Staring at Death

While learning “The Sailor’s Tango” from Happy End, a Weimar-era play with songs by Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill for performances this winter, I recently discovered a major obstacle that had inhibited my full realization of this musical mini-drama. Within the span of a few lines, I would have to evoke and enact the most frightening experience possible: confrontation with the most fearsome, shattering, and terrifying thing in all of life—death.

“Der Matrosen-Tango” tells the story of humble sailors, the lowest ranking men aboard the German ships of the 1920’s. They return from shore leave, bragging about the booze, cigars, and girls left behind. Laughing at God and religion, they depart for Burma, only to meet their fate amidst the whirlwinds of a tropical typhoon. Their last-minute prayers are unanswered as they witness their ship destroyed, drifting down to a watery grave. A “sea of blue” will be their home for all eternity.

Naturally, it’s a rare privilege to learn a Brecht/Weill song, even for someone who directed The Threepenny Opera as a 19 year-old Yale undergraduate. Their music collaboration produced masterpieces whose hypnotic harmonics and intense drama are uniquely haunting. I too have been haunted by “The Sailor’s Tango” and not just by its subtle dance rhythms and literally hair-raising words. A very dear Yale friend, Glenn Mure, a brilliant actor and singer, included this number in a 1986 cabaret program for his closest friends immediately after he was diagnosed as HIV-positive. The horrifying pleadings of the sailor took on an extraliterary significance that still give me chills.

During my years as a medical student, extern, intern, resident, and emergency room attending physician I saw by my estimation approximately 3000 people die in front of me. Almost all doctors have crossed that same battlefield. Some of those people had lived long, happy lives. Others were cut down in their youth. Some were victims of accidents or unforeseen health crises. Others were infants, children, or adolescents who never experienced the beauties of health, friendship, and joy. How did these experiences steel me in a resolve to fight disease and help people in need? I don’t think I will ever know.

Now I find myself reliving the deaths of close friends, family members, and even some strangers as I channel the primal terror that a doomed fictional sailor experiences—compacted into 20 seconds of the Brecht/Weill song. A lifetime of death, as it were, passes through my mind. As does my reaction to this incessant fear caused by the inexorable forces of nature and illness. When I first started to witness multiple cardiac arrests during a typical day in a large Brooklyn hospital—despite heroic measures and amazing dedication by humanitarian physicians, nurses, and assistants—I realized that I needed to live each day fully, caring for others and enjoying my favorite things, namely friends, theater, and music.

When I perform “The Sailor’s Tango” I will be once again staring at death, and it won’t be the last time.