Life Beyond Measure

by Sidney Poitier

  I’ve not been one to preach to you, and will do my best to keep it so as long as our relationship lives on. But I am now asking you to be mindful of the needs of the planet, mindful of the environment that must sustain the family of man—not for a century, not for a thousand years ahead, but on into perpetuity. And if we consciously work not to throw the intricate, extraordinary balance out of sync, if we are in harmony with the universe, the snows and rains will continue to come, and we will honor and preserve the earthly home given to us by our maker.

  That entity we know as God is the subject of my next letter.

  twenty-first letter

  FAITH

  Many letters ago, you will recall, I wrote to you, Ayele, about the evidence of things not seen—the faith in God—that sustained my mother in her anguish when faced with the prospect of losing her child, when confronted with not knowing how I was faring during those many years when, without a sign to the contrary, all she could do was believe that I would return.

  I return to the subject of faith to add a few more thoughts that seem fitting in connection with the larger questions of our individual and collective purposes. And one of those questions we’re hard-pressed to ask at times when we look back at our lives in sum is whether our faith was well placed. Mine was not my mother’s religious certainty; rather, it was a spiritual recognition that I had a purpose, even when I didn’t know what it was. Does that mean that God made all the decisions in which I was an instrument in His, or Her, design? Or was it the day-to-day choices that, in the aggregate of the day’s accumulation of choices, I had to learn to trust?

  To answer those questions for myself I have to ask, again, whether I feel that what I have done in my life was by my own determination. No! I really do have a wonderful curiosity, an instinct for the possibility that God is as big as I think and as immeasurable as I perceive; and the faith that I have invested in that belief has delivered me into a life that is beyond anything I could have asked for or sought.

  It is one article of faith to accept that I am here as part of a larger picture, in which my choices played an important but lesser role. It is a further article of faith to be mindful of what this power has done for me. I think it protects me. I think it will use me ultimately in a manner it so chooses, and my entity is a part of an energy of which there are many parts. So, for His design to be effective, my life has had to take a certain turn, as it will continue to do. If God needs me as an entity to sidestep the buzz saw, I will. And if I assume that my having sidestepped the buzz saw was all my doing—that’s crazy, that’s ego.

  But conversely, I don’t believe that God wants me to sit absolutely contented that He is going to make all the decisions for me. I think, as I perceive God, that it is my responsibility to make the choices in my life that I feel are necessary for me to be the kind of person that I am. One or another of those choices will kill me, probably, but that’s how it goes. Before me there were hundreds and hundreds of millions of people who died, generation after generation. All of us live and we die, and it is to the honor of this great intelligence that I perceive as God that we live life as we feel we have to live it if we feel decency, honor, respect, compassion, truth, love, sympathy, and empathy. All of those are the forces, energies, dispositions out of which we make our choices, for they are very real for us, and within our abilities to offer to others, because somewhere within our individual existence is a need for love, for compassion, for a safe harbor in the arms of somebody.

  My choice is to have faith in that infinite intelligence and to trust that we are where we are, when we are, how we are, for a reason—that each of us has a perfect life, lived as it was meant to be.

  Of all the human beings alive at this moment all over the planet, some are moving slowly toward the closing of their lives, some are just beginning to come alive and are being spanked on the behind as they begin crying, some are enduring in the middle, some struggling for wisdom, some for clarity, some for understanding. That’s the whole process; it is constantly in motion. We reach for small, incremental improvements. We would like a better job; we would like health for our family; we would like a long life; we would like an absence of war; we would like an ability, collectively, to put a lock around the impulses we have that are destructive for others, and around the impulses others have that are destructive for us.

  My faith is enough to stand on, no matter how early or late the hour of the day, to look at where everyone is in the course of all their struggles and triumphs, myself included, and to say—My God, life is so arresting! To take it all in with great thanksgiving, even knowing that we could all be dust in one fell swoop. I don’t mean in ten years or fifty thousand years or eight billion years.

  We could all be dust for reasons we don’t understand. The dinosaur probably had no idea that one day it would be extinct. And we could go as well, because we don’t rule; we are not the driving force behind the planet. But knowing that we were here and believing that we mattered—that’s faith.

  The ability to look back at your life and see all the things you might have done differently, but still recognize that everything happened organically and for a reason—that, too, is faith. I have put that faith in the only God that I can see in my mind’s eye, a God who is an invisible, intangible force that is the ultimate in forces that cannot be described, that does have a direct relationship with everything about us—how we come into being, how we breathe, of what use we ultimately are to the larger frame of existence.

  What is our purpose? You have to either go into structured faith or, as I do, try to figure out—and I don’t have much time left—all of these possibilities. I just am reluctant to embrace a format for faith that says that the embracing of it is all you have to do, and then you’ll understand, and then you’ll leave it all to God. It is the nature of mystery, as I see it, and of God, not to settle for finite explanations.

