Leah Stamm

Topic

The bliss in ignorance.

Evidence

• “I would ask my father how the BoSox did last night…as if nothing in the world were more important” (4)
• “I lived, we all lived, with a doubled, dreamlike consciousness of what we all were going through, bewildered most by what remained familiar…” (5)
• “For years my father would not accept Russ as his son-in-law” (7)
• “We were tired of our helplessness, and guilty for being tired. That we were all impatient to go home was our unspoken with, our dirty secret” (10)
• “Beth… stopped asking for food or liquid, and my mother stopped offering, even though she knew not getting her to eat or drink would hasten her death” (15)
• “To touch her now, I felt, would be to touch the brute, unvarnished fact of her dying; it would be to face her” (25)
• “It was an odd blessing to have so many petty affairs to tend to in the middle of this unbearable sorrow” (31)
• “I’d find the business of dying exhaustingly tedious. But today I happily sought refuge in it, especially since I knew that when we’d gotten these appointments out of the way we’d have to face my sister with the terrible news” (31)
• “I watched her almost secretively pull down and scan through those books, and then return them to the self before anyone noticed” (38)
• “She was surprised by this attention, and sadly delighted by it, delighted to have her sense of herself, her doubts and uncertainties, so thoroughly and convincingly contradicted” (39-40)
• “I described in the opening chapter how strange our usual interests and preoccupations had come to sem to us as we pursued them in the context of Beth’s dying, that we were so self-conscious about the things we normally did that we in effect became performers of our own lives” (67)
• “David would be more comfortable, in times of trouble, breaking into song than talking, since singing, for him, has come to be the most intimate place of feeling, the place where feeling disappears into the voice he’s spent a lifetime learning to control” (69)
• “In that moment he seemed incredibly sad” (70)
• “But the trail was more than just a refuge from my sister’s illness” “we could argue and obsess about the OJ Simpson trial in part because we couldn’t afford emotionally to argue and obsess about my sister” (74-75)
• “The triall enabled us to turn away from what was painfully before us and at the same time indirectly articulate what each of us was feeling” (75)
• “More often than not, sentimentality is less a mask of cruelty than a source of anxious discomfort” (82)
• “We wished for any sort of illusory refuge, or palatable lie, that might blunt what we were helpless not to feel” (82)

Analysis

The common saying that ignorance is bliss is only a cliche because it is evidently true. That idea is extended as a theme throughout Alan Shapiro’s Vigil, as he explains what got him through the weeks leading to his sister’s slow and agonizing death. When he first visited his sister after her cancer spread into her brain, he didn’t know how to react. He reminisces about how their relationship was always carried on conversation and their cleverness and wit. Seeing her so broken made him feel uncomfortable, describing her vulnerability with words like “brute” and “unvarnished”, he seemed repulsed by her (25). To touch her was to make it real, it would physically confirm that his sister was being consumed by death. Instead of facing that truth, he took the easier route of ignoring the signs, and let himself wallow in his own ignorance.

It wasn’t just Alan that chose to bless himself with ignorance, everyone in the family did too. At the beginning of the book, he explains that while his family was gathered at the hospice, it was easier to go through the motions of everyday life rather than acknowledge the reason why they were gathered there. Alan admits he and his father would conversate about the most normal of things, as if “nothing in the world were more important” (4). Even Beth’s husband would choose to play ignorant in the days preparing for her death. Instead of spending every last minute mourning with Beth, Alan and Russ went to prepare for her cremation. Alan recalls the memory with contentment, “seeking refuge” in the tedious tasks to keep his mind away from reality.

Interpretation

Given this evidence, I contend that Shapiro’s relationship with Beth in her final days represents his wish to ignore death.