I let things go. I shingle the roof, I empty the cesspool, but if a light fixture fails, I do without it. Maybe the next tenant will not want it. I let the old wallpaper flap loose. Somebody will remove four hundred feet of bookshelves.
    There are also bits of land I cherish. When Jane and I moved here, we found my great-grandfather’s stationery, labeled “Eagle Pond Farm,” and borrowed the name for our address. Last November a friend took me driving past Eagle Pond. It’s obscured from my windows by the growth of tall trees,