In the Slender Margin (10 page)

It is an esemplastic language that sees this world at the same time as it sees another. Much like the White Rabbit in
Alice in Wonderland
, the dying too are often preoccupied with time.
I’m late, I’m late for a very important date; no time to say hello, goodbye, I’m late, I’m late, I’m late.
Sometimes they wait for someone to arrive from out of town; sometimes they die when people have stepped out of the room for five minutes to have a smoke. One day in ICU a boy who had been hanging on for weeks, after an accident, died within minutes of his mother telling him it was okay to go. The wonder is not that the dying might wait—that a
boy might need his mother’s permission—but that the living might sometimes be able to open the door for them.

One man told me he was going hiking in the mountains but was a bit anxious because he didn’t have a map. Another man, on his deathbed, told his wife a yellow cab had pulled up in front of their house.

“The fool’s got the wrong address,” he said, “but since he’s here, I may as well go.”

His wife looked out the window to the empty street and said, “Yes, love, you might as well.”

The metaphors of departure and everlasting life do not apply as readily to sudden death. There is an uncertainty to the language, a flicker of doubt. Where was God, we wonder, when
life was cut short
and someone
was taken from us
? Where was He the night my brother was killed? When something is killed, life is, by definition, extinguished. That feels accurate. Ian was snuffed out like a candle. One minute there was light; the next we were standing, disoriented, trying to adjust our eyes to the pervasive dark.

In the introduction to the 2011 edition of
Best American Essays
, Edwidge Danticat writes, “Through recent experiences with both birth and death, I have discovered that we enter and leave life as, among other things, words.” Many of us start life, she muses, as whispers or rumours. Born into language, we take in the sound of voices, the sound of wind in the trees, the clattering of dishes, the cooing voices of our mothers, the day-to-day prattle that goes on above our cribs, and we make, of this, our native tongue. On our way out, we may once again speak the indecipherable language of our childhood kingdoms.

Sometimes there are no explanations for the languages we speak. Years ago, Thais, a cousin by marriage, told me that her youngest child’s first words were in the old Squamish dialect. The baby was raised, as most Salish babies are now, in an English-speaking home. Last year, my friend Delmar Johnnie, or Seletze as he was known by his ancestral name, died of complications due to multi-system atrophy. In his obituary, our mutual friend Chris Welsh wrote, “Delmar often told of how, as a young boy, he loved to fish in the Cowichan River near his home at Green Point, B.C. He sometimes watched an old man across the water cleaning fish and singing as he worked. One day he sang the song he’d heard the old man singing and his grandmother asked him where he’d heard it. The song belonged to his great-grandfather, Seletze, who was in the spirit world.”

Some metaphorical thinking—such as that described by Susan Sontag in
Illness as Metaphor
—may be counterproductive. When someone with cancer is told their “anger” contributed to the disease or there is a suggestion that a person gets an illness because “they have something to learn,” it is both untrue and unhelpful. At a symbolic and metaphoric level, death is used to understand other realities in human life. In Chinese tradition, if a woman’s fiancé died before the wedding, she could choose to go through with the ceremony, in which a white cockerel would represent the groom. This “ghost marriage” ensured that the woman still had access to a male descent line and would be cared for after her death. The wife of a ghost was required to take a vow of celibacy and immediately
take up residence with his family. In this way she became part of the family and legitimacy was maintained. Sometimes it was arranged for two ghosts to marry if the family got wind that one or the other was lonely.

“Illness,” wrote Sontag, “is the night side of life. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” The use of metaphor, in both these kingdoms, makes room for the imagination. It allows the mind to walk towards death without having to confront it directly. It allows ghosts to marry.

