by Lori Smith
Fourteen
Winchester: A Patient Descent
She was the sun of my life,
the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of
every sorrow, I had not a thought concealed from her,
& it is as if I had lost a part of myself
—CASSANDRA AUSTEN, AFTER JANE'S DEATH
Jane came to Winchester to die. I think she knew that. She drew up her will in late April 1817 without telling any of her family. By the end of May, she and Cassandra were here in a house at 8 College Street behind some windy roads from the cathedral so Jane could be treated by the surgeon Mr. Lyford.1 He told Jane that he would cure her but soon privately told family members that there was no hope. In June everyone thought she was dying, but she rallied again and lasted until mid-July. Her sister, Cassandra, was there, and her sister-in-law Mary. Her brothers had been visiting, all but Frank, whose seventh child was just three months old and who may have agreed to stay home to keep their mother company.2At the end, Cassandra asked if Jane wanted anything, and she told her “she wanted nothing but death” and said, “God grant me patience, Pray for me Oh Pray for me.”3
Early the next morning, she was gone.
Nearly everyone in Jane's family lived into their seventies or eighties. Her mother, who regularly suffered from all kinds of illnesses, like a “gouty swelling & sensation,” bile, “heat in her throat,” “an Asthma, a Dropsy, Water in her Chest &C a Liver Disorder”4 would outlive her by ten years, her sister by nearly thirty. James died shortly after Jane, but Frank and Charles were both commanding ships in their seventies. Charles died at seventy-three of cholera in Burma, serving as rear admiral.5 Frank lived to the ripe old age of ninety-one.6 Edward lived to be eighty-five, and dear Henry almost as long.7 In a world where sickness and death were so much more readily expected, the Austens were remarkably healthy. Jane was just forty-one.
She had been sick for a year and a half.8 It was a strange illness no one understood at the time. It made her tired so that she often had to lie down. Her back hurt sometimes, and her skin went blotchy—black and white. She had fevers and difficulty sleeping and enough gastrointestinal problems to make her believe that bile—that general nineteenth-century malady supposed to be responsible for so much illness—was the cause of the whole thing. At the end, she would be stuck on a sofa during the days and brag of being able to get up from time to time and move from room to room. Some suggest this was cancer, but most now believe it was Addison's disease, which had yet to be named. With Addison's, the adrenal glands go askew, and the body's fine balance is disturbed.
Jane was always hopeful that it was going away. There were periods when she couldn't take her regular walks so she used a donkey cart to get out or even rode the donkey itself, which she sometimes found easier. She was always trying to get better, always expecting that she was getting better. She wrote to her niece Caroline, “/ feel myself getting stronger than I was half a year ago, & can so perfectly well walk to Alton, or back again, without the slightest fatigue that I hope to be able to do both when Summer comes.”9 And to Fanny, “Sickness is a dangerous Indulgence at my time of Life.”10 Some days she rested on a group of three chairs in a row, never taking the couch for fear that her mom might need to lie down there and would never use it if she thought Jane might need it.
She finished writing Persuasion as the fog was setting in (not that there is any symptom of this fog in her writing), then started Sanditon and had to put it aside fairly quickly.
Her illness got worse with stress, and there was stress during this period in the Austen family. Edward had been dealing with a lawsuit that threatened all of his Hampshire properties, including Chawton and Steventon.11 Charles, whose wife and new baby had died a couple of years earlier, ran the naval ship he was commanding aground along the Turkish coast.12 It was all proved not to be his fault, but he would have had to go through a court-martial, and it was a black mark against his name. Henrys banking business failed, which cost the family dearly.13Then Uncle Leigh-Perrot, Mrs. Austen's wealthy brother, died and left them nothing immediately, instead giving everything to his wife. The Austens had reason to hope for something from his will and were greatly disheartened—and if that sounds moneygrubbing, at that period of time, families were largely dependent on one another, and Leigh-Perrot was immensely wealthy compared to the Austens.14 So Jane would get worse, and then she would recover and believe she was getting better, but it would never actually go away—only return again and again with a stealthy ferocity.
I think Jane had always been preparing for this moment. Reading her letters, there is an awareness and remembrance of what would be next. She was conscious of that other world that is a focus of Christianity. This life, however good or bad, was thought of as preparation for the next. In one of her letters to her brother Frank—Frank who was known as the devout sailor, the one “who knelt in church”15—she wrote of her growing fame, “what a trifle it is in all its Bearings, to the really important points of ones existence even in this World!”16 (Actually, what Jane was concerned about was Henry's letting out her secret career as a writer.)
Jane, with humility that prevailed in spite of her sharp wit and sometimes sharp tongue, was not sure she was entirely prepared for death. In one of her last letters, sent when Jane still believed she was recovering, she tells her friend Anne Sharp, “the Providence of God has restored me—& may I be more fit to appear before him when I am summoned, than I should have been now!”17 I can only imagine what she felt, to be so sick so young, to have hope because of the grace of God and yet feel like more could have been done, more years were wanted.
The Austens—particularly Cassandra—seem to have stifled their grief a bit in light of their great Christian hope of another world, of Jane being acceptable to God, and even of someday being together again. They were both devastated and stalwart, with tangible hope.
