Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
I’ve always been fascinated by history.
It was one of my majors in college (religion was the other). I studied history again in graduate school, read history books as my default recreational reading, and if the TV is on, I’m probably watching a documentary on some obscure historical subject that would bore anyone else to tears, including my family for whom my love of historical documentaries has become a running joke.
I’ve always been a bit envious of people who got to live through the moments in history that end up in documentaries.
This past week I’ve discovered how naive that envy was.
Living through pivotal moments in history isn’t as exciting as I thought it would be. In fact, it sucks. A lot. Or at least this pivotal moment in history sucks and that’s about as poetic I can be about it.
I used to be Owen Wilson in Midnight In Paris, longing to live in a romantic era I missed out on, but this past week has turned me into Frodo in The Lord of the Rings wishing none of this happened in my time because this week has been hard.
Really hard.
Despair. Depression. Grief. Anger. Anxiety. Fear. Rage. Confusion.
As soon as the writing started to appear on the electoral wall last Tuesday night and I could no longer deny the inevitable, I went to bed. Or at least tried to. I couldn’t watch the official announcement. I was too sick to my stomach. Literally. The next morning I sat in my living room crying while my kids got ready for school, appalled at the world they were going to be growing up in and dejected by the sense I had failed them. Then I cried again in the car on the way home after dropping them off at school.
I really thought we were better than this as a country. Not all of us, but enough of us had to know better and be better than the kind of people who would reelect such a depraved, completely unhinged, racist, hateful convicted felon.
Clearly, I was wrong.
Whether through obscene ignorance or moral depravity we have failed ourselves and our children and the future looks bleak.
The crying has stopped, but I’m still struggling about what to do next.
The best way, really the only way I knew how to fight the threat of Trump and his fascist fantasies was at the ballot box, but that failed. Which has made the despair and sense of hopelessness and helplessness all the more overwhelming. I’ve had to turn off the news and tune out social media, at least as much as I can. It’s helped some. And if there’s any silver lining in this national nightmare it may be that all of this awfulness will help me unplug more because just a week of doing so has been good for my mental health.
Being unplugged and free from the endless doomscrolling on social media has also allowed an unexpected visitor to reappear in my life.
I say unexpected, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by the visit because it’s a poem I worked on committing to memory a while back as a way to handle my chronic anxiety and depression. Ironically, I’m not all that into poetry. I certainly appreciate it as an art form and enjoy some of it, but I don’t spend much, if any time reading poetry. But as I’ve worked with my therapist to find ways to calm my mind when anxiety attacks or depression sets in, reciting poetry is something I’ve found helps me focus, or at least distract me from the surge of adrenaline coursing through my body. It also gives me a bit of hope and encouragement, even some direction if it’s the right poem for the moment.
However, lest you are beginning to think I am cultured, let me assure you that I am, if nothing else, a walking cliché and the poems I chose to memorize reflect that fact. But I’m also over 40 and no longer care about being cliche which is why I have no shame in telling you the poems I chose to commit to memory were Invictus by William Ernest Henry and Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas.
I’ve found the latter coming to mind almost constantly over the past week.
I suppose that was the point of memorizing it in the first place, an anchor to instinctively grab onto when storms come my way. But as much as both of those poems have helped calm my mind in recent days, “do not go gentle into that good night” has become a growing mantra, a personal challenge bubbling up from whatever motivation still hides inside me refusing to give up the fight even though everything around me right now seems hopeless.
Dylan Thomas wrote his so-famous-it’s-become-a-cliché poem about his father as he faced death, that inevitable end of all our lives no matter how much we may hope otherwise. This week has felt like an unexpected death in the family. I really, really hoped that as a country we would finally be done with the madness of Donald Trump, which made election day feel like a funeral for what might have been. And so I’ve been in mourning, working through the various stages of grief, but mostly swinging back and forth between anger and denial.
In the midst of all that, I keep hearing the words of Dylan Thomas.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
I’m sure Thomas’ words keep coming to mind because I’ve trained my brain to respond to my anxiety and depression with those words, but I’m also sure it’s because I’m stubborn.
Really, really stubborn.
Ask anyone who has ever known me.
It’s in my DNA.
It’s not something I necessarily consider a virtue, but I’m finding it to be a helpful trait in this particular moment when all hope seems lost. And hope may very well be lost. This may be the end of democracy in this country as we know it. With both Congress and the Supreme Court in his pocket, Trump may become the dictator he’s said he wants to be only to one day be replaced by a MAGA acolyte when he finally meets his maker.
The once unbelievable may very well come to pass. The light of our supposedly shining city on a hill may be dying, but I’m too stubborn not to rage about it because losing an election doesn’t mean we were wrong and they were right. It just means the fight continues whether I like it or not and no matter how much I want to give up right now my genetic stubbornness refuses to let me.
I refuse to go gently into that good night no matter how hopeless things seem right now. The night may win in the end, but I’m going to be kicking and screaming till it fully envelopes me.
What will that rage look like?
I honestly have no clue.
I’m not sure any of us do right now.
And I think that’s ok.
For now and maybe for a while to come, Dylan Thomas’ words will probably just be a personal mantra for me until I figure out a more tangible way to fight the dying of the light.
And I think that’s ok too.
I think it’s ok to sit and grieve right now, to give ourselves space, to calm our minds as we figure out a way forward. The challenge we face right now is not to have all the answers or a detailed gameplay for what to do next. The challenge we face right now is allowing ourselves to hope again. And I’ll be the first to admit that is a challenge I am really struggling with. But if we can find the courage to hope again, it will give us the freedom we need to imagine and imagination is going to be crucial in the coming weeks and months if we’re going to figure out how best to respond to the challenges we know are headed our way and those we can’t yet see. We can decide now to act in the future even if we don’t know what that action will look like today.
The next 4 years are probably going to be terrible. There’s no getting around it.
But that doesn’t mean we have to go gentle into that good night.