On a very bad summer day a year and a half ago, my family buried my cousin Tommy. He was a jovial Irish-American who loved his Portuguese-descended wife, my godmother, and children and Portuguese culture. I can remember Tommy impersonating Amália Rodriquez — the great Portuguese fado singer, whose funeral shut down the country for three days — his voice reaching stratospheric falsetto heights as he strummed an imaginary guitar and then punctuated the whole thing with laughter. That’s how I remember Tommy — laughing.
As I’ve said, and written before, it was a very bad day for me for other reasons, and I was so distracted I missed the turn for the church but slipped in just in time to hear the priest read the Gospel that is often read at funerals and whose chief words from Jesus haunt the climax of Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities”: “I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.”
The Gospels are a mirror image of the Hebrew Bible, with more reversals contained in the Gospels themselves, so that in this passage those who believe but are dead shall live and those who live and believe shall never die. Life and death, death and life are but two halves of a continuum.
In his homily, the priest talked about the ways in which we all die, however. We die to our possessions, he said, our reputations.
And then, as light poured threw the stained-glass rose window behind him, he said something that has had a profound effect on me ever since and that at a deeply troubled moment gave me a strange peace: “The hardest thing is to let go.”
I have been brought back to that day over recent events, including the news that tennis star Andy Murray plans to retire this summer after the Paris Olympics and that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell plans to become a backbencher.
Murray has announced his retirement before, and in truth hasn’t been the player he was in the glory days of the Big Four (himself, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic) since his hip surgery. With his Slam wins, two Olympic gold medals, a castle hotel, a wife and four kids, Murray doesn’t have to prove anything to anyone. He even made an appearance on Mary Berry’s Scottish Christmas special, helping with a sausage-and-egg dish.
Still, when he, Nadal and especially Djokovic go — as they are now headed toward 40 — it will mark the end of a golden era in men’s tennis and, for me, the end of a time that paralleled a turbulent but highly creative moment in my life. I can see him still, playing Djokovic, with whom he grew up on the junior tour, at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan almost 10 years to the day — March 3, World Tennis Day. (Indeed, I have the promotional poster for the match — which I “stole” from a Metro-North train, thanks to a gracious conductor — framed in my home office.) There they were, kids no longer, but kidding around and taking selfies. I wish them all the best for a glorious tennis sunset.
McConnell’s is, of course, a more complex sunset. You can feel sympathy for an old man and the physical disabilities that are pushing him from the world stage. You can also remember the revenge he took on the Democrats and former President Barack Obama in particular by crossing him at every turn and failing to give Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland a hearing, then rushing in Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett to pack a conservative Supreme Court. (The Garland loss turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I find him to be a toothless, virtue-signaling attorney general.)
McConnell did all this not only to promote a conservative agenda but to avenge the Democrats and in particular the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s Borking of Reagan Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. Now Bork is gone, along with Kennedy and someday McConnell, too, as will we all be. And what will McConnell’s legacy be? One of spite, for certain, but also one of thwarted ambition, in which his own spitefulness was used against him as it laid the groundwork for the rise of Trumpism, which has checkmated McConnell’s Reagan-style, internationalist Republicanism.
McConnell has outfoxed himself, and it’s got to hurt — knowing not only that he is swimming against the tide of his party but that he contributed to the riptide himself.
The rest of us, I hope, are more Murray than McConnell in our leavetakings as we approach retirements, children going off to careers, marriages and families of their own, and loved ones like Tommy bidding “adieu.” I’ve been studying the Roman Stoic philosophers in this another winter of our discontent, in particular Epictetus, who wrote: “Do not demand things happen as you wish but wish that they happen as they do, and you will get on well.” Easy to say in good times, harder in tragedy.
But ultimately, Epictetus is saying what’s going to happen is going to happen. There is only so much of life you can control. What you can control is your attitude to it. And when you do, you may observe that what you lose comes back in another way. As Edmund Spenser wrote in his poem “The Faerie Queene”:
“For whatsoever from one place doth fall,
Is with the tide unto an other brought:
For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought.”