In the Slender Margin (14 page)

In the home of a Second World War veteran dying of brain cancer, I noticed an exquisite wall hanging beside his bed. Imprisoned for three years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, he had pulled single threads from his uniform and woven them into a tapestry. He embroidered green mountains
and footbridges over deep blue pools. He wove ducks sleeping under willow trees and great white cranes lifting off the ground with their black legs dangling helplessly. He did not weave the fields of grain from his home in Saskatchewan nor the crow or blackbird on the reed; he didn’t embroider train tracks cutting across fields of snow or smoke threading its way lazily out of a chimney. He took refuge in what was in front of him, beyond the barbed wire, in the madhouse of beauty.

We open our hands and let fall the blossoms.

It’s all guesswork. Joseph Campbell believed that the first burials implied a recognition of the cycle of life. From our agrarian roots, he imagined bodies planted in the earth like seed pods. A variation of the pods in the fictional town of Santa Mira, California, where the townspeople were replaced by perfect physical duplicates, simulacrums grown from giant pods in the 1956 film
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Reverence and horror are close companions in the kingdom of death and dying.

Of all the quandaries having to do with death, the most obvious continues to be what to do with the body. From the first intentional burials, at which goods were placed in the graves of our ancestors in preparation for the afterlife, to the fetuses kept in glass jars for scientific research, we have a responsibility to our dead. We bury, believes Robert Pogue Harrison, “not simply to achieve closure and effect a separation from the dead but also and above all to humanize the ground on which we build our worlds.” Over the centuries we have lost track of where people are buried: we have built villages and cities on top of long-forgotten burial grounds and bulldozed ancient grave sites to build townhouses and golf courses. The most serious armed standoff between First
Nations and “mainstream” Canadian society in modern times was over a golf course planned for a Native burial ground at Oka, Quebec. When paleontologists re-excavated the Combe Grenal cave in France, from 1953 to 1965, they unearthed sixty different layers of human occupation. Under a suburb in St. Louis, archaeologists found thirteen settlements on top of each other. We live, as Annie Dillard says, “on dead people’s heads.”

In the fifth century BC, the Greek philosopher Empedocles posited that all matter was composed of four elements. The building blocks of life were once believed to be fire, water, air and earth—the same elements into which we relinquish our dead. If ancient philosophers believed that all things were formed from these four elements, the modern philosopher does not agree. The periodic table tells us we are made up of thirty elements, but in our imaginations and our creation myths we are created from the elemental: a god’s tears, clay, Athena’s breath, fire and ice.

Fire
As humans, we have a primal relationship with fire. It warms us and feeds us and wards off wolves howling in the night. We sit in the dark, our faces lit by flames, and tell each other ghost stories. When I was a young girl, I spent hours striking two stones together over a bundle of dry grass trying to get a spark the way I’d seen cowboys do it in the movies. We fight fire with fire, literally lighting backfires to deprive large fires of fuel; birds rise out of its ashes; we have fire in our bellies;
there are fire-eaters and fire-walkers; and it is rumoured that some people have spontaneously burst into flame and burned like human candles until nothing was left. It is destruction and creation: the funeral pyre and the volcano.

Fire is the great transformer—taking material from this world and delivering it like a takeout order to the next. It is white, red, yellow, orange and blue, and when a human body is placed in it, it consumes the remains like an animal with an insatiable appetite.

In Varanasi, a city situated on the banks of the Ganges River in Uttar Pradesh, the Manikarnika Ghat performs four hundred cremations a day. When my son, Saul, was nineteen and travelling in India, he wrote to me saying that Varanasi was the undisputed king of all things associated with that country—sadhus, Buddhists, beggars, movies, slums and heat. He watched the body of his yoga instructor burn on the banks of the Ganges in Rishikesh. It takes three to four hours for a body, smeared with clarified butter, to burn, within which time it is hoped the skull will explode to release the soul from the flesh, allowing reincarnation or ascension to heaven. If it doesn’t, it’s smashed with a stick, ensuring the soul is released. Kailash Choudhari is a boatman and member of the Dome caste in Varanasi; every member of his family has lived and died on the burning ghats. “We were raised to work the fires,” says Choudhari. “Without our fire ceremony, dead bodies could not burn in the proper way.” Known as “the lords of this earth,” he and his family often see souls dancing in the flames. On the roads leading to Varanasi it is not unusual to see shrouded corpses strapped like kayaks or surfboards to the roofs of vehicles on their way to the river.

