From John Griswold, author of “Three Graces” in Brevity 28
I’ve long been interested in the concept sabi from Asian art. The meaning has shifted over time, and it’s now usually joined with wabi:
“Wabi-sabi is an intuitive appreciation of a transient beauty in the physical world that reflects the irreversible flow of life in the spiritual world. It is an understated beauty that exists in the modest, rustic, imperfect, or even decayed, an aesthetic sensibility that finds a melancholic beauty in the impermanence of all things.” (Andrew Juniper, Wabi-Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence, Tuttle, 2003)
The poet and translator John Balaban once described sabi as the feeling you’d get watching a very old man dressed like a young hip hop artist while waiting together on a train platform—you might want to laugh and cry at the same time. As I think of it sabi doesn’t contain the anger of black comedy but rather leads to empathy and even compassion. This viewpoint doesn’t seem all that common in Western literature, but Chekhov is a master. My piece in Brevity is an attempt to see with that view.
My father was 89 and in good health until two months before he died. He and his wife had the curious, engaged, witty minds that I have often wished for in acquaintances my own age. But he left us when I was six or seven months old, and I knew him only because I had tracked him down and only ever as a friend and only for ten years. It was strange and beautiful and frightening being at his bedside in hospice. All I could do was run little errands, be calm, and tell him more about his grandsons. Being there was important, not because I could share much more in my father’s life, but because I wanted to show him I loved him enough to witness his dying.
There weren’t many left to bear witness. Most of his friends and colleagues from various universities and from his time in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and elsewhere had been dead for years. A few more lived far away. I was a little afraid for him, with his failing breath, and his wife, who couldn’t hear well, and it had something to do with loneliness. Maybe that’s silly, since the dying often begin to distance themselves long before they die, but I was thankful when the others came.
First there were neighbors from their retirement community then the waitresses came from a Greek restaurant where my dad and his wife had breakfast every morning. Life and time had made the waitresses a little hard and tired in a way you don’t recover from, and it was easy enough to imagine the rest of their unchanging lives. But they were comical as well, full of gossip, cussing and the need for more drinks. And it was they who had the strength and vitality to flirt and kiss my father’s hands goodbye as a kind of last rites. I was so moved and found them so beautiful that I saw them instantly as sabi figures, the three saving graces.
