In the Slender Margin (13 page)

For all its grave stillness there is nothing more dynamic than a corpse. It is the event of passage taking place before our very eyes.

—ROBERT POGUE HARRISON,
The Dominion of the Dead

The Body Deserted

In my mother’s last year, her world was measured out in small rooms. Confined to her house because of weakness, she went from the living room, where she could look out on the neighbourhood, to the kitchen, where she could make herself tea, to finally being unable to leave her bedroom. After a serious fall, in which the skin between her wrist and elbow was peeled off, leaving her muscles and tendons exposed like one of the human bodies in Gunther von Hagens’s travelling Body Worlds show, home support workers came in daily to help. One woman, from the Philippines, arrived in a wedding dress with frills scalloped down the back. Her wedding plans had fallen apart months ago, but she was not about to waste a good dress and was on her way to a dance after settling Mom in for the night. She served tea in her floor-length lace gown and when Colleen, the woman with Down syndrome who had lived with my mother for thirty years, saw this vision, she went upstairs and put on a crown and a pair of gossamer strap-on wings and came downstairs to join the tea party looking like Titania, Queen of the Faeries, only with almond-shaped eyes and a slightly protruding tongue. In the photo my mother took of them, they look weightless, like Chagall angels.

The women who bathed her, made her meals and helped my mother onto a commode in her last weeks were all immigrants. Women whose past lives I had no idea about, who could have been scientists or doctors or engineers in the countries they came from. Without exception, they were kind women. She died in the arms of a home support worker from Iran. She took a sip of tea and handed her cup to Mahvash, who reached out for her as she began falling backwards on her bed. I didn’t see it coming. All my years of working with the dying amounted to a hill of beans when it came to my mother’s death.

I started out to write that my mother died of old age, but this is not quite right. She died because she was tired. She no longer wanted to live. I was in the business of helping people die, but when it came to my mother I just didn’t see it. Two weeks before her death, she told me a woman in a long white dress had come to her in the night. The woman, radiant and strangely familiar, held out her hand in a kind of invitation. My mother wondered if it was her mother coming for her.

It was my job to look death squarely in the face; it was my job not to flinch. She looked me directly in the eye and asked, “Do you think this means I will die soon?” The grief counsellor in me checked right out. “Buck up, buttercup,” I said. “You’ll be better in no time.”

I didn’t see the woman in the long white dress. I didn’t see that my mother had already reached out her own hand—that she was floating, like one of Chagall’s brides, above the earth. “Will God or someone else,” wrote the artist, “give me strength to breathe the breath of prayer and mourning into my paintings?”

The call came from my sister, on a Saturday morning, when I was at work. One minute I was a worker, the next a mourner surrounded by the dying. I told the nurse I was working with that my mother had died. She reached out to hold me, but it was an awkward embrace; this death was too close to home for both of us. We switch sides in the blink of an eye. Did I think, in some magical way, that if I hid in plain sight of death it would not find me? Of course I did.

My sister’s voice was uncommonly gentle. That should have been a clue. How the news of a death is delivered can have a lasting impression. In B.C., a program called the Death Notification Program was launched in September 2012 to help paramedics understand the right and wrong ways to deliver the traumatic news of someone’s death. The instructor tells the first responders to use direct language, to use words such as
dead
or
died
, as opposed to
passed away
or
gone.
He tells them they will become part of the family’s history: “Get it right, they’ll never forget you. Get it wrong, they’ll never forgive you.”

After my mother died, I wanted to see her at home, in the room where I’d spoon-fed her wine a few weeks earlier, when she stopped eating solids. The same room she’d converted into a beauty salon and where, in the late fifties, I served sherry to her “victims,” as she called them, at ten o’clock on Saturday mornings. I could picture her in her house. If she wasn’t there, where in the world could she be?
Corpus
, from the late fourteenth century, refers to “the body of a person” as well as to “a collection of facts or things.” In linguistics, it refers to “a body of utterances as words or sentences.” My mother was never at a loss for words; she was a consummate
storyteller. Like Albert Finney in Tim Burton’s film
Big Fish
, the line between fact and myth was never really clear with her. I wanted, in place of silence, a body of utterances. I wanted to hear her side of the story.