  How can we know whether we have measured up to our given purpose? Again, faith will tell us that we have, that we have done the best with what we’ve been given. After all, I doubt that God, if He exists in those terms, leaves all that much to us, and is sitting there clucking his tongue, waiting to give us a bad report card, or is watching us and saying, “Oh, Lord, there they go again. How can they not see that they’re going over a cliff?”

  I readily admit to being bedeviled by thoughts about how imperfect we human beings are. I could argue that if there is a God, then He made us the way we are. No, I’m not placing blame, and let me hasten to add that I don’t question the actual existence of God. I believe that it’s either one way or the other. It can’t be that there is a God and there is no God. So I give the presence of God equal time with the opposing thought that there is no such presence. I can’t say positively that there is a God, because I don’t know. I cannot say there is not a God; again, I don’t know. So I leave it, but in the leaving of it I have now granted myself permission to think further and deeper. And as I go deeper, I find other mysteries.

  I assume that there is a power and that it has a relationship to us, and its dimensions and its image are beyond me. So I give it its due. Its due is, we’re here.

  And not only are we here; the planet is here. And not only is the planet here; the galaxy is here. And not only is the galaxy here; billions of galaxies are here. And they all form a universe.

  We don’t know much about this universe. Science tells us some little bits about it. We don’t know if there is an adjacent universe. We don’t know if there are billions and billions of universes. And with the limited capacities of our minds, that’s enough for us to figure out. It’s enough to drive us for billions of years to come if we’re smart.

  Contrary to some thinking, science and faith to me are not mutually exclusive. I believe that only the God who has been a force in my life from the time I entered the world, ahead of schedule, could have been the spark that ignited it all.

  Since these matters are highly likely still to be unresolved in your time, Ayele, you
will need to do your own deep thinking and arrive at your own conclusions. And, if you are the educated, well-rounded, ethical, decent, moral person that I am sure you will be in your adult years, you will be able to make your own choices.

  twenty-second letter

  DEATH

  Dearest Ayele,

  As your life blossoms, both your great-grandmother Juanita and I will be attending to our final accounts. And let me state for the record that regardless of my differences with her that came many years earlier, she will have enriched you in countless ways. No doubt you will wear the imprint of her affection proudly in all that you will be; and likewise she will take nothing but pleasure in watching you grow up.

  You’ve been so fortunate to be raised with the love of three generations of women, starting with your confident and caring mother (my granddaughter Aisha); Beverly, your life-embracing grandmother (my daughter); and your great-grandmother Juanita, who has been blessed with a very long life.

  Many of us live to a fairly ripe old age, as I, too, have been fortunate to do. Nevertheless, the possibility of loss of any of your loved ones is a subject that can’t be ignored.

  It is easier for me to make comments on death than it will be for you to hear comments on death. At your tender years, you are probably quite unmindful of the fact that death is a part of every life, for every life eventually ends. It falls not to you but to your elders to convey that fact as gently as possible.

  Indeed, you may run into a loss as early as among your classmates in elementary school. Death is not off-limits to that area, nor is it off-limits to children in high school and college, and the further you go into adulthood, the greater the chances that you’ll encounter it. Life is certainly not a guarantee.

  Many times, the length of our survival on earth depends on circumstances over which we have no control. Quite important is our inherited infrastructure—who we are in terms of our vital organs, how able our cells are to replenish and replace themselves, and whether nature smiles on us with all of the fine work it does in keeping us together in one single unit of life.

  I suspect that, with the discoveries of modern medicine and your being mindful of your own life and those things you must do in order to enhance it, protect it, and nurture it, you, Ayele, will live quite a long time beyond my years. As a matter of fact, I’d be disappointed if you didn’t. I don’t want you to be even thinking of having one gray hair until you’re eighty. And for you to have all of your hair go gray, I’d want you to have to live to be at least 125. So, you see, I’m charging you with a responsibility even at these young years of yours.

  But death does come, my dear Ayele, and when it does it brings a sadness, a solemn moment. It brings a time when separation and departure are experienced. It brings contemplation and reflection. It brings back days, wonderfully well spent, that are etched in your memory of all that transpired between you and a loved one or a friend. It does that even when the loss is not yours but is experienced by a close acquaintance. Love and concern and compassion travel across genders, across generations, across ethnicities, across races, across religions—all touched in one way or another by that loss. Death comes not only to the person who has to receive it, but also to those who will experience the absence of that person.

  Death is a frequent visitor. The larger the family, the more frequent the visits; sometimes it appears without notice of any kind. Sometimes a simple message is sent to say that it will soon be dropping by. It comes and leaves, always in the company of at least one family member. When a visit is merciful and unbearable pain and suffering are brought to an end, the visitor leaves us to mourn our loss and to heal, until it comes again, as surely it will.

  In my lifetime, the number of visits death has made to family members on both my father’s and mother’s sides is sobering: grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins—first, second, and third—and then my dear granddaughter Kamaria, who died at a very early age.

  My memory chain of death as a frequent visitor among my family began with my grandparents on my mother’s side. Most of those on my father’s side were gone before I was born. My mother’s mother and father, Mama Gina and Pa Tim, have been locked in my memory since I was five years old.

