Reading Emily Dickinson at Hallowtide

For readers acquainted with the great American poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)—or even, dare I say, the macabre predilections of adolescence—it will come as little surprise that the Belle of Amherst spent a number of her formative years trying to imagine her own death. What might prove slightly more surprising is that her imagination at first refused to cooperate.

Dickinson was thirteen when a beloved friend of hers, Sophia Holland, died. She had visited Sophia while her friend suffered from typhus, keeping watch at her bedside. Dickinson would later describe her as “too lovely for earth,” a line reminiscent of an earlier poetic forebear of hers, Edgar Allan Poe.[1] While reading a traditional biography of an author like Dickinson, we might encounter this anecdote and move quickly to a reading of her poetry, but I invite you instead, this Hallowtide season, to pause and remember being thirteen and having a close friend at that age. Or perhaps you might remember a friend you have now, someone you admire, who seems a little “too lovely for earth.” I have a few of those, friends whom I wish I could emulate but whose level of holiness I know I could never quite attain.

Now imagine visiting such a friend’s sickroom. I find myself returning this Hallowtide to my own mother’s deathwatch, perhaps because my daughter is approaching the age Dickinson was when she lost Sophia, and I wonder what such a loss would do to her. It is easy to forget that the poet who now seems almost mythic in the American imagination was once a young girl confronting the death of someone she loved. I can still hear the hospital sounds beeping in my head as I write this, then fading into the eerie quiet of hospice. Everyone whispered there, in my mother’s room and outside it, as though the dying might be disturbed by anything louder than a prayer. (For those who know me, my grief disturbed the whisperers.)

I remember keeping watch with my sister and my husband, and with an aunt and uncle who seemed more at home with the hum of the television than with me. I remember the kindness of the nurses, the crying I did in the sanctuary, and the stories I swapped over stale coffee with two cousins keeping vigil in the break room, who seemed to enjoy talking with me more than watching television. Nobody tells you how much of a deathwatch is fueled by stale coffee in Styrofoam cups. I remember playing gospel Elvis on repeat for my mother, “Peace in the Valley” and then “How Great Thou Art,” because I knew it would comfort her. And I remember having to return, eventually, to a world in which she would no longer be there. I suspect you may have your own stories like this.

Perhaps that is why I want us to pause with Dickinson at thirteen rather than hurry along to her poetry. Death is difficult enough to comprehend when it happens to someone we love. Imagining our own death, or what might await us afterward, can seem another matter entirely.

In January 1846, less than two years after Sophia’s death, Dickinson wrote to another friend, Abiah Root, about her inability to contemplate her own death. Partway through a heartfelt letter concerned with religious belief and her own spiritual uncertainties, she posed the following question, one I invite you to ponder: “Does not Eternity appear dreadful to you?” She continued:

I often get thinking of it and it seems so dark to me that I almost wish there was no Eternity. To think that we must forever live and never cease to be. It seems as if Death which all so dread because it launches us upon an unknown world would be a releif [sic] to so endless a state of existense. I dont know why it is but it does not seem to me that I shall ever cease to live on earth—I cannot imagine with the farthest stretch of my imagination my own death scene—It does not seem to me that I shall ever close my eyes in death.[2]

Here is the strange thing about Dickinson’s letter: having experienced the death of someone she loved, she seems equally unable to imagine the end of her life and a life without end. Eternity frightens her, but she cannot imagine her own death, either. She even struggles to imagine the weeping others will do for her. She knows what it means to grieve someone she loves, but she cannot imagine herself becoming the person who is grieved.

I readily admit that I wake up every morning with much the same aversion to imagining my own death. Even though I have had many relatives pass away—too many—I do not wake up and contemplate what will happen when I die. Yet, as a Catholic during Hallowtide, I am invited to do so, as are you, dear reader. From All Hallows’ Eve through All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, Catholic Christians remember the dead, celebrate the saints, and pray for the faithful departed, including Dickinson and her friend Sophia Holland.[3] We are invited to contemplate what Dickinson found so difficult: our own deaths and the possibility of life beyond them.

Oh, at least we try to. Perhaps this is why I find myself returning to Dickinson during Hallowtide. Each week at Mass, we Catholics profess that we “look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” But how often do we pause to really contemplate what those words mean? Dickinson’s poetry, with its combination of dread, humor, and wonder, invites me to do just that. Of course, she does not offer the assurances of the Creed, nor should we expect her to. Instead, she helps us consider what it means to die, what becomes of those we love when they die, and what it might mean to hope for a life that does not end. She helps us, I think, to make our own the desperate prayer of the father in Mark’s Gospel: “I believe; help my unbelief!” (9:4).

