The Quick and the Dead (aka Haunting The Ghosts)

I  like to commune with saints, sinners and saintly sinners.  I believe I know some who came before and some who will come after me better than those with whom I drink coffee and carry on conversation daily.  One such soul is Edna St. Vincent Millay.  I feel a familiarity with her spirit, and our lives and deaths are something of a mirror with 44 days separating our individual occupations of planet Earth.  Our masks are similar; our experiences not entirely different; like all artists, our deep artistic feelings revealed not in who you see, but in what we produce.  

In the Spring of 1950 at the time I was conceived, Millay mourned the death of Eugen Boissevain, her husband of 26 years.  She was preparing for death at the age of 58 and voiced a fear of spring's rebirth as "shrinking from being hurt too much." She wrote to a friend, "I have already encountered the first dandelion. I stood and stared at it with a kind of horror. And then I felt ashamed of myself, and sorry for the dandelion. And suddenly, without my doing anything about it at all, my face just crumpled up and cried. How excited he always was when he saw the first dandelion!"

Not long ago I encountered spring's first dandelion, but I did not cry.  I photographed, captured and studied it.  But, then again, I am not drugging and drinking like Edna was during the spring she faced death.      

In October 1950 I was close to birth as I formed in my mother's womb while Millay shrank from being hurt too much, gave in to death and wrote her final lines, impressively objective despite the cloud of drugs:

I will control myself, or go inside.

I will not flaw perfection with my grief.

Handsome, this day: no matter who has died.

Millay the artist, reaching the end of her strength, likely found the atmosphere full of ghosts tapping and sighing on her window on that October evening in 1950.  The ghosts most certainly listened for reply, and she responded with a heart attack, falling from the top of the stairs at her home, Steepletop.  Her reply snuffed that lovely candle that had so famously burned at both ends; and she joined eternity with her beloved Eugen.  When found, her head was resting on a page of her notebook that contained the penciled draft of one last poem. The final three lines quoted above had a ring drawn around them.  Did she die of a broken heart?  If anyone could pull of such a thing, it would be Vincent.

Forty-four days later I was born, and I have lived 57 years to reach a point of understanding the value of ending a life refusing to flaw perfection with grief.  As such, I don't think Vincent would mind my borrowing her art to reply to the fading ghosts who tap on my window:  

My candle burned at both ends

til darkness stole the light

But oh my friend and oh my foes

That light will haunt your night...

I am pretty sure Vincent would like a good haunting.