In the Slender Margin (2 page)

These be

Three silent things:

The falling snow … the hour

Before the dawn … the mouth of one

Just dead.

—ADELAIDE CRAPSEY,
“Triad”

We Played at Death As If It Were a Game

When I was six, I roller skated home so fast sparks flew from the backs of my skates. In my hand was the still-warm, limp body of a yellow budgie that I had retrieved from the floor of its cage at my best friend Kathy’s house. The bird felt weightless and soft as talcum powder. I didn’t know what death meant, but I knew it was big.

The street I grew up on in North Vancouver was a small world bordered by the Gilmores on one end of the block and the Rankins on the other. On summer nights it was Susan, Kathy, Glenda and I against Alan, Gary, Kenny and Ryan; we stocked our arsenals with hard red mountain ash berries and fired at each other with homemade slingshots. We pranced around with silver wands and strapped on fairy wings made of tin foil and cardboard and dressed up as cowboys and Indians and shot each other dead with silver pistols carried in holsters slung low over our hips. And then we went home for dinner. In our world, the dead didn’t stay dead for very long.

One minute the budgie was singing, the next it was lying in the sawdust. Neither my friend nor I saw it fall. It’s a kind of magic trick that birds do.

In the early 1950s, Mao Zedong declared war on sparrows. The Chinese were exhorted to bang drums, pots, pans
and gongs in order to keep the birds flying until they fell, exhausted, to the earth. Shanghai alone accounted for over one million dead sparrows. The death of over five thousand birds on New Year’s Eve 2010 in Beebe, Arkansas, was likely caused by fireworks that sent thousands of panicked red-winged blackbirds into such a tizzy that they crashed into homes, cars and each other before plummeting to their deaths. Over the years I have seen many dead birds—crows on the lawn, gulls at the side of the road, headless robins dragged into the house by the cat—but I have never seen a bird die. Never seen one fall out of the sky.

Along with the yellow budgie, I buried birds that flew into our windowpanes and goldfish that floated belly up in their glass bowls, in my backyard. I dug holes with my mother’s silver spoons and made little crosses out of Popsicle sticks. I also carried a bouquet of wildflowers and practised walking slowly like a bride. Unlike the Italian women, who dressed in black from head to toe and walked slowly along the sidewalk hunched over like crows in front of our house, I had no visible way to show my grief. My first funerals for animals were shaped not by belief in a send-off to the afterlife but out of love of ceremony: the little graves, the procession and the tea party on the lawn afterwards. My earliest funerals were like weddings.

My friends and I played at death as if it were a game like frozen tag or Mother-May-I. Six months after my brother died, Kathy’s father and uncle were swept away in the Nechako River where they had been fishing. Every day I waited to hear if their bodies had surfaced. I imagined myself washed away and devised ways to save myself from
the churning waters of my own imagination. I practised holding my breath underwater and visualized grabbing an overhanging branch and hauling myself out of the rapids. I lay perfectly still on my bed with my hands crossed on my chest. Summer passed without any news; I started grade five and stopped playing dead. In the past, when he was home, Kathy’s dad would drop on all fours and pretend to be a big black bear. He lumbered through the halls with us squealing ahead of him. I can’t remember what he looked like as a man, but I clearly remember him as a bear. I never saw Kathy cry; she waited without ever talking about what she was waiting for. Once inseparable, by fall we started to drift apart.

My brother eloped when he was twenty-five and moved to Toronto with his bride, Dee. Before they left, he took me to meet her parents at their cranberry bog in Richmond. I don’t recall much about the day other than the floating fields of red and my brother wading waist-deep through them.