Dickinson was not Catholic, of course, and she might seem at first a strange companion for a Catholic professor to find solace in during a liturgical season. Her relationship with the Christianity of her upbringing was famously unsettled. Raised in the Calvinist tradition of New England Congregationalism, she grew up in a world where Scripture, hymns, and questions of salvation and eternity were part of everyday life. As Msgr. Charles M. Murphy notes in Mystical Prayer: The Poetic Example of Emily Dickinson, she was familiar with the Apostles’ Creed through the Congregational church her family attended, encountering its declarations of belief in “God, the Father Almighty” and the “forgiveness of sins.”[4] These words belonged to the religious world she knew, even as she struggled with what it meant to believe them.

Murphy describes Dickinson’s spiritual position in terms of a “believing unbeliever.”[5] I find myself drawn to that phrase during a season when the Church invites us all to contemplate life’s greatest mystery: death. It suggests something about the complicated relationship between the beliefs we profess and the questions we continue to ask—and struggle with—in our souls. Yes, the Church has answers, and we may know those answers, but our hearts do not always reconcile themselves to them right away. Dickinson’s poetry is full of such questions and doubts, and I am not entirely sure that those of us who recite the Creed each week are always so different from her.

By her early thirties, Dickinson was writing poetry that imagined death in extraordinary detail. The American Civil War had begun, and in March 1862, Frazar Stearns, a young Union lieutenant, the son of Amherst College’s president, and a close friend of Dickinson’s brother Austin, was killed at the Battle of New Bern, North Carolina. In a letter, Dickinson described the terrible repetition of the news: “Frazer is killed”—“Frazer is killed.” She called the announcement “Two or three words of lead—that dropped so deep, they keep weighing—.”[6]

Significantly, in April of that same year, Dickinson wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson about a “terror” that had troubled her since the previous September. We do not know precisely what frightened her, but I am particularly taken with the way she described her poetry as a salve to this terror: “I could tell to none—and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground—because I am afraid—.”[7]

Sometimes we sing, write, tell stories, or make art precisely because we are afraid, and sometimes we read these same stories as to help us, too. And so I invite you to read one poem with me this Hallowtide: “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—,” generally dated to around 1863.[8] The girl who found it nearly impossible to imagine her own death had now become a poet capable of narrating a deathbed from the perspective of its dying occupant—and perhaps is the most famous one we know today for her skill at it. And what she imagines is an ordinary room and one rather unwelcome visitor—a room not unlike those we occupy today, if we dare to imagine our deaths, as we ought to together as Catholics during Hallowtide.

A Fly at the Deathbed

“I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—” has one of the most memorable opening images in all of poetry, and Dickinson does what she espoused she could not do in her letter at fifteen. She imagines her death. She does not imagine herself as beautiful like her friend Sophia, however. On the contrary, she imagines herself dying, and there is an annoying fly buzzing around her—quite the unwelcome visitor:

“I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—,” she begins this poem famously. I imagine an ordinary afternoon, the sort of afternoon on which death might eventually come for any of us, if we are truthful. As I was writing this essay, my seventh-grade son was in the room, and he laughed a little when he heard the opening of Dickinson’s poem. (We read it aloud together, and I understand why.) Here is a copy of it if you would like to read it aloud before continuing, which I highly suggest. The scene she sets is both macabre and terrible, and there is something almost absurd about imagining our own deaths, only to discover a fly buzzing near us and not being able to swat it, or do anything. Here is a subject we spend so much of our lives trying not to think about, and Dickinson gives us an insect of annoyance.

Of course, there will be flies at the graveside, and perhaps even at our deathbeds. But is this particular fly simply an ordinary insect, or might it signify, too, something more sinister? After all, flies have long been associated with decay, and even the devil. Beelzebub, a name traditionally associated with the “Lord of the Flies,” appears in the Gospels as a name for the prince of demons.[9] In this poem, are we witnessing an ordinary creature going about its business, or is this fly something that threatens the heavenly revelation the dying speaker seems to anticipate? Spoken plainly, is the speaker going to Hell? Or is she there? Dickinson does not tell us. And perhaps that is part of what makes the poem transfixing, and even a little frightening: even when she finally imagines her own death, she cannot tell us with certainty what comes next. And what comes next is not always good. In fact, it might be mundane. Or evil.

Dickinson writes in the familiar patterns of Protestant hymnody, but what an eccentric—and mayhaps beautiful!—hymn this would make. She continues:

The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air—
Between the Heaves of Storm—.

