Rage

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Thus spoke Dylan Thomas in probably his most famous poem, written to his dying father. This is, I think, the only truly human approach to death. Until the very end, of course, when it finally grabs you, and sucks the last bit of hope from your soul, when you are finally ready to give up your ghost, and in that surrender you find what we are led to believe is an overwhelming feeling of peace. But until that final moment, anyone worth their salt is going to fight that mutherf*cker for all they are worth.

I’m not a big fan of group projects. And I’m also not very comfortable with public discussions of things that the folks in my family, the descendents of Oakies who had stoically scraped out hardscrabble lives on this continent for centuries, have tended to keep to ourselves. Things like our own suffering. But I married into a bunch of Midwestern Catholics, and I’ve learned that they handle strong emotions in a different way than how I was raised. I don’t think either way is inherently better or worse than the other. Just different. But I’ve learned to respect my new family for their honest expression of strong feelings. In this vein I, along with 29 other bloggers, have been asked by Sheila Quirke, my cousin-in-law, to write a brief commemoration of Donna Quirke Hornik, her daughter, who passed away a little over a year ago, at the age of four, from a rare form of brain cancer.

Actually, I’m not going to tell you much about Donna. I really didn’t know her that well, at least not nearly as well as a lot of good folks who’ve already written very eloquent testimonials about her. Rather, I want to talk about the rest of us still living and breathing on this planet.

“I could have been someone,” laments Shane MacGowan in “The Fairy Tale of New York,” to which Kirsty MacColl responds, “Well so could anyone.” Which gets to the heart of our existential tragedy, MacCool a siren for all of our fates.

Life, probably all life, but certainly all individual human lives, including mine and yours, is both ecstasy and tragedy rolled into one another, the tragedy precisely that there is so much beauty to experience, there is so much truth that we feel compelled to tell, there are so many good things that we want to get done, that as we squander our allotted time in the light, the momentous heaviness of those wasted opportunities becomes almost too much to bear. We all have experienced those seemingly cruel twists, those moments when it becomes clear that great chunks of our potential will never be realized. But this is especially true of 4-year old girls who die of cancer.

We all have our own ways of raging against the dying of the light. For my cousin Sheila, this has become quite personal, as it is also a rage against the dying of the light of her daughter. As long as Sheila lives, she is determined not to let that happen.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Sheila is determined not to be that type of “good” person, the one who looks back in lament at the frailness of her deeds. Rather, she is making her own green bay, in which the light of her daughter may continually dance. She is hosting a benefit for St. Baldrick's Foundation, which raises money for pediatric cancer research, and you can support her, if you are so inclined, by going to Donna's Good Things.