"Spoiler Alert. . . They All Died": Alice Lowe on Aging and Muriel Spark's MEMENTO MORI
“Remember you must die.”
That’s all they say, the anonymous callers in Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori.
Dame Lettie Colston, 79, is shaken by the calls. Outraged, threatened, violated. She demands that the police find and punish the culprit. Mrs. Pettigrew, 73, shuns unpleasantness. She chooses to ignore the calls and their implications. Charmian Piper, 85, a one-time best-selling novelist, is nonchalant. She tells the caller she thinks about dying from time to time, and has for years. Her memory is failing, she says, “But somehow I do not forget my death.”
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Muriel Spark was 40 when she wrote this unsentimental, satirical novel. I was in my 40s when I first read it, a fledgling Anglophile, in thrall to British women authors. I was captivated by Spark’s macabre brand of humor, her sardonic spark and her novel’s bizarre sequence of events, the way she captured and intertwined the self-absorbed lives in this microcosmic, aged, upper-middle-class 1950s English society.
The book was published in 1959; I discovered it in the early ‘90s. The world had undergone upheavals in those three decades, leaving much altered in their wake, including the landscape of old age.
I contrasted Spark’s cast of characters with seniors I knew. I was involved at the time with WILPF, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, a far-left rabble-rousing organization dating back to World War One. WILPF was still active, but its dwindling membership consisted primarily of the old guard, stalwarts from countless campaigns, activists til the end. Frieda was in her late 80s, firing up the old people at her retirement home—distributing literature, circulating petitions, staging protests. Phyllis volunteered at Planned Parenthood and the Peace Resource Center and was a regular presence at pro-choice and anti-war demonstrations until failing health halted her activities; she died in 2006 just three weeks before her 100th birthday. On the threshold of middle age, I stood in awe of these women and enjoyed being preened over as the youngster of the group.
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Alec Warner, 79, Spark’s “old sociologist,” has been studying old age since he turned 70. He keeps extensive files on his contemporaries, not inclined to rely on his so-far-still-reliable memory. He records the particulars of the past and present lives of friends and acquaintances, charts his relationships and encounters with them and theirs with each other, elicits gossip from willing sources. Observing their varied reactions to the enigmatic calls, he speculates about mass hysteria.
The calls can’t be traced. They don’t even know whether there is one caller or several, as each recipient describes the voice differently: young/old, male/female, cultured/common, gruff/polite. Henry Mortimer, a retired police inspector, is enlisted to work on the case. A mere 70 years old, he too is a beneficiary of the calls, but remains unruffled by them. He believes that thoughts of death intensify life, that the caller is “Death himself.”
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I am over 70 when I reread Memento Mori, now with renewed interest and appreciation. I am one of them, and another 25 years of change have ensued. My first shock of recognition came when the wise Miss Taylor, nullified as one of the generic “grannies” in a hospital ward for aged women, says, “Being over 70 is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as on a battlefield.”
Seventy isn’t what it once was, but contrary to what some like to say, 70 is not the new 50. It’s old, but it isn’t old old. 65 to 74 is “young-old,” not yet in the thick of the battle. Miss Taylor, 82, isn’t privy to today’s divisions of the elderly into three stages.
Nor am I. Not yet. I can, however, relate to a character in Emily St. John Mandel’s Ghost Hotel, who observes that, “a woman gets old and falls out of time and realizes she's become invisible."
Ironically I have fewer “old-old” acquaintances—in their 80s and 90s—now than when I was younger. My closest acquaintances are near my own age, reasonably active, with varying health conditions. I lost two dear friends to cancers in their 60s, but death hasn’t come close with undue frequency. In contrast to the aged activists—rarified exemplars—from my WILPF days, I now observe the inhabitants of Green Manor, a low-income senior facility around the corner from my house. A tall and stately blonde woman strides through her daily rounds. A short, stout Russian couple, she with walker and he with cane, shuffle around the neighborhood. Others are wheeled out to the senior rideshare van.
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They all die. Some sooner, some later. Alec Warner is confined to a nursing home after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage and paralytic stroke. His files destroyed by fire, he scours his mind to recall the demises that befell his subjects: comminuted fractures of the skull (Lettie was bludgeoned to death during a robbery), hypostatic pneumonia, uraemia, myocardial degeneration, carcinoma of the cervix, carcinoma of the bronchus, arteriosclerosis, coronary thrombosis. We get the picture. We all die. We don’t need spectral voices to tell us, though it does us no harm to be reminded.
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Alice Lowe writes about life and literature, food and family. Her essays have been published in numerous literary journals, including Ascent, Baltimore Review, South 85 Journal, and Hobart. Her work has been cited in the Best American Essays and nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. Alice is the author of numerous essays and reviews on Virginia Woolf’s life and work, including two monographs published by Cecil Woolf Publishers in London. She lives in San Diego, California; read her work at www.aliceloweblogs.wordpress.com.