There is a stillness here, and I share now that I know something of this type of decaying, heavy stillness from my mother’s hospice room. I imagine the air heavy, perhaps a summer afternoon, the sort of afternoon when a fly would seem entirely drab. The room Dickinson describes is quiet, stale. Yet her speaker is caught somewhere between life and death, while the mourners are caught between moments of grief. I find myself noticing that word “Heaves.” How often in grief are we completely broken, unable to do anything at all, only to find ourselves wracked by tears moments later? (Or “Wrecked, solitary, here,” as Dickinson describes it elsewhere, a line I often bring to mind when recalling my own grief, or even feeling it once again, unexpectedly, in a moment alone in an elevator or when a song comes on in a car.[10])

Yes, grief comes in waves, as a wise mentor once told me, and there are also those strange intervals when everything seems suspended, when the air itself seems to be waiting—“still,” as she describes. This happens immediately after someone dies, and weeks, even years, later. We might imagine that the earth has paused with us, that the world cannot possibly move forward without this person we have lost. But it will move on. It always does. We proceed to meetings, to soccer games, to Mass, as if we are fine, while pieces of us are missing inside. We say nothing, and the world goes about its business, even when for us, if only for a moment, everything, even the air, had become still.

So, yes, Dickinson’s “Heaves” seems to capture something of that experience: the movement of a storm, the heaving of a body overcome by tears, the stillness between emotional storms and the spiritual storms we feel inside but rarely speak aloud, except perhaps to a trusted friend or a priest. Further, I cannot help noticing how close “Heaves” looks to “Heaven,” especially in a poem about death. I find myself almost reading “Heaven,” only to hear that final s as a z: “Heave—zzzz.” Almost Heaven, and then the buzzing breaks in.

And the buzzing, that “zzzz,” distracts her, as it does us. Imagine that fly buzzing in your own ear now. The buzzing of our world, the business of our lives. My eye reaches toward Heaven, but my ear brings me back to the fly. How often are we so distracted by the ordinary annoyances of living that we miss something extraordinary happening around us? Perhaps we are all caught somewhere between the heaves of grief, the buzz of flies interfering with our attention, and the possibility of Heaven. And Hell.

The witnesses surrounding the deathbed have presumably already cried until their eyes are dry, at least around one another. Dickinson describes them as having wrung out their tears, as I did alone in that sanctuary, their breathing gathered for what she calls the “last Onset.” Let us pause with this phrase, too. Is it the onset of the afterlife? Of eternity? Or simply the moment when the dying person finally leaves this world? Everyone seems to be waiting for something, and Dickinson tells us what it is:

For that last Onset—when the King
Be witnessed—in the Room—.

The capitalized “King” invites us, of course, to consider a Christian expectation, perhaps the appearance of Christ at the moment of death. And yet Dickinson’s phrasing is suggestive rather than certain. The dying person’s companions appear to be waiting for some revelation, some indication that what they believe about the next life will become visible to them.

What are these onlookers listening for, and expecting? What have you listened for when you have prayed for the dying, or waited for death with others? What are we listening for this Hallowtide? We want to know that the dead are going somewhere, that someone is waiting for them, that they are not simply disappearing from the world we share. And yet, while waiting, are we planning funerals? Watching their bodies? Or praying for their souls? And if the dying could look back at us, as Dickinson’s speaker somehow does, what might they see?

When my mother was dying, my aunt and uncle suggested we go out for fast food one day. I remember not wanting to go, but going anyway, out of politeness. I remember feeling ill as I ate, aware in new ways of my own body, of the strange business of feeding it while my mother’s was failing. When we returned from that restaurant, my mother had died.

It was the only time in a week I had left hospice. We were gone for twenty minutes at most. Often, I have regretted leaving her, but I have also wondered whether perhaps she wanted to die alone, without all the attention, the peering eyes, the people gathered around her bed waiting for something to happen, waiting for her color to change.

I cannot know, of course, if this is the case. Perhaps that is part of what makes being present at a deathbed so difficult. We want to accompany those we love to the very end, but there is a point beyond which we cannot follow them, no matter how closely we watch.

And this is what Dickinson’s poem gets at, I think: the ordinary within the extraordinary, but not in the beautiful, aspirational way we so often speak of transcendence in Catholic circles. Oh no, Dickinson’s transcendence is macabre. Here we are, waiting for the Christian King to reveal himself, and a fly buzzes into the room. Rather than offering us a comforting glimpse of eternity, Dickinson jolts us into confronting the afterlife as something real, something we must one day encounter ourselves, not simply something that happens to other people.

Death is not merely an occasion for beautiful thoughts about Heaven, with choirs of angels singing. It is coming for us, too, and perhaps the fly, in all its irritating reality, makes that harder to ignore. Like the fly that ruins a picnic, death interrupts our plans, whether we are prepared for it or not. And there may not be a final word, a peaceful expression, or an acknowledgment that assures us that the person we love is ready to leave this world.

