Walt Whitman and the Lessons of Grief

Obit Magazine has an interesting piece on Walt Whitman's thoughts of life and death after working as a nurse during the Civil War.

From the piece...

One of the attractions of Whitman’s poetry is its straightforward embrace of some of the big, mushy life questions. He is not a modern poet in the sense of being so advanced as to be incomprehensible and inimitable; no, he speaks to us in a clear voice, his poetry can (usually) be understood, even by schoolchildren and non-English majors. His book Leaves of Grass has not been made for “literary satisfactions,” he tells us; rather, it is intended “to be the Chant, the Book of Universal Life, and of the Body,--and then, just as much, to be the Chant of Universal Death, and of the Soul.”

He was attracted to the dying. Before he became a nurse in Civil War hospitals, before he sat at the bedside of tens of thousands of wounded or sick soldiers as they passed over, he haunted hospitals and assisted at operations, preparing himself, intentionally it seems, for the war that was to come. People needed to know what death was, in his era, and Walt also needed to know. From his researches at New York hospitals came at least one useful answer: Death is not the struggle before the end, the pain and the terror, but rather the deliverance:

Prais’d be the fathomless universe,

For life and joy….

And for love, sweet love…O praise and praise,

For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death.

Well, we think, he would say that, wouldn’t he? In his role as hospital nurse he was the one, often, who wrote letters of condolence to the bereaved mothers and fathers of the soldiers whose corpses were mounting up in the hospitals and out on the tragic battlefields. If he had written them letters that said, “I have had the duty of sitting at the bedside of your beloved son, John or William or whatever he was called, I was with him when he breathed his last on Tuesday night, and I want to reassure you now that he is nowhere anymore, has ceased to exist, is surely not in heaven or hell, because those destinations aren’t real, and he is surely not here anymore, because, as I was saying, he isn’t breathing now and his heart has stopped beating. Death that cunning, grinning thief has again acted with unspeakable cruelty, snatching a young man from out of life in his 19th year, before he had much of a chance to live at all. He’s gone now, completely gone, there’s a void where he used to be, and I’m sorry about that, as far as another human can be sorry. Yours truly, Nurse Walt Whitman.”