  To this day, I can still draw up images of Mama Gina stooped over a cooking fire just outside the kitchen that her husband, Pa Tim, built for her out of palm leaves that he fastened to a sturdy structure made from the limbs of hardwood trees. The kitchen was for use on days of wind or rain; otherwise, she preferred to do her cooking outside. I can still see her there, with her hair covered as usual by a white cloth tied behind her head in a knot at the base of her neck.

  When I was around the age of six, I watched Pa Tim noticeably change. Where before he had been tall and sinewy, weathered though sturdy from a lifetime of working out in the elements, he declined suddenly before my eyes, growing frail and feeble; his life and times had worn his body down. It could no longer fend for itself. Day after day, whenever I went to see my grandparents, I wondered why he sat quietly, looking for long periods of time at the ocean. I had no idea a process was in motion: his life was drawing to a close. Day by day, dementia was slowly enveloping him. He simply was waiting for release. When it came, with him went portions of the Poitier family history, never to be reclaimed. The frequent visitor death had called on Mama Gina’s husband, and soon thereafter it returned for her.

  My father had moved the family to Nassau by the time my mother received the news of her mother’s passing. She wailed for hours, uncontrollably: “Oh, God! My Ma, gone! My Ma gone! My Ma gone!” She completely lost it, and ended up in a deep gloom that took her weeks to climb out of.

  My mother was destined to eventually mourn a son, a daughter, a sister, a grandchild, and finally her husband—the last a loss that ran so deep she was unable to recover, and she joined him soon thereafter.

  In my own case, as I’m sure you will read in my letters to you, I have been so close to death that my salvation was of a nature that I could not possibly understand. I’m alive for reasons I cannot explain. The many close calls I’ve had were of such nature that under normal circumstances they would have taken me away many times over. So that is why I, at this point, choose to talk to you about death.

  And let me look at my own demise. It will come, as death comes to all living things; as it arrived for my parents, as it arrived for my brothers, as it arrived for my sisters, cousins, friends, acquaintances, fellow workers. The loss was always registered by me in terms of its totality. It is, and it will be forever, a total loss.

  Religion says that we will, we hope, meet up with some of those who left us through having been called by death. My mother believed that very deeply. I have my own thoughts on that, as I’m sure you know by now. And although my thoughts, my expectations, head down a different path, I am respectful of my mother’s deep faith in her beliefs. I’m sure she grants me the prerogative to embrace whatever opinion I have in terms of life and death.

  But I raise the question to you now because it’s an exchange that we must have. By all indications, I will precede you in death, and probably by many, many decades. If that is the case, I would like you to know that I am comfortable with whatever lies ahead, and that I am comfortable in my feelings that you will have a long, productive, happy, useful life. It will not be automatically presented to you, however. You will have to carve it for yourself out of all that is around you.

  A tiny bit of myself is lost when my friends are gone. A tiny bit of myself was lost when my brothers, all but one, passed away. I experience a loss when friends, relatives, and acquaintances with whom I had a human connection go.

  But there are other aspects of death, some of which science and society are just beginning to explore. Do our parents actually live on in us, or does just their memory? If so, is it more than memory? Is inside us the actual resting place of that elusive quality deemed their “soul,” and thus is it passed on from generation to generation?

  Somewhat to
the contrary, science now indicates that the sum total of our existence resides in our consciousness, and with our passing comes the passing of everything, and so the “soul” as an actual entity does not exist. Since the world’s major religions hold that consciousness is indeed located in the soul, and therefore does not die with the body but goes on to an afterlife of reward or punishment, this presents a ponderous question for those who hang their hopes on a spirit world.

  But when does a person actually die? Is it with the last breath that passes from the body; the last beat of the heart; the last fading signal from the brain?

  Some people believe that you do not truly die until the last person who knew you dies. In that case, your life could go on for half a century or more beyond the legal declaration of death.

  While most of us fear death, there are those who seem to reach a state of calmness when it appears near, and those in great pain welcome it. Some, by virtue of religion or temperament, are stoic in the face of the prospect of death; they see it as merely the next step in the existence of one’s life—a further adventure rather than a sad ending.

  Still, until and if we reach that calm state, most of us wish mightily to avoid death. As the phrase often goes in religious circles: “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.”

  Woody Allen put it another way. “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work,” he said. “I want to achieve it by not dying.”

  But since death is unavoidable, perhaps what we can best seek is a long life that comes peacefully toward its end, and then have that end come swiftly. A lingering death is the most undesirable of all.

  Part of the fear of death is the feeling of stepping into the great unknown—a vast, dark void of which no research has been recorded, no news reports sent back. Ah, but what of people who claim to have been there and back? Those who say that, in a time of critical illness, they saw “a white light” unlike any they had ever seen before, and maybe even for a time moved toward it. They believe that they were in that moment at the abyss of death, and somehow, miraculously, stepped back from it. Was this an actual occurrence in the subconscious, or a medical, drug-induced aberration?