The body speaks a number of languages. On one level, it needs no translation; on another, it requires that we become translators and interpreters if we are to be of any help. Whenever I’m away on a trip, I know that I will start to return home in my imagination at least two days before actually leaving. The dying too will often withdraw from loved ones days before death; they often leave us before we let go of them. Over the years it became apparent to me that the dying regularly shove off from shore before untying the bowline. Some kick off blankets and remove their clothing, as if fighting their way back to the womb. Some turn to face the wall and disappear into an opening only they can see. It wasn’t until I read Jane Kenyon’s poem “Reading Aloud to My Father” that I understood the living, too, must play their part and resist the urge to haul the skiff back in:

At the end they don’t want their hands

to be under the covers, and if you should put

your hand on theirs in a tentative gesture

of solidarity, they’ll pull their hand free;

and you must honour that desire,

and let them pull it free.

When family members struggled with a perceived rejection, it was sometimes helpful to suggest that their loved one was not turned away from them as much as turned towards something else. It was necessary to learn to read the body; to differentiate between physical pain and other kinds of suffering. To know when to intervene and when to stand back and let the dying sort through whatever it was they were working out.

If it is close to impossible to translate the music at the heart of poetry, then the same must be said for any attempts to precisely translate the dying process. The word
translation
derives from the Latin
translatus
, meaning “to bring over, carry over.” To
translate
is “to remove from one place to another.”

Seen in this light, death itself is an act of translation.

“Poetry’s fertility,” writes Jane Hirshfield, “lives in the marriage of the said and the unsaid, of languaged self and unlanguaged other, of the knowable world and the gravitational pull of what lies beyond knowing.” We can interpret the physical signs of dying, but there remains an element of the untranslatable in both poetry and dying. A mystery at the heart of both. Something only the dying know.

The elegiac nature of poetry is derived from human grief. If poetry is how we speak to the dead, and if metaphor is the language that waits for us at the end, it is poets who help us
understand death, because they are using that language now. The poet listens to water, to the wind, to the back alleys of sweltering cities; she sees the old fence falling down and hears the first nail that was driven into it; she attempts to sit with what is and not what she assumes something to be. The poet makes great leaps from the known world into the unknown, from the rational to the irrational, the steady to the unsteady. The dying, too, make great leaps from the known to the unknown, from the rational to the symbolic.

I inherited a dark forest, but today I am walking in the other forest, the light one.
We are, all of us, walking along with the poet Tomas Tranströmer in a forest of light. It will not always be so.

In the days and hours before an expected death, many people enter a kind of altered state. It is clear, when you look at them, that they are looking through you to something else. A story is told about the time W. H. Auden, walking across the grounds at Oxford, immersed in a discussion about poetry with a group of students, had to be guided by one of them around a gaping hole in the ground. Teased about this, Auden is reported to have said, “I am not absent-minded, I am present-minded elsewhere.”

The Talmud teaches that unborn children are in a holy state. They are visited, in the womb, by the angels of light and sadness and taught the Torah and the secrets of creation. Just before they are born, Purah, the angel of forgetfulness, taps them over the lips and they forget everything, but an echo stays
in the deep stronghold of the heart.
If birth is a kind of
forgetting, could dying be a kind of remembering? Are the dying present-minded elsewhere?

When we leave, is there a stream of light that continues for a while after we’re gone? When we observe the crab nebula, for example, we are seeing it not as it is now, but how it was four thousand years ago. In the elapsing of one minute, a star ten thousand light years away from earth explodes and it ceases to exist. Five thousand years after this explosion, we still see the light. You get the idea. Of course, there’s always Wikipedia to help with these things: “Imagine I dropped a letter in the snail mail then dropped dead. It’s like asking how long my letter could go on after I died. The answer is ‘until it is delivered.’ My death doesn’t stop the letter from coming.”

The metaphoric language of the dying is the language of the boatman. Of the five rivers dividing Hades, it is Acheron, the river of sorrow, across which Charon ferries the newly dead. It is the river Lethe they drink from to forget their past lives. The difference between
translation
and
metaphor
is slight—the former meaning “to bring or carry over”; the latter, derived from the Greek, “to transfer or carry across.” If death is an act of translation, metaphor, then, is the language of transition. You could say it is the falsework, the scaffolding of the whole dying process; it holds us up until the crossing is strong enough to get us to the other side.