Why is it that trivia catches my attention? Da Vinci believed the heart was of such density that fire could scarcely destroy it. Not so. Of the bodies that are cremated, often a man’s chest bone and a woman’s hips will not burn completely. We go through our lives with places in our bodies capable of withstanding fire. Our hearts go up in flames every time. Choudhari once saw a burning body stand up to speak, but no words came out when it opened its mouth. The bones that don’t burn are deposited in the Ganges along with the fifty or so bodies a day that can’t be cremated—those of holy men, children, pregnant women, lepers and people who die of snakebite.

“A human limb burns a little like a tree branch,” says fire investigator John DeHaan. For a few minutes, in the stainless steel vault of a crematorium preheated to eleven hundred degrees Fahrenheit, we ignite like tinder-dry saplings.

Water
The human body is made up of over 60 percent water. We come from water, say the evolutionists, and some of us return to it. New research suggests that our gills are still sitting in our throats—disguised as our parathyroid glands. For Christians, baptism symbolizes death by water and rebirth; you “drown,” whether by being submerged or having a few drops of water sprinkled over your head, and surface as a new person. We live for nine months in the watery home of our mother’s womb and arrive in the world when the waters break. Without water, we are dead in five to seven days. It flows from one place to another; it originates from a source
that is often hidden from us and carves pathways through stone; it is blessing and curse. Ancient Norsemen, believing that water had the power to restore life, sent the bodies of their heroes out to sea in “death ships” in the hope they would return to them once again. As children, we fall asleep imagining lost underwater continents peopled with creatures who are part human, part fish.

In Canada, the disposal of human remains at sea is regulated under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, Part VI. The long and the short of it is that the burial of bodies at sea is not a thing to be encouraged. It is one thing to scatter ashes on the water, quite another to release a corpse into Davy Jones’s underwater locker. Legend has it that Davy Jones was either an incompetent sailor or a pub owner who kidnapped sailors. Some also think he was Satan or Jonah, the devil of the seas. One of the concerns about burial at sea is that the body will be hauled up by a fishing boat. In order to avoid this, anyone wishing to go this watery route must first pay a $2,500 application fee to the Receiver General of Canada and put a notice of intent in the local newspaper. To top it off, the casket must be weighted with iron and steel and have a concrete mix placed at the foot of the corpse. The coffin must then be drilled full of holes. Even Houdini would be stumped.

For Canada’s servicemen and -women at sea, it is less problematic. Because of a lack of coffins on board, the body is placed in a burial shroud, weighted with rocks, or sometimes cannonballs, and released into the depths.

Of all the rules, regulations and procedures I encountered, the thing that surprised me the most was the fact that cannonballs still exist.

Water is a pathway and a purifier. On days when I felt myself saturated with death, my mother-in-law, Rose, told me to go to a river or swiftly running creek and brush myself off with cedar. The few times I did this, I invariably felt lighter, as if the dead let go of me or were washed away in the clear, cold water.

It is said that ghosts travel from one place to another on underground streams.

I have stood on the spit near the mouth of the Capilano River and shown my children where I want my ashes scattered: at the place where sea water and fresh water mingle. Freighters regularly pass nearby under Lions Gate Bridge, and the lights of the city form a second city on the water’s surface. I will live in this second city, along with my mother and John, whose ashes were released there long ago.

In her poem “Water,” Gwendolyn MacEwen might as easily have been writing about death itself:

When you think of it, water is everything. Or rather

Water ventures into everything and becomes everything.

    It has

All tastes and moods imaginable; water is history

And the end of the world is water also.

When we give up our dead to the water—as ash or corpse—we give them up to the peripatetic movements of the currents. They become travellers, sojourners, voyageurs beneath the dark, impenetrable sea.

