Eulogy
by Timothy Murphy
On May 22, 1973, as I was writing a mournful letter in a bar in Hartford, Connecticut, Alan approached me and grinned: “I can’t believe anyone in this bar can read or write.” What a great opening line! So began our literary partnership, which bore much fruit over the course of 37 years.
Alan Sullivan’s cancer was diagnosed the Friday before Pentecost in 2005. Dazed and angry I went to St. Leo’s in Casselton for High Mass on Sunday. Instead of my boyhood friend, Father Frank, an elderly prelate, the spitting image of my late father, proceeded up the aisle.
Our guest on Pentecost was Father Hughes.
“Suppose that cancer spreads incurably
through one from whom you cannot bear to part.
Devoted spouse, can you accept this news
with some measure of equanimity?
Have you the Holy Spirit in your heart?”
In his lovely Irish brogue, Father Peter spoke in perfect, rhyming pentameter, and his homily solidified my recent return to Mother Church and helped me come to terms with this devastating diagnosis. Not long after, Alan wrote his most famous poem, a villanelle which was anthologized in Best American Poetry and which is studied in medical schools:
Divide and Conquer
The cells divide. The cells that will not die
divide too well and so they multiply.
They kill the host to keep themselves alive.
The blood goes bad. In vain physicians try
to purge the veins with drugs the cells defy.
The cells divide. The cells that will not die
mutate anew. The hardy few survive.
The few recruit the many teeming by.
They kill the host to keep themselves alive.
They colonize the nodes from neck to thigh.
The tumors grow, and scanners never lie.
The cells divide. The cells that will not die
stifle the very organs where they thrive.
Blind, stupid things—their purpose gone awry—
they kill the host to keep themselves alive.
Exploding through the flesh, they multiply,
but immortality eludes them. Why?
The cells divide. The cells that will not die
kill the host to keep themselves alive.
In a great blessing, Alan, ever a skeptic, came to God in December of 2008 and was immediately received into the Church. Then on Easter Sunday of 2009 he decided to devote the little time remaining to him to translating the poems of King David. With the expert assistance of Seree Cohen Zohar, his Israeli consultant in Classical Hebrew, he finished this immense task on June 24th and died July 9th of 2010. I don’t pray for the repose of his soul, because I figure nearly four decades with me is Purgatory enough for anyone. God bless Alan.
