The living dead.

 The living dead. 

I was thinking this morning about a story told about John Wilmot, Lord Rochester.

     This happened when he was a young man still in his teens. He was serving on the Revenge - this was during the Second Anglo-Dutch War. During the fire-fight in Bergen harbor, he entered into a pact with George Windham, another “young man of breeding,” according to Rochester’s first biographer, Gilbert Burnet, that, should either of them die, “he should appear, and give the other notice of the future state, if there was any.” A third young man, Ned Montagu refused to enter the pact - perhaps he was a few months older. But all three fought bravely until under heavy fire Windham began to give up the ghost. When Montagu saw his friend trembling - “violently” - he ran to help. He also ran into a cannonball that squashed Windham and ripped out his (Montagu’s) stomach. The first died immediately, the second within the hour.

Eddie Anderson as Lord Rochester in Carolingian Capers,
1674 (with Stuart’s Cavalier Gueñon as his monkey).

     So, would Windham come from beyond the grave to give him a sense of “the future state”? Rochester wondered, apparently as soon as the battle was over (no sentimentalist he). But no; much to Rochester’s disappointment, he did not. Not then, or ever. And Windham’s failure to appear was, according to Burnet, “a great snare to [Rochester] during the rest of his life,” even if “it was an unreasonable thing for him to think that beings in another state were not under such laws and limits that they could not command their own motions but as the Supreme Power should order them,” not to mention that he, Rochester, really “had no reason to expect that such an extraordinary thing should be done for [him].” Because dead people really aren’t bosses of themselves. And live people are foolish to expect miracles.

The story almost certainly came to me because Dr. Feight asked me yesterday if I had heard any more from my sister.

     “Which one?” I asked since he didn’t specify the dead one though that’s the sister he meant.

     “Well,” he said backtracking, “either one, then.”

“No,” I said. “Not really.” It was not entirely the truth. I don’t hear from Hannah now that Uncle Albert lives here, but I still hear from Moira frequently. It’s not a miracle, though; there’s an explanation.*

01.18.19

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 * This is not that explanation; but it started, the reader may remember, my hearing from Moira, back in the summer. We talked about it once, Dr. Feight and I, in late October, I think it was. See here and here.