No matter how attentively you watch as the last breath comes and goes, no matter how closely you lean over the rails of the hospital bed and listen for the final murmur that might offer some last shard of detectable meaning, the moment of death—even the most expected death–remains shocking and mysterious. The repeated “when” in these lines from Krysl’s poem about her grandmother’s death mirror the way we might strain to imagine that moment of crossing over—the way we squint into the dusk to make out a figure already disappearing in shadows. We accompany the dying, when that task is given to us, as far as we can, listening for the next breath, watching for a fluttering of the eyes, any slight sign that they are still “with us.” And then they are not. They will not hear the birdsong outside the window that already sounds like flights of angels.
Some believe that it takes time for the spirit to leave the body; others that it is instantaneous. Those who have had near-death experiences often tell of hovering in the room, seeing their bodies on the bed where beloved ones cover their faces and weep or medical workers rush to verify the death, or perhaps revive the one who lies there, inert, self and not self. Those left to weep are also left to wonder. We don’t know. We can’t know. It’s not our business to know exactly what transpires when we let go light and breath and unbecome what we were.
The more curious among us might find these prohibitions—”this far and no further”—frustrating—maddening, even, when we long, in our grief, for reassurance, a sign of vital connection, a revelation. But maybe those prohibitions protect us from the sight of “heaven and damnation / which flesh cannot endure,” as Eliot put it in “Burnt Norton,” a poem that hovers at that threshold for 178 lines, peering into the timeless moments that allow glimpses and echoes of what can’t be fully seen or heard, but hauntingly, lastingly remembered. Those moments, when they come, are gifts. But they’re perishable as manna: we take them in and return to the lives we’re given in this dimension. We have things to do here, as those who return from “near death” so often remind us—here on the solid earth, washing the silver, making the bed, pulling back the curtains to let in the light that is still ours, taking the deep breath that is still ours to take to equip the bodies we were given for this journey.
It’s humble work we’re given—a word that shares a root with humus, ground or earth. We walk away, eventually, from the bed when the first shock of absence has left us bewildered, perhaps, and changed. What we don’t and can’t know fills the aching mind. In that moment it becomes clear that we live at the edge of mystery, like living at the edge of a dark and uninhabitable forest. Creatures dwell there, but we won’t thrive too near that edge. At the bedside of the dying the call comes again, and loudly: choose life. There’s more of it to live.
~ Dr. Marilyn McEntyre ©