Looking into Chapman’s Homer - on Hallowe’en
Here drew we up our ship…
And walk’d the shore till we attain’d the view
Of that sad region Circe had foreshow’d…
My prayers and vows had done devotions fit…
And round about me fled out of the flood
The souls of the deceas’d.
-The Odyssey [translation, George Chapman (1559-1634)]
Hallowe’en has come and gone, and once again it was difficult to avoid being haunted by ghosts. After the last of the trick-or-treaters had floated up to the doorbell, after the dog had eaten most of the jack-o’lantern’s face, after the lights were finally turned out and I was huddled in a cozy chair looking forward to a final hour of quiet reading before bed, I felt an eerie presence hovering over me. It was not a traditional ghost - a disgruntled relative, or one of those made-for-television auras - that caused me to close my book and tremble as if the proverbial Raven had just flown into the room with a Dear John letter from the other side.
It was memory itself that sent shivers in all directions - the memory of patients who once stood before me and are now gone.
…There cluster’d then
Youths, and their wives, much-suffering aged men,
Soft tender virgins that but new came there
By timeless death, and green their sorrows were.
Like Odysseus, who was shocked upon seeing the shades of his old comrades, of his enemies, even of his own mother, I cannot help but remember the many who came to me suffering from the plague of cancer and whose life-thread was snipped far too early by the Fates. On this dark evening of haunting, when the wind seems alive with shadows and shrieks of laughter pierce the neighborhood, my former patients approach this chair softly, full of dignity and sorrow. They stand before me and pronounce their fate:
“I who died so quickly I could not wait for my treatment…”
“I who withered like some alien being throughout my illness, never able to turn back toward vigor, or serenity…”
“I who seemed to improve, then suddenly tumbled over like a cornstalk buffeted by the winter wind…”
“I who went into complete remission and, having survived the ordeal of Charbydis turned to sail home, only to die in the jaws of the Scylla of relapse…”
No words can lift these empty hearts, and it is useless to try, just as Odysseus discovered when praised the dead Achilles on his “renewed life of command beneath” the earth. Achilles’ reply was:
“Urge not my death to me, nor rub that wound,
I rather wish to live in earth a swain,
Or serve a swain for hire, that scare can gain
Bread to sustain him, than, that life once gone,
Of all the dead sway the imperial throne.”
The hour is late now. No noise is heard from the dim streets. The distant ticking of a clock see-saws through the sleepy house. The time for reading has now passed. With some effort I arise and head upstairs to bed, but before ascending the stair I turn and face the ghosts of Hallowe’en.
“Do not be offended by my presence. Do not smile as if you possess some great secret - I also know that someday we will all be together, but until the tolling of that bell is heard, my obligation is to the living. Now go.”