Dickinson’s speaker, meanwhile, has made her earthly preparations, though whether she is ready for what follows is another matter:

I willed my Keepsakes—Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable—.

We humans love our material objects, the things we are so often concerned with, the “Assignable.” Of course, we can give away our possessions, leave our books to someone, pass along jewelry or photographs, or decide who will inherit the furniture. Those things can become terribly precious to the people who receive them, at least for a while. But move forward a generation or two. What memories stay? My daughter never knew my mother, and although I tell her stories, I wonder what she will remember of a woman she never met. We may leave our belongings to the people we love, but what of the rest of us? The voice, the laugh, the way a person moved through a room? What do we imagine happens to all those things that make a person herself?

And then, just when we expect the King, Dickinson gives us her fly again, in a beautiful color, I dare say, blue:

With Blue—uncertain—stumbling Buzz—
Between the light—and me—.

Blue is, for Catholics, a color we associate with Mary. It might also suggest the sky outside the window, so often associated with Heaven, although we might just as readily picture a bluebottle fly going about its ordinary business. Could the color suggest something beyond the insect itself? Or are we, like the people gathered in the room, looking for signs where there may be none?

The fly comes between the speaker and the light, and then the speaker tells us:

And then the Windows failed—and then
I could not see to see—.

What a strange and wonderful conclusion! “I could not see to see.” We not only lose the speaker’s vision, but we also lose her ability to tell us anything more. There is no report of Heaven, no final assurance, no glimpse of the King. The poem ends at the point where the dying speaker can no longer describe what she experiences.

And those “Windows”! I find myself thinking of actual windows, through which we glimpse a world beyond the room in which we are sitting. Dickinson gives us a familiar, material object and then makes it fail. Perhaps these are the speaker’s eyes, the windows through which she has known the world, or perhaps they represent something about the limitations of our knowledge. The dying speaker wants to see, or at least we want her to see, and yet the very means by which she might witness something beyond herself have failed.

Dickinson, that “believing unbeliever,” as Murphy describes her, takes us to the limits of our vision. She invites us to imagine not simply the perfection of Heaven, but our own deaths, with all their awkwardness, mystery, and uncertainty. And perhaps that is a worthy task for Hallowtide, when the Church asks us to contemplate our mortality and the life to come. We Catholics profess belief in the resurrection of the body, not simply in the immortality of the soul.[11] This is a rather astonishing thing to say when we have watched bodies fail, or when we ultimately contemplate the eventual failure of our own.

Beyond the Windows

And so I share now, at the end of this essay, something else I remember about my mother’s hospice room, something I have not told you yet. It was there that I knew, certainly and without a doubt, that there was an afterlife. I was in my twenties when she died, and I was a relatively new Catholic convert. I remember experiencing a certainty about eternity that I cannot quite explain, a moment when the mysteries of my faith seemed less mysterious, when I knew something I had previously only professed to believe. For a time, I could see what I so often struggle to imagine.

I wish I could tell you that I have never doubted since. Oh, but I have! There are moments when eternity seems as difficult for me to imagine as it did for Dickinson at fifteen, when I wonder what becomes of the people I love, whether I will see them again, and what it could possibly mean to live forever. Perhaps that is part of why I have returned so often in this essay to the details of my mother’s last few days. I can tell you about the Styrofoam cups, the music, the television, the fast food, the whispering, and the tears. These things I remember easily. But that extraordinary certainty? It is more difficult to call back. But it was there.

I also remember a window at hospice, one I would look through when I went off by myself to pray. That window gave me a solace I cannot quite put into words. Sometimes I return to it in my imagination. Sometimes I forget it entirely amid the ordinary business of living. And sometimes, strangely enough, Dickinson brings me back to it.

Perhaps that is why I return to her poetry each Hallowtide. Like Dickinson’s boy singing by the burying ground because he was afraid, I find myself turning to literature when I am afraid, too. Her speaker’s “Windows” fail, and with them goes her ability to tell us what she sees. Yet Dickinson’s imagination takes us to the very limits of what we can see, inviting us to contemplate what might lie beyond them. She cannot tell us what awaits us after death. But perhaps, in confronting what we cannot see, we can learn something about what it means to hope.

This All Souls’ Day, I will pray for my mother, for Sophia Holland, and for Emily Dickinson. And when I find myself wondering again about eternity, I will remember that window, and the young girl who could not imagine her own death, and the woman she became who imagined it so extraordinarily. Perhaps I will sing a little louder myself, as I have in writing this essay. “I believe; help my unbelief!”

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