So Cicero, you claim that all that remained was to contend with fortune? Is there something in your words that can summarise this book and your purpose in writing it?
But death truly is then met with the greatest tranquillity when the dying man can comfort himself with his own praise.
Cicero, you must have sensed that your death was at hand. Mark Antony was not a man to be insulted or opposed without blood being shed. You had divorced your wife, re-married, divorced again, lost your treasured daughter and her baby in childbirth. You had lost your beloved Republic along with so many of your friends, all dead and buried in a seemingly endless civil war, what more was there for you but to comfort your dying pillow with your own praise?
Ciero's Tomb
I think of course about my own Father, and of his final days, and what comfort he found in the company of his son and grandson, and in the films we watched, and in the food we shared, and in the stories we told. My father in so many ways is like you Cicero, worthy of both praise and censure, and making a summary of a person's life, measuring the balance of their heart against the weight of a feather, is an impossible task for a mortal. That conversation is a private concern between you and Hades, so to speak.
When I stood with my sister and wrapped my father's body in a white burial shroud, placing two gold pennies over his eyes to pay his way into the afterlife, I felt the weight of my heart, and the gravity of our actions.
When I wrote his eulogy, I knew a moment of happiness to be praising him, and to name his demons and his sins, along with his triumphs and great deeds. I knew happiness, to see the end of all his problems, knowing, as you put it Cicero, that either the dead are insensible to the pains of mortal life, and thus must be happy, or the dead are insensible even to their own existence, in which place they are also, insensible to pain. My father suffered in his last years, his body wracked with pain and seizures and his eyes darkening into blindness, but he suffered through it smiling.
Smiling, with his shrine to depression upon the bookshelf. His books on mythology lined up behind all his black dog figurines.
Cerberus, lord over them all.
Cicero, Hell is not in the afterlife, it is now. It is everywhere. It burns in our hearts and minds and makes ill our good intentions. It tears down our good works and breaks up our great loves and all the while it seems to laugh at us. God is envious of human prosperity and likes to trouble us; or perhaps it also speaks truth to say that we like to trouble ourselves.
We keep our black dogs hungry and howling and we chain ourselves to their post; growing thinner every year we let silence become our legacy, as, smothered in fear, we do not speak the words that could grant us that tranquillity promised only to the dead. Diverted from the path of virtue, we suffer alone alone alone.
What customs could have compelled me to speak with my father more about these black dogs we both keep? What opinions kept us from speaking as openly as we could? What Hyrkanian dogs tore at us both while we sat in the half shade of our half truths, only half revealing ourselves, scared of love, scared of the dogs. I can feel the bright light of all my secrets shining out through the cracks in my facade, and I open my face, almost ready to laugh. Finally ready to cry.
I am a storyteller, I tell stories, and if, by the good grace of fortune, I sometimes manage to speak the truth as well, then I hope that one day, when my time is done, I might be counted among the happy.
Or at least,
the lucky.
Today, Cicero, I feel lucky to have known you.
With gratitude and respect,
Morgan.
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