(Note: this post contains references to death and dying, with brief mentions of mental health issues and chronic pain.)
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
This is the opening line of “The Gunslinger” by Stephen King. These are the first words on the reader’s seven-book journey to the Dark Tower. I borrowed a copy from the library in the fall of 2015, long after I’d added it to my list on the recommendation of my closest friend.
He’d told me about it during one of the many rambling late-night drives of our college years. We talked our way around the sleeping city streets, over empty harbor bridges, past deserted buildings and perpetual construction sites. We would pour out our troubles and laugh and turn the music way, way up.
One night, some pile of rebar and chunks of concrete triggered his memory of Mid-World, the world of the gunslinger. The world that had moved on. He told me something of the books, of the desolate landscape littered with remnants of a time before. Of one man’s dogged quest for something only he could understand. Most importantly, he told me how much the books meant to him. So I put them on the list, the endless list. I didn’t read as much as I used to, but I would get to them someday.
Now I was older, and sick, and getting sicker. At a doctor’s appointment when I’d filled out a chart about my pain levels and my state of mind, they sent in a behavioral health specialist to talk to me. He asked me a lot of questions, and some were things like: any fun plans to look forward to? Read any good books lately?
In other words, what’s keeping you alive?
I told him about the Tower. Dark, isn’t it? Yes. To say true, it’s not my usual fare. But sometimes I find a path to the shadowy places, and it was autumn, and the place I had to walk was shadowed to begin with. It got into my bones, this story. This man alone in the desert. Unbroken in a broken world. No way to go but forward. It was not the kind of world I would dream of escaping to, but it lent me strength to survive my own.
We shy from the dark places. It’s hard to talk about those paths we walk alone. So we let it out in fabulations–we tell each other stories set in worlds just real enough to hold the truth. Unreal enough to hold it a little removed from our own desperately vulnerable lives. Sharing the stories and singing the songs is a way to bear a torch into the dark.
I followed the Beam. I took my time. I would finish one book and go looking for the next one at Logos, the labyrinth of a used bookstore which had stood downtown for nearly 50 years. I had remarkable luck. Each time I found the volume I was looking for. Often it would be the only volume of the series on the shelves when I came searching. It was like someone was reading their way through them just ahead of me.
When I was ready for the final book, I hurried down to the basement where the misfit fantasy worlds are always kept. Sure enough, there was old Roland, watching me from a field of roses that took my breath away. I clasped that book to my heart and took it up quick-quick, do ya.
The next day, all the windows at Logos Books and Records were covered with signs. STORE CLOSING.
I took that last stretch of the journey as slow as I could, took the ka-tet with me wherever I’d go. It took me three years to work my way through the series, and we reached the end of the path as I was preparing for the culmination of my own quest: the surgery that finally healed me of the pain and sickness I had carried for two decades.
A year later, my father died. One of my dearest friends followed a few months after.
Every death is its own tangled mess. Memories and feelings, decisions and regrets–they jumble up inside you. They can black out your vision and strangle your heart.
Writing was the needle I took to the knots. The first song I found was pulled from the rubble of Mid-World. There, Death was a face you couldn’t shy from. Some part of me needed to look it in the eye. To stare down the fear and the finality of it, and to speak to the one thing every living creature on this earth has in common. And to honor the ones who have stepped into the clearing.
The notion of a good death is a hard one to process. The truth of dying itself is beyond our ken until we get there. The hope is to face it, if not in your own time, then on your own terms.
“Don’t say I lost the battle on the day I lay my weapons down.
I made this peace with my own hands, I take it with me to the ground.”
The words came with the sound of steel, picked slowly by a lonesome hand in the middle of an endless desert. In the distance I heard other voices: the ghosts of a harmony close as sworn sisters.
I am listening to that guitar and those voices as I write, but now I hear so much more. The dulcimer that rings as in a summons from the mountain. The bass hinting at something ominous while the mandolin shines above. The fiddle painting the desert sky, the banjo steady as a heartbeat, and the bodhran galloping along in pursuit of a foe who’s forever one step ahead.
This was a thing I had to do before I die. I’m not in any hurry, though I know it’s out of my hands. It’s out of all our hands. What we have is here and now. If we are lucky, we have each other. And we have lights that we can carry as we walk together through the dark.
(Portions of this writing were adapted from a post I originally shared on 9/19/19. Constant Readers will know why.)
Summer Russell 
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