In the Slender Margin (11 page)

Angels were often left by patients’ families in a small alcove
in the hospice unit: some with their heads bowed in prayer, some looking skyward; crystal angels from Birks and plastic angels from Walmart; winged and haloed last hopes, with the tacky, overly religious and just plain ugly ones being culled from time to time. For those who wanted inspiration, there was a shell with angel cards beside a white porcelain angel with a worried look on her face.

Far from the fiery six-winged beings crying “Holy, holy, holy!” with their flaming swords held high, angels today have come to represent sentimental presences that shine with New Age light and can be purchased everywhere from hospital gift shops to the china section in thrift stores where the glass ashtrays used to be. People often called us angels when we arrived on their doorsteps, but it was our strangeness with death as much as our familiarity with it that allowed us to help in whatever ways we could. Angels we were not.

“Estrangement is at the root of suffering,” writes Rabbi Dayle Friedman in
Jewish Pastoral Care.
Caregivers must find the stranger in themselves to understand what it might be like for the dying who are becoming estranged from all that is known.

According to Miriam, who calls upon her Jewish faith in the work she does, there is a notion that Jews should be kind to strangers because they too were strangers in a strange land. “I was excited by the connection to strangers,” she told me, “because it disrupted the favoured metaphors of angels and ‘special people’ doing ‘special work.’ “ The truth of it, she says, is that this work is best done by people who have hovered on the outside edges of comfort, by choice or circumstance or temperament. People, a little
rough around the edges, who have seen a few things. In a society that encourages us to shy away from death, we had to learn how to walk towards it. To open the door and make ourselves at home.

Miriam recently wrote to me,

The whole thing, from the first sung word to her last breath, might have lasted two minutes. No more.

The wonder is not that Miriam knew what to do and did it well; rather, the wonder is in the randomness of it all. Not the “sacredness” of the story, which so easily dips into the precious. The wonder is that she walked into that room at that time without any notion of what might be helpful, and was used in the service of the good. That’s the thing. To be used in the service of the good.

My favourite angels are the pen-and-ink ones sketched by the painter and poet Joe Rosenblatt: angels with fur, cat angels, sunny angels being carried off by a flock of bright blue birds.
The preternatural critters—downy angels and demons—that materialized in the bat cave of his imagination.

“Now a demon or daemon can be bipolar, benevolent or downright malevolent, depending on cultural environment,” says Joe. “Angels generally are not seen in a bad light. I certainly try to give demons parity in my drawings, although my bias favours the angels. The demons are generally benign in my visual window, and yet my cat angel or angels in fur have fearsome expressions, as though they have just lunched on the proverbial mine songbird.”

Animals

What, I wonder, do animals know about death? The red horses of Irish mythology are death horses; in the Book of Revelation, Death himself arrives on a pale horse. In Egyptian funerary relics, the spine of a snake was said to contain the fluid of death; on the other hand, the spine of a bull, considered the source of semen, was the fluid of life. Birds, by the very fact that they are not earthbound, are often seen as portentous. Swallows, in ancient mythology, bore the displeasure of the gods; in England, a swallow trapped in the house was believed to be a sign of death; purple martins, on the other hand, were viewed as serving God and were known as his “bow and arrow.” The idea of hundreds of them plucked
from God’s quiver and fired to earth—with their slightly forked tails and tucked wings—goes a long way in tempering the idea of a wrathful celestial archer.

The Egyptians believed the souls of the dead took the form of bees and ascended alive into heaven; with an unerring sense of the soul, lost far from Amenta’s fields, they made a beeline for home. I met a woman once who made a beeline after weeks in a coma seemingly unable to die. The woman’s hospital bed was in her living room looking out on the ponds and pathways she had spent years creating. The nurse and I arrived, as we had every morning, to draw up meds and visit with her daughter. On this particular day, a bee buzzed incessantly against the inside of the sliding glass door directly in front of the patient’s bed. Without thinking, I walked over and slid the door open. In the time it took the bee to crawl over the metal rim and fly out towards the garden, the woman took two breaths and was gone.

It’s easy, in the presence of death, to see the extraordinary in the ordinary; harder to know what is imagined, or hoped for, and what is real. On the morning of my mother’s funeral, hundreds of honey bees filled the chapel—released overnight from the numerous flowers that had been delivered. At her service, their steady hum rose and fell like the undisciplined chorus of an audience before a concert; the room vibrated with anticipation and out of the corner of our eyes the bees, moving in and out of the long shafts of light, tricked us into thinking the air was flecked with moving gold. That same morning, my son, who had returned from Ghana for his Nani’s funeral, awoke to find an
Apis mellifera scutellata,
otherwise known as an African killer bee, on his pillow. For three days we saw bees everywhere.

To find a honey tree, says Annie Dillard, catch a bee when its legs are heavy with pollen and it is ready for home. Release it and follow it for as long as you can see it; wait until another bee comes, catch it, release and follow it. Keep doing this and sure enough it will lead you home. Sometimes all we can do is catch the impulses that feel right to us and follow them until we lose them. Who knows, if there is a spirit, how it leaves? We don’t know, but every window on the hospice unit is open just a crack—just in case. Bee to bee leading us home.

In early traditions, bees were believed to have originated in paradise and were known as “little servants of the gods.” At my mother’s funeral, the little servants flew above our heads like scullery maids in the great house.

One of the hallmarks of grief is our need to make sense of loss. It is not uncommon to look for a sign, a message more or less signalling, “I’m gone but I’m still here.” Animal sightings are sometimes
interpreted
as visitations. A few days after my friend’s mother died, a hummingbird hovered outside her kitchen window while she was washing dishes. A sign is a combination of things—a confluence of our hopes, memories, beliefs—a moment in which the veil seems to drop and we are granted a glimpse of another reality.

