La vida feliz is the blithest song to sing, but no discussion of advancing years can be fully authentic without acknowledging la vida triste, the inevitable losses that can make the cheerful overture appear to be insensitive at its most benign, and a travesty at its worst. A single loss can fell the strongest heart; the cumulative losses across the span of years can erode one’s life force until one’s own death can seem the more welcome reality. How do we, in the passing of the years, hold on to life when its griefs can sometimes seem so much more unbearable than its joys are life-sustaining?
Each of us must answer this for ourselves; as Ella Wheeler Wilcox wrote over a hundred years ago, ”One by one we must all march on/through the narrow aisle of pain.” My own answers can often feel like a desperate sort of flailing, just short of madness at times. I both believe and disdain my rationales, depending upon the moment. It was only today that a new answer emerged, one that did not explain the grief, but simply found company in it.
The company I found was in listening to the local classical music station. It was Gustav Mahler’s birthday today, a composer whom I otherwise often dismissed as overwrought. One of his many lieder (German for song) titled, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” was played, and the announcer read its German translation. It is as follows:
I am lost to the world
with which I used to waste so much time.
It has heard nothing from me for so long
that it may very well believe that I am dead!It is of no consequence to me
Whether it thinks me dead;
I cannot deny it,
for I really am dead to the world.I am dead to the world’s tumult,
and I rest in a quiet realm!
I live alone in my heaven,
in my love and in my song.
As fraught as the lyrics are, the music and the performance were so utterly heartfelt as to be transcendent. It made me think of my resolve during the throes of childbirth: that if countless millions of women could have braved it, surely I could as well. There is no sorrow any of us endures that has not been suffered by countless others as well; perhaps that can help us bear our own. Perhaps that is, in the end, the greatest and most necessary consolation: that we are not alone, or that, if we are, we can embrace our solitude, as Mahler described so poignantly.
Katherine Mansfield wrote, “Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become love. That is the mystery.” I am learning, once again, to stay with sorrow long enough for it to be transformed into something that can almost seem like beauty. It was a gift from the universe to have heard one of Mahler’s lieder today, on a day when I doubted I could find beauty again. I want to pass this gift along to you, in the form of a recording by Kathleen Ferrier.