‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo.
‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us. And already, Frodo, our time is beginning to look black.
From “The Shadow of the Past” in The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien, as you all no doubt know.
Much is distilled in this passage about the great themes with which Tolkien wrestles in his stories, and there is much to reflect on about our own small part in this cosmic wrestling between good and evil. No doubt many have, like me, found inspiration in Gandalf’s words here to bear up in the face of wickedness undeserved and unprovoked; to play the man. Tolkien evokes through The Lord of the Rings a powerful kind of disinterested certitude in the face of doom when every piecemeal victory merely postpones loss and decay. Lewis, in his own way, captures this in chapter thirteen of Perelandra as Ransom and Weston are adrift at sea, about to find themselves broken upon the rocks. Weston cries out, “O God, here comes the dark!”
And the dark came. Horror of death such as he had never known, horror of the terrified creature at his side, descended upon Ransom…
This moment of fear gives way to this striking passage:
“Are you there, Weston?” [Ransom] shouted.
“What cheer? Pull yourself together. All that stuff you’ve been talking is lunacy. Say a child’s prayer if you can’t say a man’s. Repent your sins. Take my hand. There are hundreds of mere boys on Earth facing death this moment. We’ll do very well.” His hand was clutched in the darkness, rather more firmly than he wished.
“I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it,” came Weston’s voice.
“Steady now. None of that,” he shouted back….
In the face of evil, even of death, we’re spurred on to play the man. Lewis roots this explicitly in the Christian hope—a child’s prayer, repentance—while it remains more nebulous in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. I used the word disinterested above to capture the rejection of self-serving fear on the parts of both Frodo and Ransom here. They are able to face the dark and horror without clutching at their own lives. Weston here can do nothing of the sort and so death remains for him unbearable.
All this is very noble and salutary, and we ought to reflect more and more on the often unheroic good works to which we have been called even when the cost is great; yet, I have digressed from another element in the first passage that struck me quite unusually in the middle of the night as I lifted my dying mother out of her bed. There’s a certain fog that gathers around the mind at such hours when one has been jolted again from too little sleep. In the midst of such fog, I had come into my mind those words of Gandalf. There was a brief temptation to read myself in them: to feel heroic and yet unappreciated, unwillingly called to bear up my mother against the tyranny of cancer and death. To playact as if her suffering were a thing happening to me. I wish it need not have happened in my time, but, tragic hero that I am, I guess I have to play the hand I’ve been dealt. Be brave and drink the cup I’ve been given.
This mood lasted only a moment and better wisdom prevailed. It took only a heartbeat’s pause to trace out what it would mean if I were to wish that my mom’s sickness were a thing not to happen to me. Of course I wish she were not ill; I wish that this mortal coil were not riddled with death and decay; I wish that the Lord would come quickly. But I do not wish this happened in anyone else’s time nor any other time of my own life. To wish the first is to unwish all the things that matter most about Mom’s suffering. It could only happen in my time and our family’s time by the very nature of the thing. Nor could I at any other time in my own life be better prepared and able to help.
This is a different register than the heroic choices of Master Frodo. Not all evil is faced by gritting one’s teeth and bearing, come what will. There’s hardly a choice at all in suffering like this. This suffering now is the working out of all that is most dear in my life: to be a son to this mother, to be cared for, and now to care in return. “Whát I dó is me: for that I came,” as Hopkins sings it. The ring comes to Frodo from beyond him, undeserved, by some providential chance, and he is summoned forth to perform nobly in such terrible straits. But to care for the dying is something different, especially to care for those we love. The suffering of my mom is the working to its end of the life she was given; the care I and our family can give her is the love she gave us given back. Wyrd bið ful aræd.
Shakespeare knew what he was talking about in Sonnet 73:
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
This, it seems to me, is the register in which most of our lives are lived. Perhaps we should be ready for some extraordinary heroism needed betimes, but the steady call for each of us is to love God, to love one another, to give back the love given to us. “If we love one another, God dwelleth in us.” In this cursed world, that love is often pitched toward grief and suffering. So I do not wish that my mother’s sickness and approaching death came in some other time to some other family. It could only be to us, given life by her, nurtured in her love, and brought to this pass where we return a token of that, refashioned into the bearing of whatever burdens can be borne as she faces that last enemy.
And one day, late or soon, love shall be purged of grief and all that will remain is our joy.
“And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away.”