I, Mary MacLane/Chapter 40
WHEN I'm dead I want to Rest awhile in my grave: for I'm Tired, Tired always.
My Soul must go on as it has gone on up to now.
It has a long way to go, and it has come a long way.
My Soul first started on its journey somewhere in Asia before the dawn of this civilization. And it has gone on since through the centuries and through strange phases of Body, terrors of flesh and blood, suffering long. But it has gone someway on, each space of the journey taking it nearer to the journey's-End.
It is the dim-felt memory of those journeys that heaps the Tiredness on me now. Not only is my spirit Tired. Through my spirit my hands are Tired: my knees are Tired: my drooping shoulders: my thin feet: my sensitive backbone. When I lift my hand in the sunshine the weight of the yellow honeyed air bears down and down on it because I'm so Tired. When I start to walk on stone pavements the ache of them is in my feet before I set a foot on them because I'm so Tired. The pulse in my veins Tires my blood as it beats. My low voice, though I speak but rarely—it Tires my throat. My breath Tires my chest. The weight of my hair Tires my forehead and temples. My plain frocks Tire my Body to wear. My swift trenchant thoughts Tire my Mind.
It is not the Tiredness of effort though I strive to the limits of my strength every day.
It is not pain, Restful pain. It is Tired Tiredness.
So when I'm dead I want to Rest awhile in my grave. It would Rest me.
In the Episcopal Church they use a ritual of poetic beauty, full of Restful things. One of them is the sleep of the dead. The crucified Nazarene slept three days. But all others of us when we go down into our graves are to sleep until a Judgment Day. 'Judgment Day' is preposterous and evilly crude: there's no judgment till each can judge himself simply and cruelly in the morning light. But the sleep of the dead—
—the sleep of the dead. Its sound by itself without the thought is Restful—
And the thought is Restful.
I imagine me wrapped in a shroud of soft thin wool cloth of a pale color, laid in a plain wood coffin: and my eyelids are closed, and my Tired feet are dead feet, and my hands are folded on my breast. And the coffin is nine feet down in the ground and the earth covers it. Upon that some green sod: and above, the ancient blue deep sheltering sky: and the clouds and the winds and the suns and moons, and the days and nights and circling horizons—those above my grave.
And my Body laid at its length, eyes closed, hands folded, down there Resting: my Soul not yet gone but laid beside my Body in the coffin Resting.
—might we lie like that—Resting, Resting, for weeks, months, ages—
Year after long year, Resting.