A couple of months after Ian died, Dee arranged for me to come to Toronto. Every morning I walked to the red postbox at the end of Isabella Street to mail a letter home to my mother. Afternoons we visited their friends, Beth and Wally. Wally plunked me on the counter and made special fruit drinks in a martini shaker and served them to me with a maraschino cherry and a paper umbrella on top. Dee had started packing up the apartment before I arrived; cardboard boxes were stacked up against the bare walls and we both slept on a mattress on the floor. She took me to the Woodbine Racetrack and stood with me at the betting window, where I placed two dollars on a black stallion to show and we watched my horse come last, through little opera glasses. I have no
idea why she sent for me. I’ve wondered if she saw a little of Ian in his kid sister. I’ve wondered if she felt she could hold on to him a little longer if I was close by. Grief is inarticulate. We didn’t talk about him the whole week I was there.

“Why isn’t the earth littered with the bodies of birds?” my daughter asked me when she was eight. Why indeed. When I started working at hospice, I had never seen a dead body; I had never seen anyone die. Like the birds I had never seen fall out of the sky, the dying were invisible.

Friendliness to Ghosts

In Greek mythology, Hades is the Lord of Death, Thanatos is Death itself—son of Nyx, goddess of night, and Erebos, god of darkness—daimon of non-violent death who lives with his twin brother, Hypnos, the god of sleep, in a cave surrounded by opium poppies. The hour is always twilight, the only noise the slow trickling of the river Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. Thanatos is sometimes portrayed as a winged bearded man, other times as a beautiful winged boy. His touch is gentle, likened to that of his brother who lies on his soft couch, surrounded by his many sons, who are the bringers of dreams.

Sometimes we can’t tell the twins apart: comforting ourselves by saying the dead look as though they are sleeping.
Praying, as we fall asleep, that we don’t die before we wake. “Death was a friend,” wrote Steinbeck, “and sleep was death’s brother.”

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Grim Reaper is a dark, hooded, skeletal figure who carries a large scythe that he uses like a well-honed razor blade to collect souls. In Europe during the Middle Ages, children were dressed as adults as soon as possible to trick death into looking elsewhere for prey. The Angel of Death, according to Jewish lore, has twelve wings and is said to be “full of eyes.” There is no hiding from him. From the beginning of recorded history, we have painted, danced, sung and written about death. We have dressed as devils, skeletons, reapers and ghosts on the night of All Hallows Eve and eased our fears by holding out our pillowcases for strangers to fill with sweets in the night.

In the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, home to the city’s most vulnerable citizens, Thanatos has been working the streets since 2008. He dresses as a superhero, his dark costume a mix of the Green Hornet, The Shadow, Doc Savage and Batman. Along with a black and green mask, he wears a long trench coat, a skull-and-crossbones tie and a wide-rimmed black hat. A former military man, Thanatos moved to Canada from the States in 1973, naming his alter ego after the Greek god of death. In a cemetery in Vancouver, Thanatos talked to a reporter from the
Globe and Mail
about how he tries to help the homeless. Along with the water, food and blankets he hands out, he also gives white strips of paper with the word
friend
written on them. “It’s better to have a friend in a costume,” he says, “than to have no friend at all.” From a cave on the river Lethe to Hastings and Main. From
the river of forgetfulness to the forgotten. Try as I might, I could not make this up.

The word
hospice
was first used in the fourth century by monks who welcomed and provided sanctuary for pilgrims. During the Crusades, these guesthouses took in weary travellers and served as places of refuge for orphans, lepers and the destitute. It wasn’t until the mid-1800s in France, when Jeanne Garnier founded the Dames du Calvaire hospice in Lyon, that the name became exclusively associated with the care of the dying, shortly after which Our Lady’s Hospice was opened by the Sisters of Charity in Dublin.

Derived from the Latin
hospitium
, meaning both “host” and “guest,” hospice is an idea as well as a place. In Homeric times all strangers were regarded as guests; the obligation to be hospitable to strangers was imposed on civilized man by Zeus himself—one of whose many titles was Xenios, “protector of strangers.” In the
Odyssey
, Alcinous, king of the Phaeacians, offers hospitality to Odysseus without knowing who he is: “Tell him, then, to rise and take a seat on a stool inlaid with silver and let the housekeeper give him some supper, of whatever there might be in the house.”