For my friend, the fact that it was winter and hummingbirds were her mother’s favourite birds was enough for her to believe that her mother had come to say goodbye. The word
interpretation
lends a certain kind of bias to the idea of
signs. I don’t know if her mother did pay her a visit, but I also don’t know that she didn’t. Ten years after his father died, Patrick awoke to see a disc of fire spinning in his room like a buzz saw blade. At first he thought it was God, but quickly understood it was his father saying goodbye. Now, he says, perhaps there is no difference between the two.

For the hunter, a set of prints in the snow reveal the deer that is nowhere in sight. We seek the invisible through the visible. We discern God, as the sixteenth-century Anabaptist leader Pilgram Marpeck wrote, through the beauty of his works.

“If you had told me twenty years ago that the children in our Texas towns would have green hair and bones in their noses,” says the sheriff of El Paso to Tommy Lee Jones in the film
No Country for Old Men
, “I just flat out wouldn’t have believed it.”

“Signs and wonders,” sighs Jones. “Signs and wonders.”

What do animals know? Do they sense our sadness or do they have their own? My father left when I was five. Soon after, our dachshund, Lucy, died. My mother told me she had died of a broken heart. We see the heart in our mind’s eye. I used to imagine Lucy’s made of red construction paper torn down the middle. Other times, I saw it explode in her chest in a bloody pulp.

There are dogs that smell drugs, cancer, bombs, diabetes, blood, gasoline and bedbugs. Specially trained cadaver dogs sniff out human remains; guide dogs act as our eyes and ears. Scientists are working on an early warning detection system
using dogs that sniff out various illnesses in the hope of staving off death by refining early diagnoses and treatment. A boy in Timmins, Ontario, has a diabetes dog that can dial 911. We fight death with everything in our arsenal; when machines fail us, we call out the pack. We are relentless, but perhaps not quite as relentless as our furred friends who would do anything for us—including risk their own lives—for a treat and the chance to chase after the small orange ball we keep tucked away in our back pockets.

In Hindu mythology, dogs are believed to be messengers of Yama, the god of death, and are said to whine and whimper when they sense death approaching. I’ve never seen a dog act this way. In the houses I attended, most dogs just seemed sad. In one home, I confused the patient’s name with his dog’s name and sternly ordered the patient “down” when the dog jumped on me. In another, a border collie herded me away from the door every time I tried to leave. Very few barked; mostly, they were curled up on their owners’ beds, where they stayed, often refusing to eat, until the person died.

There is a difference between seeing and wanting to see something; between a genuine encounter and wishful thinking. After my mother’s death, I went looking for a sign. I drove three hundred miles to the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island with my two daughters. I didn’t know where we were going, I just wanted to drive until the road ended and we could go no farther. We stopped for candy at the Sayward general store and bought wool and needles in Port McNeill, where we stayed overnight in a cheap motel and I tried to teach my daughters to knit just as my mother had taught me in 1969. Hopeless, they abandoned their knitting efforts after
half an hour, and we ended up lying on the bed watching the one working channel on the TV. We fell asleep fully clothed and in the morning we headed to Cape Scott and hiked the trail to San Josef Bay through old-growth forest and emerged onto a white sand beach on which stunted cedars, like bonsai, grew on top of hollowed-out stacks of volcanic rock. It was breathtakingly beautiful, but it wasn’t beauty I was seeking. I wanted a sign.

After she died, I thought to myself that if only it could get silent enough, I might be able to hear her. If people stopped talking; if the wind died down; if the noise of traffic, the hum of wires, the sound of birds flying, cellphones, radios, the washer on spin cycle, someone clearing their throat—if only the sound of my own thoughts would die down, then maybe I would hear her and know where she had disappeared to.

We fanned out on the beach, connected but separate like a splayed hand. I scanned the sky for eagles and walked along the creek looking for otters—her favourite animal. Bears and cougars had been sighted in recent days, but I saw nothing, not even tracks. Two crows nattered at each other, but she hated crows and would have been offended if I took their appearance as a sign. She was gone. There was nowhere on earth I would find her. There were no messages, no sightings, no possible interpretations of a spiritual existence. No spinning discs; only the relentless pounding of the surf and a cold March wind kicking up a few sand spouts along the empty beach. It was the magnitude of the nothing that took my breath away.

Many First Nations people on the coast believe the owl represents death. My ex-husband, a hereditary chief, believed the owl travelled between the land of the living and the land of the dead. One day, when he was driving down a logging road on his way back from hunting, a barred owl landed in front of his truck. His uncle, in the passenger seat, started shaking, and upon arriving home he was told that a close relative had died. If an owl lands in front of my truck and I don’t share the cultural belief, what then? After my marriage ended, it took me a long time to see the owl as simply a bird and not some messenger of death.

Years ago, I was given two tabby cats by a friend on the local reserve. The cats, a brother and sister, fit perfectly in the palms of my hands. The female, Tigger, was short-haired and petite, fine-boned and delicate like Audrey Hepburn. Her brother, Askem, long-haired and scrappy, was more like Keith Richards. In sleep, curled up together, you couldn’t tell one from the other. When Askem died after being hit by a car in front of the house, we sprinkled dried flowers over his body and buried him in a shoebox in the back garden. Whenever Tigger went outside, she made her way directly to the grave and curled up on it until we brought her in at night. It’s easy to anthropomorphize animals—to imagine Tigger grieving for her brother. I don’t know why she slept on his grave every day for a year and then abruptly changed to a sunny spot in the woodpile. Maybe she missed him, or smelled him, or maybe it was simply the warmest spot in the garden. Maybe her heart was broken. I just don’t know.