I am afraid it looked like I was moving into the cathedral for a while. I decided to stop through on my way to Lyme so I had to drag my suitcase and backpack with me the whole way; because of all the terrorism, the tourist office will no longer hold on to them. So I rolled the whole unbalanced mess through the line, in front of the desk where they plead for a donation, up to the center of the nave, out the side door up the steps and through the turnstile into the bathroom, back in through the exit up the nave and over to the side aisle to look for Austen's memorial, up the steps at the back of the church to try to see the choir loft and chapels. My luggage sat beside me as reverently as possible.
The whole town felt better and more real than Canterbury. The brick streets are wider; there is still commerce but less schmaltz. They seem to be stores that real people use. You can walk through the whole center of town, which is blocked off to traffic. There were people out doing business, and not just hordes of tourists (sneers the girl dragging her suitcase behind her).
I loved the cathedral, in spite of the noise and crowds of schoolchildren, not all of whom had intelligent, good-looking masters keeping them in line. (“Scuze, scuze,“I was interrupted by a group of Italian junior-high kids in the middle of my reverie in front of Jane's memorial. They will not remember what it was when they get home and look at the pictures.) And I know this is a building Jane loved. It's so much like Canterbury that I don't know how they could feel so materially different, but Winchester felt open and welcoming; Canterbury felt heavy and dark and oppressive. Huge green spaces around the cathedral were filled with groups of teenagers hanging out, talking, and smoking.
My favorite is the back window, a jumble of colors and patterns. The panes, as most, had portrayed various biblical stories, but they were ruined by the parliamentary forces of William Waller during the Civil War. Waller's troops entered the church during a morning service— some on horseback, with noise and drums and chaos, and decided to use the window for target practice. The local story is that when the townspeople heard, they rushed in and gathered up all the pieces. Twenty years later, the original p
ieces of glass were put back in however they could get them to fit, so now it is an entire wall of comforting mess.
They say in the early years after Jane's death people would come to see her grave, and the verger had no idea why they were looking for the grave of this country girl. She was buried here almost a week after she died with the epitaph Henry wrote for her tomb:
The benevolence of her heart,
the sweetness of her temper, and
the extraordinary endowments of her mind
obtained the regard of all who knew her, and
the warmest love of her intimate connections.
Their grief is in proportion to their affection
they know their loss to be irreparable,
but in their deepest affliction they are consoled
by a firm though humble hope that her charity,
devotion, faith and purity, have rendered
her soul acceptable in the sight of her
REDEEMER.
“They know their loss to be irreparable.” I love that line. Her nieces and nephews said that they went back to the Chawton Cottage after they had grown up a bit, after Jane was gone and when Cassandra was getting older. They found it had none of the charm they remembered.
Henry, Edward, Frank, and Jane's nephew James Edward carried the coffin. Women did not go to funerals then, for fear of their emotions, so Cassandra could only watch the procession carry her sister, “the sun of [her] life,” until they went down the street and around the corner and she “had lost her forever.”18
Jane's death makes me think of my Aunt Ginny. She was lovely. I mean not in the traditional beautiful person sense, but she was a lovely person. Her face and hair sort of reminded me of a throwback to the forties, maybe because her hair never really changed from when she got married in the middle of World War II just as her fiance was about to ship off—short curls, not entirely natural, carefully put in place. She let me and my sister curl it once when we were staying in a condo on Kauai and she was out of town for her regular hair appointment. She sat there in a chair in front of the mirror, and we laughed and tried to figure out how to do an old persons hair. That was the trip where the police came one night and told us to quiet down because we were being too loud playing spoons and singing old country music. I was fifteen then; Ginny was in her early sixties and already had cancer. I didn't think too much about it, I guess, except that you had to expect stuff like that when you got old.
And when I was seventeen and she, in tears, put her mother's—my grandmother's—pearls around my neck, passing them on to the next generation (I think she must have known too that she was dying, although that would take another year and a half), I felt young and beautiful and deserving, not able to comprehend the greatness, the significance of the gift.
Back then women were still allowed to get old. Ginnys hair had turned gray, her hips were a little wide, her chest a little flat. She was eighteen years older than my mom, so more like a grandmother to me than an aunt. Her eyes danced whenever we came to visit, and she was the one I took my first steps to on my first birthday.
She and Uncle Steve went on cruises and sent us postcards from places like St. Thomas and St. Lucia, and every Valentine's Day without fail she sent a heart-shaped box of Russell Stover candy.
My mom went to stay with Ginny when she was dying since Steve had passed on years before. Her colon cancer had spread, had eaten through her body so that there was a hole to the outside. She was in tremendous pain. Now I realize that she was young, my parents’ age now, and that she could still be here if they had caught the cancer sooner or if they had different treatments.
I was a sophomore in college. My mother called and said there would only be a very small memorial service, that I shouldn't come. Reluctantly I let her persuade me. I regretted it even then. So Ginny was cremated, her possessions gone through, the house with the lovely hardwood floors sold. A small group of friends gathered to remember her, and I cried myself to sleep in a metal bunk bed in a sterile dorm room in gray, rainy Ohio.
