from
If You Want to Live, Prepare for Death
by Walter Jens
in
Dying with Dignity: A Plea for Personal Responsibility
by Hans Küng and Walter Jens
translated by John Bowden
Continuum

Now at the beginning of the fifteenth century there is at least the complaint of the ploughman from Bohemia, who puts death on trial for taking away his dearest possession, his wife: "I was her lover, she was my best beloved. You took her away, the delight of my eyes so full of joy. She is gone, my peaceful shield against adversity; she is gone ... my bright star in heaven has gone, the sun of my salvation has gone to rest and she will never rise again - not she, not the shining morning star; her radiance had faded away. I have no more desires of the body; dark night is everywhere before my eyes. I do not suppose that there is anything that could restore to me real joy; for the proud banner of my joy has sunk into suffering."

Has the solitude of a widower, his anxiety and loneliness and emptiness, ever been described in a more moving way - the distress of someone who at the moment when he unreservedly acknowledges another as lover, spouse, bride and beloved, has to reflect that husband or wife will one day stand at the tomb, facing a return to an empty house in which clothes and writing equipment, sewing things and spectacles, everyday objects, evoke a "no longer" which will be felt even more painfully after long years of marriage than after short days of happiness? Here is the coat, and there, long out of date, is the vaccination card. Here an old bill, there a pen case, a book marked with pencil that was important to him, that meant something to him - and now never again.

No, I shall never forget the moment when my friend Wolfgang Hildensheimer said to me after the death of his father: "If my wife died before me, I could bear the ceremony, but looking at a brush which still had a trace of colour on it, the one bit of dirty red that she used for her last picture: that's unbearable." (Now Wolfgang Hildesheimer died before his wife, and was spared solitude among the possessions of a woman who was no longer alive; the wish of husbands who have grown old, who are fond of referring to the life expectation of a younger wife - "she will survive me, statistics guarantee that, moreover she is stronger than I am and will look after herself" - was fulfilled.)

A deviation - a short detour into the sadness of a widower's existence? An excursus for the sake of excursus? Not at all. The reference to the "ploughman's" complaint is meant to show that this dying, in which dignity and anguish meet - the nonviolent departure from this life which those left behind must take, step by step - has been described in literature for centuries, at least after the event. It has been described from the perspective of the farmer as it was, two thousand years earlier, from the perspective of the lamenting Admetus for whom his wife Alcestis sacrificed herself in a pact with death in order that he might live. However, what happened beforehand at all events seems to be described in hints, with a view to the hour of the final farewell.

Menschenwürdig Sterben. Ein Plädoyer für Selbstverantwortung © Copyright R. Piper GmbH & Co. KG, Munich, 1995. Translation © Copyright John Bowden, 1995. All Rights Reserved. No portion of this work may be reporoduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system now or hereafter invented, without permission in writing from the Publisher.