When I saw her in the hospital morgue, she was lying on a steel gurney in a half-zipped black body bag in the middle of an empty room. Her face was uncovered and her hands, with their magenta nails, were resting on her chest. Although I have no recollection of it, I’m told I stroked her head and kept repeating, “Oh Mom, what have you gone and done now?” The morgue smelled like an over-chlorinated pool; the viewing room was brightly lit, and along with Patrick, who had come with me, a nurse and a security guard sat in chairs by the door in accordance with policy at Lions Gate Hospital, where the dead cannot be viewed without supervision. I didn’t want strangers in the room; it irritated me. Better eight thousand clay soldiers guarding the dead than two uncomfortable hospital employees.

The dead are cold the way something taken out of the fridge is cold—not a surface chill, but a cold that permeates to the core, a cold that feels like stone. There is no yield, no give. It felt as if I was outside myself in the morgue, watching from a distance as I touched my mother’s brow. This is my mother, I thought, and at the same time, This is not.

Along with the presence of death, we are shaken by the absence of life: the body deserted. The temporary shelter abandoned. With death, we close up the house, so to speak, turning down the thermostat as our mothers told us to, checking that the lights are off and the iron unplugged. We lock the door when we leave. At the moment of death
the muscles relax completely and then stiffen, starting with the eyelids, jaw and neck. Rigor mortis, literally “death stiffness,” sets in about three hours after death and gradually dissipates three days later—as if the body steels itself, and then softens, for whatever might be next.

In the West, a body is required, by law, to be transported in a dark, leak-proof plastic bag not unlike one you might get from an upscale dry cleaner when you pick up your suit or evening gown. A few years ago, Native chiefs in northern Manitoba were not impressed during an outbreak of H1N1 influenza when, along with medical supplies, the government shipped body bags to northern reserves. The bags were returned by First Nations leaders to the Health Canada office, where they were dumped on the floor outside the building’s lobby. “To prepare for death,” says Wasagamack chief Jerry Knott, “is to invite death.” I’m pretty sure the chief would not be happy with the current trend of buying designer coffins and using them as coffee tables until the time comes.

Inside the bag, a cardboard toe tag is fastened, with a piece of string, to the body to ensure proper identification. I don’t know how or why it became the norm to zip the bag completely up; perhaps it was to protect against disease, perhaps it was to spare the living having to gaze too long upon the corpse. Whatever the reason, I asked the undertaker, who looked like an overdressed delivery boy in an ill-fitting suit, to leave my mother’s face uncovered when he zipped up the body bag. He agreed, although reluctantly, as this was against protocol.

When we took her the short distance outside, to the van waiting to take her to the funeral home, it was the first time
she had been outside in a year. Rain fell on her cold face. It filled the creeks and swirled in small whirlpools down storm drains. It fell on her the way it fell on Holly Golightly and Cat in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, and it fell on her the way it had fallen on the attic roof when I was a girl and everywhere water was running, and my mother and I were dry in adjoining beds and full of sleep.

Many Spaniards, mused García Lorca, live indoors until the day they die and are taken out into the sunlight. What instinct compels us to carry the dead out into the sun, to sit with them, to sing to them, to let the rain fall on their uncovered faces?
Move him into the sun—gently its touch awoke him once
, wrote Wilfred Owen.
Think how it wakes the seeds—woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Do we hope, against all reason, that the sun will warm them one last time? That the rain will wake them?

My mother’s last journal entry, dated March 3, 2004, reads
A sunny day, crocus yellow and purple down the side of the garden.
In the tradition of the Japanese poets, it is a perfect death haiku. Her last look around.