When I look up the root for
hospitality
, I misread “friendliness to guests” as “friendliness to ghosts” and think this is not entirely inaccurate. It has been said, by those who can see, that the dead walk the corridors of hospice: mothers holding hands with daughters, brothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, husbands waiting for wives, and others nobody knows, who are just there waiting.

One year before AZT became available and the death rate from AIDS dropped dramatically, a young man dying of AIDS pointed to a couch in his bedroom and warned me not to sit on it.

“Be careful,” he said, “not to sit on the old woman.”

“What is she doing here?” I asked.

“Knitting,” he replied. Too weak to raise his head, he motioned me over with his hand.

“Do you think that means death is near?” he asked.

I glanced at the empty couch. “She brought her knitting,” I said. “I think you have a bit more time.”

When I met his father, eight months after the death, he told me the only time he felt at peace was when he was flying in a plane. At cruising altitude he was 37,500 feet closer to heaven and his boy than when he was on earth.

The modern hospice as we know it did not come into being until 1967, when St. Christopher’s Hospice was opened in south London by Cicely Saunders, a young physician previously trained as a nurse and social worker. The phrase
dying with dignity
became a rallying cry for those working with the dying. The term
palliative
, from the Latin
palliatus
, meaning “to cover with a cloak,” was first introduced in 1975 by oncologist Dr. Balfour Mount when he opened a ward for the dying in Montreal. Contemporary medical care of the dying has its roots in the impulse to take the shirts off our backs and cover the sick or injured lying by the side of the road.

Palliative care contains both comfort and concealment. It does what it can to alleviate symptoms and provide a quality of life; at the same time, dying is separated and cloaked in
secrecy. Most people, I found, didn’t know anything about hospice until they needed it. There is a wonderful audacity to the idea of palliative care—a utilitarianism inherent in a practical response to suffering. Roll up your sleeves and get on with it: one by one, help the dying.
About suffering they were never wrong
, wrote Auden,

If my brother’s death led me to my life in the death business, pragmatism got me hired. It was 1985 and I was a new social worker with a baby, a six-year-old and a husband who made his living carving large totem poles in our driveway out of yellow cedar logs he salvaged from the beach. In the year that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first blood test for AIDS and British scientists discovered a hole in the earth’s ozone layer, we lived on a dead-end street in Victoria with a massive moss-covered rock at the end of the block that the neighbourhood kids called “the mountain.” The largest hospice on the island was a ten-minute walk away, and we were broke. It had never occurred to me to work with the dying; when I walked the few blocks to hand in my application, I wasn’t thinking how cathartic or traumatic it might be to work with death, I was thinking, This is great, I can come home for lunch!

It is a complicated thing to be employed to help people
die. On the one hand, each situation, each person, is unique and each death a profound experience; on the other, it is a job, a way of paying the mortgage and supporting a family. You set your alarm to wake up and grab a coffee on the way to work. Traffic is bad and you know the last parking spot is going to be gone. You vow again to leave earlier, but that never happens. Tolstoy wrote, in
War and Peace
, that if a relative was sick, the custom was to seek professional care; but when a close loved one was dying, the custom was to send the professionals away and care for the dying within the family. There was always a grandmother, an aunt or a cousin dying in a room upstairs. Like living in a cave with a sleeping dragon, we once knew how to coexist with what we feared most, unlike today, when we fear not only the fiery breath of death but any mention of it. People who work with the dying are doing work that was traditionally done by families. These days, the dying are most often cared for by strangers—intimate strangers.

The Bay Pavilion, where I first began working, was a one-storey horseshoe-shaped building constructed around a garden. On sunny days some patients sat outside on the deck, and occasionally someone would ask to sleep outside. There were roses, geraniums, nasturtiums, delphiniums and daisies in the rock beds beneath the windows. In the spring, cherry trees transformed the place into a Japanese courtyard; in the fall, the maples turned fire-engine red. These days they call hospice gardens “healing gardens.” Back in 1985, the garden made no such claims; a gardener’s garden, its
raison d’être
was to revel in its own beauty. For some patients, it was the garden of their childhood; for others, it was the garden they’d always wished they had.