In Athens, three-wheeled delivery trucks, used to transport merchandise around the city, careen through the streets with
Metaphor
written on their sides, causing pedestrians to jump out of the way and curse them with their own metaphors.

Aristotle believed the use of metaphor was a sign of genius. The dying as geniuses. On some level we know we will all be there one day. Climbing into the yellow cab idling at the front door.

From the Dictionary of Angels

Angelos
, from the Greek, means “messenger,” either human or divine. In rabbinical teachings there are at least a dozen angels of death—Adriel, Apollyon-Abaddon, Leviathan, Malach ha-Mavet, Metatron and Yehudiah, to name a few. With those monikers, there’s no mistaking them for Gentiles. In Christian tradition, the angel Gabriel is the angel of consolation. Michael, the angel of death, “leads souls into the eternal light” at the yielding up of the ghost of all good Christians. Michael is made up entirely of snow, Gabriel of fire. “And though they stand near one another they do not injure one another.” So says the Rabbi Akiva. I would have thought the angel of death was made of fire, but no, God has His own ideas about consolation. Fire, it seems, figures prominently in His plans; the seraphs are born of a stream of it blazing out from under His throne.

In Muslim theology, Azrael is the angel of death who is forever writing in a large book and forever erasing what he writes. What he writes is the birth of man, what he erases is
the name of the man at death. One wonders at the futility of this; one wonders if there are times he just wants to skip over a few names, put his feet up, call it a day.

Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor, nicknamed the Angel of Death for his diabolical experiments on twins in Auschwitz, was also known as the White Angel for the calculating, cold manner in which he chose who would live and who would die when the trains pulled into the camp each day. Angel Dust showed up on the streets of San Francisco in the 1960s—otherwise known as PCP, Peace Pill, crystal, hog, horse tranquilizer, embalming fluid and rocket fuel. People were known to take flying leaps out of windows, like angels, when high on the stuff.

What’s in a name? Joe Fortes arrived in Vancouver from Barbados in 1883. He worked as a shoeshine boy and porter in the city where, seventy years later, I was born. Joe pitched a tent on English Bay and took to patrolling the beach as a self-appointed lifeguard; legend has it that hundreds were saved on his watch. In 1901, the city appointed him its first official lifeguard. Joe’s full name was Seraphim “Joe” Fortes. Named by his mother after the highest order of angels, Joe, it seems, just had an instinct for the drowning.

When I was sixteen, on my way back home from a track meet, I was thrown seventy feet when the car I was riding in was struck by a semi running a red light. What a passerby would have seen was a girl hurtling through the air—a human projectile. What I remember is the silence, reading the letters on the side of the truck, falling in slow motion
through space. I came to, on the ground, in the arms of a stranger. It felt as if I was cushioned. Laid down so gently, caught by what, or whom, I can’t really say.

I like to think my brother experienced something close to this. Something other than what Bowering described in his poem as a
horrid air-filled explosion, shrieking steel … a twirling upside down rubber wheel, sirens.
But I don’t know. The writer Christopher Dewdney, who was a passenger in a streetcar that was blindsided by another streetcar one late spring afternoon, remembers people flying out of their seats and safety glass erupting like a floating mist all around him; but mostly he remembers that all of it took place in deafening silence, in slow motion. “It seems,” he writes, that “we are able to experience accelerated time for brief periods. But we cannot experience anything like what high-speed film can capture now—bullets slowly plunging through apples, hovering hummingbirds flapping their wings at the speed of a crow.” For a brief moment we are outside time. Falling through the air. Caught by what or whom we cannot say.

Time changes for the dying too. In the last days and hours, they often seem preoccupied and outside time as we know it. Joseph lived most of his life on boats that he built and sailed around the world. He was always working: sewing sails, fixing rigging, sanding and varnishing the decks. There was an oak tree outside his hospice room. When I visited him shortly before his death, he told me, “One leaf falling can occupy me all day.”