Ubi Sunt?

Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?
Where are those who came before us? 

The Old English poems ask—over and over again, in different words, different ways—where are those who came before us? Where have they gone?

The motif begins in the Old Testament and then threads its way through Old English and Middle English literature. It’s taken up again by the Romantic poets and carries into modern poems and love songs. Where have all the flowers gone? sang Pete Seeger in the 1950s, his lyrics based on a Ukrainian folk song. Where have all the young girls gone? Where have all the soldiers gone?

The Old English poets celebrate deeds of ancient kings and queens, war heroes from the past, glorious cities of yore. But where are they now? they ask.

Where has the horse gone? Where is the rider?
Where is the giver of gifts?
Where is the seat of feasting? Where is the hall-joy?
… How the time has slipped
Down under the night-helmet, as if it never was.
                                                 —from The Wanderer

After my father had a mini-stroke, our family’s attention focused more sharply on him. For weeks he was at the center of our plans and thoughts as we tried to understand what had happened, to figure out what to do next. One moment, we were holding our breaths as he seemed on the brink of dying, the next he was driving us crazy, trying to charge out of the house in the middle of the night. There were haunting times at his bedside and frustrating nights of little sleep.

The rest of life—back at home, working at my computer, walking the dog, seeing friends—was drifty and dreamlike.

It wasn’t the first time I’d experienced that surreal feeling.

Years ago, when my mother was dying, our family took turns at her bedside. We temporarily moved into my parents’ house, where we lost touch with routine and the rest of the world for weeks, existing on whatever food thoughtful friends and neighbors provided. When we slept, it was for a few hours at a time, often in random places on the floor.

When I had to leave for work, I was floating, still half in that other world, still yearning to be back, close to my mother.

Later on, during an intensive hospice volunteering stint in San Francisco, I spent several days in a row with a single dying patient. After long stretches of sitting at his bedside, matching my breath to his, or, towards the end, counting the seconds between his breaths, I felt so close to him. Even when I worked a double shift of volunteering from early in the day until late into the night, I didn’t want to leave. I remember returning to the place where I was staying through a downpour that sloshed water up to my ankles. All night, I listened to the rain at the window, waking and sleeping, thinking about the man at the edge of his life just a few buildings away.

It’s a kind of soul closeness, a simple being-with, untainted by surface clutter. A waiting-next-to. Even to me, an agnostic, an unbeliever, it felt like a place between worlds. A place where our personalities and histories and much of who we were was dropped.

After their deaths, I would miss each of my hospice patients. When my mother died, I would miss her, achingly, for a long time. And when my father recovered, I was enormously grateful. But in all those instances, I also felt a sense of loss. I missed the feeling, the close awareness of another being.

*

One story about the early Anglo-Saxons: when they saw the imposing monuments left behind by the Celts and the remains of Roman cities, the elaborate baths, buildings, and cities, they were awed. Because, compared to their own wood-and-thatch homes, these were the remnants of great civilizations.

But the buildings had crumbled into ruins, and the ancient people were gone. So, the poets of works like Beowulf, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and The Ruin reflected: if these civilizations, with their intricate and magnificent structures, had disappeared, then theirs, too, would be gone someday.

Wondrous are these ancient wall-stones,
Shattered by time, foundations shaken by fate,
The old work of giants, crumbled, corrupted—
Rooftops in ruin, towers tumbled down.

…

The burg-halls were bright, the bathhouses beautiful,
The gabled roofs grand. The sounds of warriors,
Their steps and shouts, reverberated under roofs.
The meadhalls were full of wine and revelry—
Until fierce fate overturned everything.
                                                 —from The Ruin

More and more often, my father would get a far-away look in his eyes, the one where I’d wonder where he was, what he was thinking. More and more often, he seemed gone from the present, from the joy he used to take in other people, in exploring the world, or even just being in the world. In those moments, he didn’t seem unhappy. He seemed not-here.

My father was gradually leaving, although the process had already been going on for years, might have taken years longer.

*

Over time, the meaning of the ubi sunt theme quicksilvers, its emphasis sliding in different generations and cultures. In the Old English poems, the motif was layered with meanings that both celebrated earthly existence and reflected on its transience. Some of the poets moralized: material joys are temporary, so spend your energy contemplating the spiritual realm instead. The ruins of older civilizations could serve as a memento mori, a reminder of death’s inevitability—the Old English word was dustsceawung, the contemplation of dust.

But there’s also a melancholic beauty in the poets’ yearning for the past. Some suggest we should seize the day, enjoy what we have, while we have it. Look! they seem to say. Look how amazing the lives of the people before us were. They left, and we will leave too. We are all leaving.

The gold and the wine and the heroic deeds have disappeared from memory, they say. And yet the poets remember, and so do we.

*

The walls of my father’s house are crammed with pictures: Photos by promising young photographers, images of ships and fishing boats and a riverboat, prints of birds by John James Audubon and paintings of birds by a friend. There are two artistic cartoons depicting my dad, and there are family photos, ranging from severe and traditional to lively and colorful.

Then there are the photographs from his days as a newspaperman. In one of these, he and five other people pose with President John F. Kennedy. In another, he reaches up to shake hands with Jimmy Carter. In still another, he sits in the news reporters’ pool, his back turned toward us, as Gerald Ford speaks from a lectern. A more formal portrait shows him in a small group with Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Looking at the pictures, you feel—or I feel—the boundless energy, the charisma of this man. He’s thrilled to be where he is, posted so near the movers-and-shakers; as soon as the photographer finishes snapping the picture, my father will be asking them a question or making a joke.

In recent photos, my dad is a different man. His face sags, his mouth is uncertain, and his eyes too often have a blank look.

People living with advanced dementia are caught between worlds. They’re still linked to the glories of their pasts, still tied to their homes, to material things that have meant something, to any evidence they’ve made an impact, left a mark.

“I was a founder,” my father would say about a small group he helped organize. Or, “Didn’t I have something to do with that?” about someone else’s success.

But he was also withdrawing, turning inward. He was readying for something else, whatever that might be.

He was seldom willing to talk about his own eventual demise. But now and then he would note the many people he’d loved who were gone. “If all those other people have done it,” he would say, “I can too,” and I feel the same way.

As they slowly fade away, people like my father are reminders of what we already know but sometimes forget in the day-to-day: to celebrate our own lives, to live them fully. Ubi sunt? they silently ask. Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?

*

NOTE: Extracts from The Wanderer and The Ruin from The Complete Old English Poems, edited by C. Williamson (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). Retrieved from https://users.pfw.edu/flemingd/OE2020/WOEP.pdf