Air

Of all the elements, air seems the most mysterious to me. It has neither shape nor colour nor smell; it is everywhere and yet it is invisible to us. It is the domain of spirit: of winged creatures, real and imagined—vultures and angels—and it is the playground of the gods. Without it, there is no life. When we speak of air, we speak of the earth’s atmosphere—the clear gas, made up mainly of oxygen and nitrogen—in which we live and breathe. Our last act on earth is to breathe out the air in our lungs. Air is movement and imagination, revealing itself by what it touches, as Christina Rossetti wrote:

Who has seen the wind?

Neither I nor you:

But when the leaves hang trembling,

The wind is passing through.

And—it is the place of miraculous burials.

In the West, we avoid touching bodies; that work is left to morticians. The thought of cutting a corpse into bite-sized pieces and pulverizing the bones is, to the Western mind, the stuff of horror films. To the Tibetans, it is spiritual practice. Sky burials, or
jhator
as they are otherwise known, are considered an act of generosity on the part of the deceased, who essentially offer themselves up as part of the food chain.
Jhator
, meaning “giving alms to the birds,” generally takes place on a large flat rock on a high ridge at dawn. On the day of the funeral, the body, which has been wrapped in a white blanket and prayed over by monks for days, is carried by a family member to the door of the house of the
rogyapa
, or
“body breaker,” who then carries it on his back to the rock platform, where he dismembers it, scattering bits of flesh and organs to the vultures and carrion birds waiting nearby. He then smashes the bones and mixes them with flour and butter for the hawks and smaller birds to eat, until there is nothing left of the body. The corpse must be completely disposed of so that the soul is free to leave it.

As I write this, the nights are getting longer and the air cooler. I am in a cabin in the woods and the night scavengers are hard at work.
Scavenger
, from the Middle English
scawageour
, originally referred to “a person hired to remove refuse from the streets.” The street cleaners of today are vultures, blowflies, yellow jackets, burying beetles, owls, raccoons and crows. Although the concept of air burial is foreign to the West, if we stop and think about it, we are living in the midst of such burials all the time. A couple of days ago a bird hit the sliding glass window at my house; it was clear, from the angle of its neck, that it had died instantly. I meant to bury it but forgot until the next morning, when I went looking for the body. It was gone. Aside from the mark on the window, there was no proof that there had even been a bird. We carry on, oblivious to the bones cracking and little souls rising all around us, every moment of the day and night.

On the highest mountain, in the highest graveyard in the world, the bodies of mountain climbers lie frozen on the slopes. There are over two hundred bodies on Mount Everest, making it one of the world’s few open graveyards. The living walk amongst the strange sculptures of the unreachable dead. For years, the body of Hannelore Schmatz could be seen sitting upright, leaning against her pack, with her eyes
open and hair blowing in the wind. The winds are constant and unpredictable. At a border crossing high in the Andes between Chile and Argentina, I marvelled at the wind-sculpted seashell patterns that fanned out from the base of the mountains like the trains of wedding gowns. A Sherpa who tried to recover Hannelore’s body in 1984 fell to his death, along with another rescuer, and finally it was the high, sculpting winds that blew her remains over the edge and down the Kangshung Face.

Prior to contact with the Europeans, a number of First Nations on the West Coast placed their dead in open caskets in treetops. In Haida Gwaii, the bodies of high-ranking chiefs were placed inside mortuary poles with the belief that if the physical body was lifted up, the spirit would be set free. Years ago, I asked my ex-husband what he wanted done with his body in the event of his death. “Put me in a tree,” he said.

Thanks a lot, I thought. That oughta be easy.

Earth

The phrase
six feet under
originated in England in 1665, when the death rate from the bubonic plague reached seven thousand per week. The mayor of London issued a decree that all bodies must be buried six feet underground in order to help stop the spread of infection. Of course, it was later discovered that the plague was spread by fleas from rats, and the only thing that stopped the disease was the Great Fire of London in 1666, which effectively wiped out all the rats.