Jewish belief holds that the soul of one recently dead has neither left this world nor entered the world to come. In that room with its sterile metal drawers filled with the recent dead, it felt as if my mother’s corpse still belonged to her; as if she was giving me time to say goodbye.

Once, at work, when the funeral home was delayed, I sat with a woman’s body for the few hours it took for them to come for her. Her room had a monastic feel to it. There was a
jar of wildflowers on the windowsill and a book on her side table; other than that, she had given away her possessions. She lay on a narrow bed, beneath a light blanket, with her face uncovered. At one point it occurred to me that although there were two of us in the room, I was the only one breathing. I felt each breath in a way I never had before; aware of how the air I was breathing in was cool and how, when it left my body, it was warm.
Inspire
, from the Latin
in
“in” and
spirare
“to breathe,” has the same etymology as
inspiration
—“immediate influence of God or a god.” Every breath we take in is sacred.
Exhale
, from the Latin
exhalare
, means “to breathe out, evaporate.” Within days of our final exhalation, we vanish. Although how completely is questionable, at least to physicist Enrico Fermi, who calculated that with a single breath we breathe in a single molecule from Caesar’s last exhalation.

The Danish poet Ulrikka Gernes, a good friend, told Patrick that when she gave her father, Poul, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation shortly before he died, she realized, just before she stopped, that the only air in her father’s lungs was her own. It was her breath, making small bubbling sounds, that he breathed out with his last breath.

When his father was dying, Patrick matched him breath for breath. There was a moment when it struck him that his father wasn’t going to take a breath in, and he thought, I’m going to have to. His poem “standing the night through,” written shortly after his father’s death, starts with the lines

like jesus’ death

pa’s death split everything into before and after

and nothing was healed.

The silence in the patient’s room was that of
before
and
after.
Death’s demarcation line. I watched the light move slowly across the room, inching its way up her body as if anointing her. When we sit for one, do we sit for the others in our lives for whom this was not possible—the ones my mother lost in the war? my brother? my mother? the ones with nobody to bury them? Do we tell the nurse to leave us alone when she comes to take the body away, as Patrick did after his father died, so that he could talk to him and wash the sleep from his eyes with a cool face cloth? Is there an interval, a pause, an amount of time between two states, when they might still hear us? Does the spirit linger for itself? Not for us, although maybe that too. What do we sit with when we sit with the dead? We sit, do we not, gobsmacked at the mystery of it all.

On Dead People’s Heads

In 1951, archaeologist Dr. Ralph Solecki set up camp in the rock-strewn hills outside the Shanidar Cave in northern Iraq’s Zagros Mountains, 2,500 feet above sea level. The Kurdish goatherds and their families who live in the cave from November to April have built individual brush huts inside it, each with a small fireplace and corrals for goats, chickens, cows and horses. From the mouth one can see the Great Zab River, a tributary of the Tigris, glistening off in the
distance. In four field seasons, lasting until 1960, Solecki and his team from Columbia University dug, swept and chipped their way through limestone layers to the Neanderthal skeletons below. Of the nine they unearthed, one, Shanidar IV, was found to be lying on the remnants of woody branches and brightly coloured wildflowers.

Were these first burials evidence of love, or were they as simple a thing as an idea of beauty? Patrick and I disagree about love. He believes there was a time in human history when we were animal with a glimmering and growing consciousness; a time when survival trumped everything. He doesn’t deny the existence of an early bond between people; he just doesn’t think it was love as we know it. I can’t imagine a time before love.

Whatever our differences, we both agree that something shifted in human consciousness around the time Nandy, as the Neanderthal was affectionately known, was laid to rest on a bed of yellow yarrow, common groundsel, woody horsetail, grape hyacinth, hollyhocks and St. Barnaby’s thistle.

A hand scattering petals eighty thousand years ago is a hand scattering petals over the little bird graves in my mother’s backyard fifty years ago. An impulse. An offering. Not to the gods necessarily, not for good luck or safe travel or prosperity. We fly, as Emerson wrote in his journal, “we fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.”