Death Be Not Proud

Praying

IT’S CURIOUS how much time I spend reading prayers, since I don’t consider myself to be very religious. I look for them everywhere and keep in my knapsack a handsome red leather-bound book of prayers from my Episcopal high school. A favorite is one from the Book of Common Prayer that has us ask forgiveness for having “left undone those things we ought to have done and done those things that we ought not to have done.” When I’m experiencing free-floating remorse I read that prayer. It’s like a broad-spectrum antibiotic. It takes care of just about anything and everything.

My mind is especially open to prayer when I’m reading a book: it’s quiet, attentive, focused. Not so much when I’m on the Web or flipping through a magazine. And while I do like books of prayers, I have discovered many of the prayers I like best in novels and works of nonfiction and collections of poetry.

One of the prayers I turn to most often comes from a book about a boy named Johnny Gunther.

For me, Johnny Gunther will always be seventeen, a contemporary, just a few years older than I was when I first met him in the pages of Death Be Not Proud, just a few years older than my boarding-school classmate Lee Harkins was when she died from Hodgkin’s lymphoma. But Johnny wasn’t our contemporary; he was my father’s. Johnny was born in 1929, my dad in 1927. If Johnny were alive today, he would be eighty-seven, maybe with grandchildren the age he was when he first got a stiff neck that turned out to be something far worse: a brain tumor.

In Death Be Not Proud, his father, journalist and author John Gunther, chronicles the last fifteen months of his son’s life. There is little of the life before: a speedy introductory chapter introduces you to this handsome young man with beautiful hands. And there are a few chapters after Johnny dies, which include some of his letters and his diary entries, and in which his mother writes about her devastating grief—the pain she gets from seeing things that her son loved or would have loved, and her regrets:

I wish we had loved Johnny more when he was alive. Of course we loved Johnny very much. Johnny knew that. Everybody knew it. Loving Johnny more. What does it mean? What can it mean, now?

Parents all over the earth who lost sons in the war have felt this kind of question, and sought an answer. To me, it means loving life more, being more aware of life, of one’s fellow human beings, of the earth.

It means obliterating, in a curious but real way, the ideas of evil and hate and the enemy, and transmuting them, with the alchemy of suffering, into ideas of clarity and charity.

It means caring more and more about other people, at home and abroad, all over the earth. It means caring more about God.

Johnny Gunther and I had little in common when I first read his story. As noted, he wasn’t of my generation; the war his mother refers to is World War II. His parents were divorced; mine weren’t. He was passionate about chemistry and science; both subjects baffled me. But I still identified with him keenly. And I also had more than a little crush on him. That’s part of the magic of the book—everyone I know who has read this book feels the same way about Johnny.

In one of those odd synchronies that keep happening to readers, I discovered on rereading Death Be Not Proud that young Johnny, at age ten, met Lin Yutang. John Gunther tells a story of his son approaching Dr. Lin, “the first Chinese he had ever met,” at a lunch party and going right up to him to ask, “Is it true what my father says, that no Chinese ever eat cheese?” If Gunther was mortified, he doesn’t say. But he does tell what happened next: “Dr. Lin ruined my authority as a parent by walking firmly to the buffet and putting a large piece of cheese in his mouth.”

Death Be Not Proud has some light moments, but it is mostly a painful book. Gunther lays out the events of those last fifteen months as a great reporter would. The painful head shavings, the surgeries, the bandaging, the discovery of an ever-worsening prognosis, the miraculous months when Johnny defied all predictions and rallied—Gunther chronicles them all. Johnny is almost preternaturally brave. Reading this book, as a teen, I wanted to be like Johnny should I ever encounter anything like what he encountered. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be—but I wanted to try. Johnny is also curious, eager to know the whys and wherefores of every procedure, though his parents do frequently shield him from the worst news. Still, he’s at heart a scientist—and he figures things out.

Johnny doesn’t live long enough to go to Harvard, where he’s been admitted. But he is able, though terribly ill, to attend his boarding-school graduation.

His father writes:

As each boy passed down the aisle, there was applause, perfunctory for some, pronounced for others. Gaines, Gillespie, Goodwin, Griffin, Gunther. Slowly, very slowly, Johnny stepped out of the mass of his fellows and trod by us, carefully keeping in the exact center of the long aisle, looking neither to the left nor the right, but straight ahead, fixedly, with the white bandage flashing in the light through the high windows, his chin up, carefully, not faltering, steady, but slowly, so very slowly. The applause began and then rose and the applause became a storm, as every single person in the old church became whipped up, tight and tense, to see if he would make it. The applause became a thunder, it rose and soared and banged, when Johnny finally reached the pulpit. Mr. Flynt carefully tried to put the diploma in his right hand, as planned. Firmly Johnny took it from right hand to left, as was proper, and while the whole audience rocked now with release from tension, and was still wildly, thunderously applauding, he passed around to the side and, not seeing us, reached his place among his friends.

When my own ghosts come, the images of friends I’ve lost young, Johnny Gunther joins them. I must confess that when I see him it’s not as he really looked—it’s in the image of an actor named Robby Benson who played him in a movie. But he’s there all the same. His father was one of America’s most famous authors and I don’t think about him at all—I think about his son. John Gunther ensured that his child would have a kind of immortality he himself doesn’t.

The book’s epigraph is the John Donne poem from which Gunther took the title: “Death, be not proud, though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.” The poem famously ends with the couplet “One short sleep past, we wake eternally, / And Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die!”

Someone told me that if you want to know what a book is really about just read the last word. The last word of Death Be Not Proud comes from the chapter that Johnny’s mother wrote. That word is “life.”

But that’s not the last last word. Gunther gives that to his son, who wrote, shortly after his diagnosis, a prayer. What made this particularly noteworthy, his father tells us, is that his son never prayed. Gunther speculates that Johnny’s aversion to prayer may have stemmed from the fact that he so disliked going to chapel at his grade school and harbored considerable “resentment at having been obliged to spend a good deal of time listening to organized religious exhortation.” So his mother, Frances, introduced him to all different kinds of prayers to counteract that early inculcation: “Hindu, Chinese, and so on, as well as Jewish and Christian. He was interested in all this, but it did not mean very much to him at first. Then she started him on Aldous Huxley’s anthology of prayer, The Perennial Philosophy, and told him how intimate and very personal prayer could be. Once she suggested that if it should ever occur to him to think of a prayer himself, of his own special kind, he should tell her. So, very casually, with an ‘Oh, by the way…’ expression, he said, ‘Speaking of prayers, I did think one up.’ He recited it and only disclosed later that he had previously written it down and memorized it.”

UNBELIEVER’S PRAYER

Almighty God

forgive me for my agnosticism;

For I shall try to keep it gentle, not cynical,

nor a bad influence

And O!

if Thou art truly in the heavens,

accept my gratitude

for all Thy gifts

and I shall try

to fight the good fight. Amen.