Posts tagged death

In a eulogy delivered at the funeral of Steve Jobs, the Apple founder’s sister used a phrase I hadn’t heard before. “We all — in the end — die in medias res,” she said.

In medias res. That it isn’t English is the likely reason I hadn’t come across it, but when I read it, it instantly sounded important. Beautiful, even. So I looked it up and the good wikifolks online described it for me.

Latin, it is a kind of narrative technique where a film or a book opens right in the middle of the story. Rather than, say, a slow shot of the morning sun rising, the viewer gets plunked into the middle of a fierce argument or a war scene or a disturbing moment of action such as the unforgettably half-awful opening sequence in the movie “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.” (The non-awful half being Marisa Tomei.)

Jobs’ sister applied in medias res to a life. That mortality happens in the middle of the story. A life’s plot can’t wrap up cleanly prior to death. There are too many subplots left hanging, too many interwoven characters left behind, too many ideas left unshared, too much advice unsent, too much knowledge not bequeathed, too many conversations unsaid, maybe love left unrequited.

On long bike rides through the Don Valley, I start to consider that all of life, nature, everything, is one long story that we all hop in and out of. We are born in medias res and we conclude in medias res. Maybe one life is like a long, epic poem. Maybe others are like quick flashbacks in a movie. Brief but powerful haikus.

My wife’s parents died too young, a few months apart and, most definitely, in medias res. My wife has had to continue on with an abridged version of the story of her mother and father, a story whose climax had not yet been reached, whose protagonists had not yet rose past the challenges they had endured. My grandmother died earlier last decade in medias res, her surgery intending to bring increased comfort and mobility to her story. My cousin lost an infant whose story had only begun to unfold. The book’s spine had barely been cracked.

There are not a few films, novels and records that abandon the watcher, reader or listener in the middle of things, with strings left untied. What will happen to the characters? Often it is left up to us, what we think, with gentle suggestions like the hopeful ring of chimes.

I guess it’s a philosophical kind of morning or something, for me, as I write this. In medias res. It’s so smooth. I thought of it on the bike path the other day when I spotted an older woman sitting on a picnic bench in the morning mist and she —