In the Slender Margin (9 page)

I called my mother to ask her what Ian’s favourite food had been. “Crepes,” she answered, without hesitation. It was not unusual, she said, for him to eat a dozen with sugar and fresh lemon for breakfast. The ingredients are simple: flour, eggs, milk and a pinch of salt. I started crying and talking to him as soon as I began mixing the batter. Had you happened to look through the kitchen window, you would have thought I was hammered.

The burning took place on a sandy estuary on the Tsawout reserve. It was a warm Sunday in May; the air was heavy with the scent of wild rose, and the nearby hills were dense with red and yellow Scotch broom. Lena had cooked spaghetti and meatballs and lemon meringue pie for her relatives, and when we were done setting up I realized we had a couple of extra servings. Lena told us to put them on the table, as there are always unexpected guests. My mother, who had come over for the day, stood beside me while I placed the crepes on top of the wood and the paper was set on fire.

Fires for the dead seem to burn with a particular intensity. Blue flames curl around the plates of food in slow motion; the flames burn so hot and high that the fire is smokeless. In the Quran, smokeless fire refers to the tips of flames out of which the jinn were created—the genies in Arab folklore that occupy a parallel world to ours. In the fire that day, on the beach, we could see the genie unleashed.

The Mexican poet Octavio Paz observes that Mexicans have no qualms about getting close with death. On Día de Muertos, thousands of candles are lit and placed on altars and graves; if the candles are blown out, the spirits leave. The Mexican, he says, “chases after it, mocks it, courts it, sleeps with it; it is his favourite plaything and most lasting love.”

At one point, when the plates were cracking and fire had consumed the whole table, my mother, who was standing beside me, collapsed against my side. “I didn’t know,” she whispered. “I didn’t know.”

“What?” I asked, alarmed. “What is it?”

“I didn’t know they were together,” she said. “I didn’t know John was with him.”

John, Ian’s father, died shortly after the war, when Ian was a young boy. My secular English mother did not have one doubt in her body that the ghosts of her late husband and son had come to the table together that day to eat crepes drizzled with lemon and sugar.

The Pied Piper

I can’t say that, as time went on, it got easier to be with the dying. There was an intensity to the work that was seductive: it was both exhausting and full of wonder. For a long time I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. Each situation brought new challenges. One night when I was working on the crisis team, we were called to pronounce the death of a Scottish man we had met earlier that day. Susan, the nurse I was with, suggested to the family that we could dress him in his traditional regalia.

It is hard work dressing the dead. I did not find it easy to touch a body the way many of the nurses did. My training was geared to the psychological; there were no smells involved in my training, no body fluids, catheters, suction tubes, no bags of saline or blood to hang on IV poles, no ostomy bags with fecal waste, or fungating tumours to dress.

Susan was compassionate and pragmatic. She started on the unit as a volunteer and decided to leave her dental assistant’s job to study nursing when she saw how kind nurses were with the dying. In nursing school, she remembers Sister Ida telling the students, “You can’t relieve spiritual suffering until you first relieve physical suffering.” Susan took that as her motto. When I asked her about her ease with dead bodies, she mused that maybe it was because nurses are so familiar with naked bodies before death. There is an intimacy that comes from looking after ill people, she believes—“an intimacy that often opens a pathway to tending emotional and spiritual needs.” Performing physical care is one of the first things nurses do. “Right after we introduce ourselves,”
says Susan. Where else, other than brothels, do we remove our clothes before the introductions are complete?

Susan motioned for me to get on the bed after she had removed the catheter and subcutaneous butterflies and lightly washed the body. I sat back to back with the corpse and propped my feet up against the headboard to give myself leverage while she squeezed, tugged, hauled and cinched a thirty-four-inch kilt around a forty-two-inch, ascitesswollen waist. We looked as if we were in a Monty Python skit on the set of
Night of the Living Dead.
She eased his rigid arms into a long-sleeved white shirt with ruffles down the front, pulled on his knee socks, clipped on his garters and cut the back of his jacket in half so that she could button up the front. She fluffed the pillow while I extricated myself, and looped the sporran and chains through the belt loops at the back of the kilt. She laid him out like a fierce Highlander.