I can only imagine how Cassandra felt watching Jane's coffin proceed from the house on College Street toward the cathedral, through the ancient Kingsgate Arch, where she wouldn't be able to watch any further.
The first time I wanted to die I was driving by Chestnut Grove Cemetery off Drainesville Road, which I drive by all the time. I was sick then—I mean, I hadn't fully recovered from that mono-like virus, so I was exhausted all the time and working full time and trying to be a writer (I think I was finishing my first book) and training on the weekends for the upcoming week-long backpacking trip to Montana. More than anything else I wanted rest, and in that moment death seemed attractive, like the only way to stop doing and just rest, for ages and ages. Strangely, there was nothing depressing about it. I just envied the silence and stillness of the dead.
Then when I was flying home from my grandfather's funeral—irascible old Granddaddy Bob, who was mean with a tinge of sweetness and sometimes the other way around (“Do you know why you aren't married, Lori?” he said once. “Its because you're too religious.”)—it hit me that death is our destination, which I had always known but had never really believed or maybe had never really believed for myself. This time I felt it with a kind of surety, like death is the main point. Bob was gone, and everyone else who had ever lived before me was gone, and all of us on the plane, all of us living, will someday be gone, and waves of people after us will all be heading for death. There is this great destination no one will escape, as if life were a churning assembly line sending us all on to death and dying. “A patient willing descent into the grass,”19 Wendell Berry more graciously calls it. In that moment, whatever comes after this seemed to be the main point.
I was tired then—I still am—so maybe my thinking was slightly off. Since then I have turned the tables a bit and seen that in the face of the constant presence of death, there is irrepressible Life. But that realization never really left me.
Jack and I talked about heaven one night, sitting with Spencer on the Wycliffe back lawn. I don't know entirely what to make of the idea of heaven, but I do believe I'll see Jesus (which sounds terribly cheesy somehow) and that all the bad stuff in me will be gone so that in that moment I will finally have a right perspective of myself, that standing there I will be known, truly, and be able to worship, truly, without my muck and tainted heart getting in the way. The pride will be gone, and I will finally be true and put right again.
Anyway, Jack and I were talking with Spencer about how if heaven is this eternal hymn sing, then, please, just send me to hell (only writing that feels very sacrilegious). And how could we think that the God who gave us Bach and physics and the entire world of the oceans with their tiny tidal pools and extravagant creature-filled depths could have something boring planned? Why is it we suspect God of giving us less in the next world than he's given us in this?
All the same, I'm not really comfortable with the idea of death. I try to be, but I'm not.
This is what keeps me up at night, the mystery of what happens in that dying moment and my fear of God. Actually I think I am not that spiritual, and my much greater fear is simply the unknown. I am the girl, after all, who didn't go to the school cafeteria for an entire year because I wasn't entirely sure how it worked. I sat there with my nerdy brown bag, wanting tater tots and wondering what it looked like behind the wall in the kitchen. So contemplating a shift from here to eternity is a stretch for me. But I have “a firm though humble hope”20that in the face of my Redeemer, all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things shall be well.
Fifteen
Lyme: the Comforting Ocean
A little sea-bathing would set me up forever.
—MRS. BENNET, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
For Jane's sake I'm sitting on a bench overlooking the beach in the cold gray mist, trying to love Lyme but not being very successful. I didn't expect this when the bus tipped over the edge of the hill and down into town last night.
Suddenly we were out from beneath the overgrowth, the tiny roads that seemed to be carved into the edge of the cliff, running down the main street. Suddenly there was the comforting ocean, the quaint town with bright buildings and little stores. I expected to love it.
But my room was dirty and smelly, with white lacquered furniture from the seventies and only big enough for a twin bed, small walkway, dresser, desk, and sink lining the opposite wall. The sink and shower were growing black mold. The fabric headboard had a dark outline where people rubbed their dirty heads against it. I'm sure the carpet was filthy, but the colors were so dark that you couldn't see the dirt. The more I thought about that, the more I obsessively dropped things—my hairbrush, my socks, my pajamas. My room was right over the pub, so it reeked of frying oil from the fish and chips; I couldn't sleep for fear that I would touch something.
Now I'm looking at the beaches, which are mostly pebbles, big enough so you wouldn't want to walk on them barefoot. Big cement steps—two or three feet high—go straight into the water on one side of the beach just down the street from my hotel, so I sat there for a while today just looking at the gray water, wrapped up in my fleece, ignoring the spitting rain. Mostly it was picnickers on the beach—families with children, a father spending the day with his son, a beautiful little girl whose parents and grandparents could give her none of the attention she craved because they were too consumed with the baby and the dog.
I've walked down to the Cobb twice. Last night I couldn't help it; I couldn't be in Lyme and not try to find the Cobb and Granny's Teeth—the steps where Louisa Musgrove in Persuasion jumps into Captain Wentworth's arms, only he tells her not to jump—he thinks it's too high and too hard—and she does anyway and winds up unconscious on the Cobb. I bought some fudge, which turned out to be not so good and then got ice cream from a small store, from a guy who was leering at his teenage customers and had his hands all over the cone.
