Death is like an inside joke: we all know the punchline but we don't want to talk about it for fear of having to face it. Death is not an abstract that can be discoursed about: adolescents do that and tie themselves into knots. Things die; there is no concept here, no abstract haze to hide behind. It is a conjunction of inevitable small deaths, an accumulation of decay, an apotheosis of entropy so woven into our lives that this one thread will destroy them all, unravel us to our bones. The death of Keats is a small matter in the universe. He was here and now is gone, a faint ripple like the green glow of the television as it warms down to that brittle star in the middle, then gone. He was cute, mellow, a ganglia of puppiness, a frail compost of quirks and insistent needs, a trail of our patience into which we could pour all of our separateness and attempt to find some way to extend ourselves, extend our affection out in a selfless and nourishing way. Keats was an opportunity to be human, to teach ourselves composure, tolerance, ingenuity, and now that opportunity must be found elsewhere, in other things, people, places, ideas. Such events must happen but that does not dilute the pain or the wishing for something better to have happened. Nothing that is inevitable is ever painless.
We did not know him long enough to be truly attached to him. We feel the pity any human feels when the light that is life, and a life so singularly helpless and appealing, is simply and curtly snuffed out. There is no question we had to choose his death: he recognized nothing about himself from the seizures, about us, indeed about anything. He was no longer an animal with a semblance of attention and spirit, just a switchboard for erratic impulses, a gameboard for chaos. Yet again that does not draw off the brine in the wound, that here was something so precious because alive, so wondrous because so common, that now no longer shares anything with us. Pick the metaphor: the dousing of a candle, the shutting of a door, the moving finger moving on. The words add no balm, are just a failing struggle to grasp this reality of now you see me, now you don't. Keats' death is one of those situations in life that is fraught with knowledge and yet offers no lesson. His death is simply the way things are, not cruel, not merciful, simply done and over with. What lesson can be drawn from that, what comfort?
There is an ache that comes with the death of an innocence like Keats, an ache that comes from knowing we have no tribunal to reverse the decision, and that gentleness is no guarantee. Death shows us just how alone we really are, how unsure our hopes for surety must always be.
Yet I can find no balm in this resignation, no Stoic grace. The heart, my heart, always arcs in remorse for small and delicate things that must perish.