It was a warm July night; although it was the height of summer, you could already smell autumn in the air. A few minutes after we arrived, the patient’s son left the room shaking and crying; a shy man, he had not spoken to us at all. Almost immediately after we’d finished bathing and dressing the body, we heard a sound outside. At first it seemed like a high cry, a keening, but when we got up and looked out of the window, we realized the son was walking slowly around the outside of the house playing the bagpipes, piping his father out. With each note, porch lights flicked on in the neighbourhood and people came outside. They were drawn from their homes the way the children of Hamelin were drawn to the Pied Piper; they came out to stand in the
night air, and had the piper walked down the street and kept going on his way to the distant mountains, they would have followed. I would have, too.

Mercy

At three o’clock one morning, when a nurse was returning to the unit after a busy night, a rabbit darted in front of the car and lay stunned on the road after the impact. The nurse got out of her car, unlocked the trunk, opened the drug kit, drew up fifty milligrams of morphine and euthanized the bunny. Nothing else was going to suffer that night. Not on her shift. No way.

The Dying Never Take Planes

When I was a kid, I often spoke in code with my friends. We lived in what we thought was a secret world:
ets-lay lay-pay owboys-cay and-ay Indians-ay.
It was a world that was perfectly clear to us but not always decipherable to those who didn’t understand pig Latin. When we encountered somebody
who spoke our language fluently, we experienced it as a kind of instant intimacy—as if they could see what we saw, feel what we felt, as if they had entered our world, were a part of our secret society.

Language, says ethnobotanist Wade Davis, is not simply a set of grammatical rules or vocabulary; it is a flash of the human spirit, a window of sorts into the cosmology of our lives. Nowhere is the power of language more evident than in our language around death. My husband, Patrick, grew up in Steinbach, Manitoba, a small Mennonite town on the prairies. His father died at age fifty-five, leaving behind a young family. When Patrick wrote in the obituary that his father had died, the pastor at his father’s church stroked out the word
died
and replaced it with
passed away.
Death was not an end in the town with twenty-six churches and a population of around three thousand; it was a passage to another life. A new beginning.

Rarely is death called by its own name.

Euphemism,
meaning “to speak with good words, to use good words of omen,” derived from the Greek
eu
“good” and
pheme
“speaking,” is most often associated with denial in the West—evidence of our discomfort in speaking directly about death—and yet, at the same time that it helps us to avoid forbidden topics, it also offers a way to voice the unspeakable. Certain experiences are too intimate to be talked about without safeguards. In many cultures, there is a reluctance—based on fear, superstition or taboo—to talk about death directly. We reach for language that will soften the blow. Some Australian tribes are forbidden to say the name of the deceased for one year, during which time they
also avoid words that rhyme with the name of the dead person. In a ceremony at the end of the year, when the name of the deceased is spoken, it is a way to welcome him or her back into the lives of the living. Salish people will not talk about funeral arrangements while someone is dying, as to do so invites death into the house. Pablo Picasso refused to make a will as a way of avoiding death—leaving his family to fight over a $30-million estate. His son Paolo was quoted as saying, “The death of my father raises grave problems for the family.”

Many of the euphemisms we use about death are based on the Christian hope of resurrection. People are said to
pass away
or
depart,
as if they are embarking on a journey; we are told they are
resting in peace
or
in a better place
or that they
have gone home to be with their maker.
“We are
in
this world,” Patrick was told, “but not
of
this world.” At its best, euphemism allows us to skirt around the taboos surrounding human mortality; at its worst, it is a sentimental Hallmark response to suffering.

