The End Game
And How to Lose it
The game is on, and I’m already losing.
The game is chess, in which I have little experience. My opponent is ranked number one in the world, having checkmated every player who ever lived, except possibly one.
I didn’t make this up. I saw it in a movie, Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal,” from 1957. A knight (Max von Sydow) plays chess with the hooded figure of Death. He plays his best, extends the match, but Death makes a surprise move, takes his queen — and soon, checkmate. I saw the movie when I was 19 and couldn’t understand it. I saw it again at 39 and it scared me, but I held out hope that I could avoid this defeat, by staying out of the game.
At the time I was a Buddhist, sitting cross-legged on a cushion every day, cultivating an equanimity that supposedly went beyond birth and death. The idea was — and it’s true, I’m sure — that the universe is One, and we simply pass from one form of existence to another, eventually reaching Nirvana, the end of suffering, game over. I was on my way.
Then, I had the misfortune of marrying a Presbyterian minister and losing a contest with her, a test of spiritual maturity in which the loser was bound to adopt the religion of the winner. I found myself in a new world, where this earthly life mattered, and you had one chance to make yours mean something. Equanimity was neither the path not the goal — life was a struggle to bear witness to the truth in a world that didn’t want to hear it, to show mercy in a world that lived by conflict. Worst of all, other people mattered. Suffering was not to be contemplated philosophically, but fought on every front. Our job is to not to get out of here and into God’s Kingdom, but to prepare the way for God’s Kingdom on earth.
And where does death fit into that? I have no ready answer.
Recently, I made my first move — a stupid move — and only then realized the game was underway. Visiting children and grandchildren on the West Coast, my wife and I went to see an apartment complex designed with the elderly in mind. No need to climb stairs, the agent assured us. It was new and sterile, but comfortable and affordable.
I found myself tempted by the prospect of an easy decline, with daughters and sons-in-law nearby to scrape me off the floor when the inevitable fall came. A comfortable end. But something in me screamed NO, that’s not what I want.
My second move contradicted my first. Unconsciously I set out to prove I was still young and strong, in no need of Senior Living. I tried to make myself attractive to a much younger woman — just to prove I could do it. She seemed to like my stories and jokes, so I set out to impress her further. At that point I immediately grew self-conscious and lost my charm, becoming a clanging bell, a nattering nabob. The rest of the evening was painful. Still, at bedtime, I preened in front of the mirror, puffed out my chest and asked my wife, “Do I look young and strong?”
“Sure,” was all she said.
Two moves — two pawns advanced on opposite sides of the board. That can’t be right. Meanwhile Death had moved his ranks into some classic position, preparing an assault that will inevitably destroy me. I have no more strategy than Donald Trump did, sitting in the West Wing in his underwear, watching TV for something to tweet about.
Come to think of it, I don’t really want to play chess.
I’d rather not identify with the knight, a tortured, doubting, self-hating intellectual — especially when there’s another character more to my liking. That’s the squire, played by Gunnar Bjornstrand. He’s a cynic, a jester, a fighter, a singer, a ladies’ man — and facing death, his counsel is to savor the incomparable feeling of life, right up to the end.
Oops! I knocked the pieces off the board.
See you later, Mr. Death.
— Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips
