Grace Under Pressure

by Dennis Green

That was Hemingway’s definition of courage: “Grace under pressure.” Whether his final act of suicide was courageous I hesitate to say. His family believe it was, and that’s all that really matters.

I always thought of my father as a very stoic man, silent, withdrawn, even taciturn. But lately I’ve changed my mind.

He certainly had his sorrows. He and his first wife went through a very wrenching, painful divorce in their early twenties. During the Depression, he rode the rails looking for work and went for days at a time without eating. At 32, he almost died in a tragic sawmill accident, and lost the use of his left arm. And at the end, he died a slow and lingering, painful death of lung disease, on oxygen for five years.

But he never complained. And I heard some writerly advice the other day that helps me better understand his silence, and also points the way to a new direction for myself. An editor advised a man about to write a book about the premature death of his daughter, “Write from grace, not pain.” When I heard those words, I thought of Hemingway, and of my father.

Writing from grace, the author explained, means writing with restraint. “I felt nothing but pain and grief, but I knew that if my story was to succeed in helping other people, it would have to be written with restraint.”

Again, hearing his words, I thought of my own father, and suddenly it came to me that what I mistook for taciturnity in Dad was simply a gentlemanly restraint. And that’s what Stoicism really is — not an absence of feeling, but a restraint of the impulse to vocalize virtually everything you think and feel. And then something else occurred to me, something about my writing.

“Self-expression is not, in itself, communication. Good writing involves discipline and self-restraint.” That was me, 45 years ago, instructing my students at the University in my English and composition classes. Good advice. And now I have to take it to heart all over again.

I’ve been writing a lot about my illness lately and my distress about my illness, candidly, in some detail, and as one friend wrote back, sometimes with “more information” than you really need. ; - ) I’ve attempted to describe even those moments of self-pity. Why? Because I’ve been laboring under the conviction that it might be helpful to you other humans who are also mortal, and will suffer similar indignities, or just make up some of your own!

But no more. No more detail. No more mention of my condition in these essays. If things improve, if there’s good news, I’ll include it in a brief cover note, but I shall not refer to my illness or treatment in these posts again.

I shall instead practice the restraint, and the self-censorship my dad did. And if an unconscious motive in writing about my condition has been to help me cope with it, as writing so often does, it has served its purpose. I have coped, and have no concerns about doing so in the future.

Not with the dialysis at any rate. I’m sure other trials await.

©2010 Dennis Green