Symphony of Sorrowful Songs

Today, Prince Andrei, in volume four of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, after enduring a long and severe illness caused by the wounds he sustained at the Battle of Borodino, with all the burning fire in his soul and the temptations of humanity and love still alive within him, while Princess Marya and Natasha stood silently at his deathbed, closed his eyes to all this horror and ugliness and was released from the bondage of the body.

For a long time, I wept for the death of my beloved Andrei. And once again, I was carried back to all the strange and lethal moments of my mot
her’s dying. Not only because every death that occurs within the circle of my presence in the world forever reminds me of her, but because of the closeness of that terrifying human experience on the deathbed—an experience I imagined must also have passed through my mother’s suffering body. Then I wept again, for hours, for the astonishing solitude she must have experienced in her final moments.

In those last moments of this utterly solitary and irreversible journey, was she light at last—finally freed from the unbearable pain that consumed her day by day and drained her vital energy?
Did she have the chance, in a single moment, to empty the last sacred breath left in her chest into this rotten world and quietly say to herself: “What a long journey. It’s finally over. I am at peace.”

What passed through her in those moments? I wish there were a way for me to know. I only wish that she was able to release that final breath with ease. Beyond this, I want nothing from the world.

All day long, while reading that chapter of the book, the sound of this symphony echoed in my head, and I kept thinking that death must sound something like this.