Whereas euphemism averts its gaze in relation to death, metaphor speaks to the mystery at the heart of it. Metaphor, the engine of poetry, is also the language of the dying. Many people, in their last days, speak of one thing in terms of another. Medical language is primarily utilitarian; it does not depend on rhetorical, metaphorical or other poetic effects.

I have atrial tachycardia. When my heart bursts out of the starting gate, I don’t want my doctor commenting on the race; I want him to calculate the amount of propofol needed
to put me under and how many joules of electricity it will take to shock my heart back to sinus rhythm.

The origins of medical terminology, however, are highly metaphoric. According to the human anatomy textbook
Gray’s Anatomy, coccyx
, the Greek word for “cuckoo,” refers to the bird’s beak and its likeness to our tailbone;
atrium
, the word for “hall” or “entrance,” is used for the upper chamber of the heart;
glans
comes from the Latin for “acorn” and is used for the head of the penis, which is somewhat shaped like an acorn.
Morphine
is derived from Morpheus, Ovid’s name for the god of dreams.

Beneath the terminology is a world rich in mythology, a world that Niels Bohr, the father of quantum physics, believed was so complex that to describe it fully one must use the language of poetry. The role of metaphor, Bohr proposed, was essential even in scientific thought. There are numerous reasons, including drug reactions and disease process, why somebody who is dying might be incoherent, but there are instances in which we don’t hear what they are saying because we haven’t learned to listen: we haven’t entered their world.

Pain speaks a number of languages. On one level it needs no translation; on another level it requires that we become translators and interpreters if we are to be of any help. The doctors and nurses who do this work understand the language of pain. They have as many words for pain as one imagines the Bedouin must have for wind (the Inuit, we are now told, really have only twelve words for snow):
sharp, dull, aching, crushing, searing, tingling, red, white, hot, cold, malevolent, familiar, catlike, ghostlike, jabbing, nagging, scalding, flickering, ravenous, blinding, shooting, boring, wrenching, nauseating.

In her essay “On Being Ill,” Virginia Woolf wrote, “English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache…. Let the sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.” For some, it just hurts like hell; for others, there are no words at all.

Those who encounter the dying must learn to think like the poet who reaches for language the way a child reaches for the moon, believing it can be held in the hand like an orange at the same time as it shines on in the night sky.

Without metaphor, how could we understand the man, dying of leukemia, with four sons, who tells his youngest, “The road was never marked very clearly, I kept missing the turns, now the vehicle is out of gas.” Or the woman who asks, “Where will I live when they jackhammer my street?” How could we see what the woman crouched on her knees on her hospital bed sees when she smiles and tells the doctor she is peeking into heaven? How could we comprehend the Buddhist woman who, in the hours before her death, insists that the heads of all the flowers in her garden be chopped off in case the smell of jasmine, rose, lavender and lilac hold her back? Without metaphor, how could we comprehend, as Robert Desnos did, that the earth is a camp lit by thousands of spiritual fires whose sparks rise and burn through the roof of the tent?

When his grandfather, Herman, was in a coma, my son-in-law, Lee, slept beside him on a cot in the Rose Room—a room reserved for the dying—at the local hospital. Waiting is often hard. Earlier in the day, Herman had said, “I am ready, but which door do I take?” Before going to sleep, Lee covered
his grandfather with a hand-spun Native blanket. In the night, a nurse drew back the blanket because he was hot. Shortly after this, he died. The blanket, given to him by his grandson, was the door.

“Every metaphor,” writes Jane Hirshfield, “every hymn-shout of praise, points to the shared existence of beings and things.”

The language of the dying is not static; it is a language of movement, of platforms, tickets, passports and maps, visitations and greetings, entrances and exits. A language of arrivals and departures. They will often ask if their bags are packed or if there is a full tank of gas in the car. They repeat themselves, asking if the train is on time; asking if you will be coming with them. You must enter this as you would enter a foreign land; signs will be of little help. You must see what they see. It is never planes they wait for; rather, they pull away slowly from this earth—the fields of fall rye rolling as far as the eye can see.