My teeming brain

This is a story about how, as a young man, I rehearsed the process of dying. 

In my final year as an undergraduate, I enrolled in a course in English medieval drama that was described as a mix of in-class instruction and performance. We would spend the first semester studying plays of the period and the second mounting a full-scale production. The course appealed to 21-year-old me; I had already taken several theatre classes, performed in a handful of student productions, and was taken with the company I found in the university’s theatre scene. The drama students lounged so confidently and carelessly in the rehearsal spaces and campus cafes, dropping names like Stanislavski and Beckett. Their bohemian attire was so on point. I wanted to belong to that tribe.

I also had a real interest in theatre. I felt like I was trying on new ways of expressing myself and revealing things I would never have dared to in another context. Through the rehearsal process, I was shedding insecurities that had lingered since high school and exploring a more open, animated, and performative version of myself. 

About the course material, my feelings were more ambivalent. I had read a handful of medieval plays in a survey course, and the familiar Bible stories told in unfamiliar Middle English didn’t have the same appeal as Shakespeare or modern drama. The few pieces I’d seen performed by a small, earnest group from the campus medieval society—full of broad clowning and stiff acting—hadn’t captured my imagination. They had been staged in public spaces and were no doubt meant to draw in passersby; to me, they seemed awkward and I didn’t linger. That said, I guess the anticipated social and creative upsides outweighed my reservations about the material, as I signed up. 

I remember the course as a well-intentioned experience. The archaic texts became more relatable as we explored how rooted they were in the folk culture of a largely illiterate society. Many were sequences of Bible stories ranging from the creation of the world to the last judgement, originally performed by local craftsmen’s guilds. The other important genre was the morality play—an allegorical story about sin and repentance that had an unambiguous didactic message for the audience. Our end of year production was the well-known 16th century morality play Everyman. 

The central character, Everyman, is just what he sounds like: a representative of humankind, a stand-in for all of us. As in most morality plays, Everyman is called on to make an account before God of his sins, repent for them, and save his soul for eternity. At God’s command, Death summons Everyman to make his final reckoning. Unwilling to face this on his own, Everyman seeks out Fellowship, Kindred and Cousin (a duo), and Goods (the worldly kind), to see if they will support him on his journey. Not surprisingly, all decline. Fortunately, Everyman finds that his Good Deeds will go with him to the grave, and Knowledge will guide him along this final journey. And while Strength, Beauty, and his Five Wits (senses) also abandon Everyman in the end, he goes to his grave thanking God for his salvation. 

So much for the plot and characters. To my surprise, I was cast as Everyman. I had spent several years playing bit parts and secondary characters in campus and community productions, while quietly envying friends who were getting leading roles. I had started to internalize the line from T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” 

I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; 

Am an attendant lord, one that will do, 

To swell a progress, start a scene or two… 

I didn’t believe I was leading-man material, so it was validating to be told I was at least Everyman material. I had no idea at the time how I would bring this two-dimensional allegorical character to life, but I was happy to have been chosen. Egotism and untested self-confidence carried the day. 

I think it’s fair to say the production was very much of its time. The professor took a secular approach to this intensely dogmatic play, attempting to explore the universal condition of dying through a performance that was historically and culturally rooted in a specifically medieval world view. This wasn’t an easy task, particularly as we stayed close to the original text, which was intended to instruct its contemporary audiences on the fine points of medieval Church doctrine. I think the director’s idea was to preserve and honour the beauty of the original piece while applying an interpretive framework that broadened its message. 

If the goal was to downplay the medieval and religious aspects, some of the choices probably rubbed against the grain. We performed the play in a campus chapel complete with a raised sanctuary, pews, and stained glass windows. We wore tunics and tights, to my dismay, and when, as Everyman, I was finally absolved of my sins I was draped in a “robe of contrition” that resembled a cross between a bishop’s chasuble and Joseph’s amazing technicolour dreamcoat. The effect of this costume (plus all my declaiming to God) on my grandmother and great aunt was profound, and I all heard for the next few years was that “I was cut out for the ministry.” None of these creative choices helped to secularize the piece, but the director did have a trick up her sleeve that pulled this antique allegory into the modern world.

That trick was Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s On Death and Dying, first published in 1969 and recognized as one of the first serious studies of people dealing with terminal illness. Kubler-Ross famously posited that people experience five stages of grief: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Her goal in researching and documenting these stages was in part to help healthcare workers and wider audiences better understand the psychological impact of dying on palliative patients and to provide more humane and holistic care. These five stages became a framework through which we could analyze Everyman and bring to life the unfolding drama of the hero’s death. 

Applying the five stages to the drama uncovered opportunities to interpret scenes and lines of dialogue in particular ways. For example, when Death first commands Everyman to make his final reckoning, we see our hero bargaining for more time:

O Death, thou comest when I had thee least in mind!

In thy power it lieth me to save;

Yes of my good will I give thee, if thou will be kind – 

Yea, a thousand point shalt thou have – 

And defer this matter till another day. 

Similarly, when Everyman is abandoned by all he approaches to accompany him on this journey – including Fellowship, Kinsmen, and Goods – we explored his anger, depression, and isolation in these scenes. And toward the end of the play, when Everyman is preparing for death with Knowledge’s guidance, we were able to represent his acceptance of this journey.  

Applying Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief to this medieval morality play gave me ways to connect with the text and, hopefully, bring it to life for our audiences as well. Looking back on that time, however, I don’t know that I really did understand the journey I was performing as a twenty-one year old actor. Death still seemed kind of theoretical. Now, as a fifty-something-year-old with cancer and going through a kind of reckoning of my life, I have a different perspective. There is a poignancy to certain scenes, such as when Everyman is forsaken by Strength, Beauty, and his Five Wits (senses), that I didn’t feel as a young man. The play also raises different questions for me: What does a good end look like? How does knowledge of my likely end affect how I live? 

Also, what to make of the play’s central theme that death is something we essentially prepare for alone? That seems hard to align with the reality most of us will experience. Certainly, since my cancer diagnosis I’ve been surrounded with support from my friends, family, and medical team. At the cancer facility I’ve recently spent so much time in, patients are almost always accompanied by one or more attentive caregivers and companions. A potentially terminal illness is in a sense a shared experience, and it’s hard to imagine most people crossing the threshold alone. 

So, I don’t think that twenty-one year-old me really absorbed the story I was supposed to be enacting. I wasn’t able to make the imaginative leap that the play demands. That said, it’s probably best that I put aside my aspirations for the stage after graduating. I do wonder, though, if my failure of the imagination isn’t quite common: Is it just being human to avoid deeply contemplating our end before something forces us to do it?   

Why does this experience of playing Everyman haunt my thoughts today? I think it’s partly because of the way it connects past and present, youth with middle age, innocence with experience. As I said, I don’t think I really understood what we were doing at that time, but aspects of the process  have come back to me with a new intensity. For example, there was the time the professor led us in meditation—my introduction to that practice. I recall sitting cross-legged on the floor, with only natural light streaming in from the windows. The professor guided us to a state where we could explore feelings around leavetaking and saying goodbye. I don’t recall her words after 35 years, but I’ve never really forgotten the experience. I quieted my mind and my body and found somewhere within me that I hadn’t previously accessed. I explored feelings of attachment and loss in a way I’d never done before. I return to that place through meditation today. I don’t know that I’m any closer to enlightenment about the future, but I’m feeling a mysterious, almost uncanny, connection between the past and the present.