Life AND Death

Reading about death lately has taught me much about life.

First, I read Christopher Hitchens' Mortality, a book of unsentimental essays written after the author learned he was dying of cancer. While Hitchens' atheism and disdain for those who sought to convert him played a role in much of his writing, the essays also revealed a caring husband, father and friend; an intelligent observer and commentator; and a man who loved writing even in his final weeks. Sometimes as I read his essays, though, I questioned whether he was debating with himself the premise of God's existence and, hence, the hereafter. Otherwise, why go to such lengths to explain why he wouldn't convert as death closed in on him and why he didn't want others' prayers. Both answers already were obvious to anyone who had followed only bits of Hitchens' life. So, I wonder whether he wondered about God, whose name Hitchens spelled with a lower-case "g."

Later, I read former death-row inmate Damien Echols' essay collection, Life After Death. Echols, along with two other men, was imprisoned for almost 20 years in the 1993 murders of three little boys in West Memphis, Ark. In August 2011, the state released the three men from prison rather than retry them with one condition -- that they plead guilty but also be allowed to profess their innocence in court.

What most impressed me about Echols was his intellect, literary knowledge, his eclectic religious beliefs, which incorporated Catholicism and Buddhism, and most importantly his ability to survive so many years of forced isolation, suspicion and no doubt anger. He did not let that anger or bitterness destroy him. Rather, this man who was only a teenager when he went to prison and who did not finish high school educated himself by reading. He read and he read and he read. And he watched, becoming a close, if not always objective, observer of fellow inmates, relatives, attorneys and others.

Until his eyesight began failing, he was a voracious reader before and during imprisonment. He read works by and about such people and topics as diverse as Flannery O'Connor (not among his favorite authors); Stephen King; poet W.B. Yeats; Nostradamus; Latin American writer Julio Cortazar; Edgar Cayce; the Kabbalah, a book of Jewish mysticism; Eastern religions; Wicca; and the Medici period in Italian history. "I've read a few thousand books over the time I've been locked up," he writes. "Without books, I would have gone insane long ago."

Like his religious views, his taste in art if you will is equally eclectic. "I see no reason why I can't love pornography and the art of Michelangelo equally," he writes. "I want to see life from every angle."

I neither have the time nor the ability to read as much as Echols. But like him and others I, too, find comfort and knowledge in the written word, whether the author is a poet I've never met, a contemporary novelist or just myself. Sorting through storage boxes of clutter and memories recently, I found a childhood diary where I wrote about one of my first unrequited crushes. I found a journal from the mid-1970s, a time when my life was changing as was my chosen career. I had great dreams then. I still have a few, but then I had more hope of achieving them. And for the first time during those years, I said my final goodbyes to two of my closest relatives -- grandparents whose two-bedroom home with feathered mattresses, a rocking chair, biscuits and red-eye gravy, and always forgiving but quiet love felt as much like home as mine did. Decades later, the goodbyes are more frequent but no less difficult these days. I rarely talk about the sadness that accompanies deaths, one of a single mother I never met but who, like me, had adopted from China. I deal with death these days through writing, reading, prayer and none-too-seldom tears. And I dream not only of the future but of the people who are now gone but who helped define my life after I close my eyes at night.