Cancer Blog #63
By Brian Zimmerman
Begun on July 31, 2021
Email: dyingman1@yahoo.com
My Dying Words
Entry #63– I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died
December 3, 2022
“I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died”
Emily Dickinson
[1830-1886]
I heard a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness round my form
Was like the stillness in the air
Between the heaves of storm.
The eyes beside had wrung them dry,
And breaths were gathering sure
For that last onset, when the king
Be witnessed in his power.
I willed my keepsakes, signed away
What portion of me I
Could make assignable, -and then
There interposed a fly,
With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,
Between the light and me;
And then the window failed, and then
I could not see to see.
I thought I’d have some fun this time by taking an entry to look at this poem by Emily Dickinson. Though you may very well disagree, I think her poem is an in illustration of a point I’ve mentioned repeatedly in this blog, viz., the uncertainty of death, especially the lack of control and authority we have over own death. For the first part of the poem, we see the calm, the solemnity of the dying speaker: the stillness, the silent weeping, the bated breath awaiting the final end. The dying person has arranged her affairs and is preparing to depart in peace when there comes the sound of a stumbling, bumbling flight of a fly. The controlled, restrained atmosphere is interrupted in surprising manner by this ordinary fly. The buzz of the fly interposes between the dying person and the window, interrupting the light coming in from outdoors. And, now at the end, the fly interjects this discord, this disharmony as the speaker’s eyes are failing her even as the window’s light is doing.
To me it’s a picture of the inability we all have to control the circumstances of our death. As I’ve mentioned many times before, we seem to think that we will be able to predict and manage our dying, thinking we will orchestrate a stillness, a calm in the process of dying that we control, but we find instead that a fly buzzes in the middle of our plan of death. A buzzing that, if not mocking, then at least announcing the uncertainty, the slipperiness of our grasp of how and when and where we will die, probably none of which were what we expected or planned.
Only the true King has that power. Though the dying speaker seems to place the power of the uncertain, stumbling fly over even the power of the king, we as believers know that our King will be witnessed in his power, and all will end not in the unexpectedness of the intrusion of a bumbling fly, but with the certainty of how He intended it to end.
Medical Update
I took my next two doses of the chemo drugs last Friday. As I’ve said before, new drugs, new side effects. I felt pretty well on Saturday and I was juiced up on a steroid (Dexamethasone), but didn’t sleep well Friday or Saturday night (or Thursday night before the infusion as I had to wake up twice to take the steroid). I crashed on Monday morning with significant weakness, a splitting headache, my teeth killing me, swelling in my ankles, and on and on. I had to take a two hour nap on Monday to get back some strength. At least my flu is better! I seem to be much weaker with these drugs than with the previous ones. But, maybe I’ll develop more of a tolerance as the treatments go on. We’ll see…Onto the next treatment!
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