By Jack Limpert
While working as a magazine editor, I had a sentence typed on a small square of paper and tacked up on the bulletin board near my desk:
Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor’s mind toward some resolution, some clear meaning, which it perhaps never finds.
It’s spoken at the beginning of the play, I Never Sang for My Father. A middle-aged son is returning home to see his father, a difficult man nearing the end of his life, and the son is giving the audience a sense of what’s coming. When the play, written by Robert Anderson, opened on Broadway in 1968, the son was played by Hal Holbrook, the father by Alan Webb.
The sentence captured how I felt about losing my father when I was young. I loved how the sentence flowed, how it seemed to have some of the poetry that magazine writing can have:
Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship,
which struggles on in the survivor’s mind
toward some final resolution,
some clear meaning,
which it perhaps never finds.
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In Robert Anderson’s 2009 obituary in The Guardian, there was another reference to the sentence: “The sensitive, semi-autobiographical play was turned into an even better film a year later. Anderson received one of the film’s three Oscar nominations, as well as winning the Writers Guild of America award. The other two were for its stars, Melvyn Douglas, as the dying, domineering father, and Gene Hackman as his long-suffering son, who utters the poignant line: ‘Death ends a life. But it does not end a relationship.’”
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This is how Robert Anderson ended the play:
The son, Gene, is again alone on the stage, the lights dimming out except for a lingering light.
That night I left my father’s house forever.…I took the first right and the second left…and this time went as far as California….Peggy and I visited him once or twice…and then he came to California to visit us, and had a fever and swollen ankles, and we put him in a hospital, and he never left….The reason we gave, and which he could accept, for not leaving…the swollen ankles. But the real reason…the arteries were hardening, and he gradually over several years slipped into complete and speechless senility…with all his life centered in his burning eyes.
When I would visit him, and we would sit and look at each other, his eyes would mist over and his nostrils would pinch with emotion.…But I could never learn what the emotion was…anger…or love…or regret….One day, sitting in his wheelchair and staring without comprehension at television…he died…alone…without even an orange in his hand.
Death ends a life…but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor’s mind…toward some resolution, which it never finds.
Alice said I would not accept the sadness of the world.…What did it matter if I never loved him, or if he never loved me? Perhaps she was right….But, still, when I hear the word father…
Exquisite.
Thanks.