The Book of Living and Dying (11 page)

She picked up a postcard:
The Three Fates.
The picture on the front showed an etching of three women sitting side by side, holding a skein of wool. The woman in the middle held shears poised, ready to cut the yarn. There was something eerily calculating about the women, with their dispassionate faces. On the back of the card was a quotation, written in pencil:
“Who knows but life be that which men call death,
and death what men call life?”
The handwriting unfamiliar. What was this doing in her mother’s things? It seemed out of place among the Christmas cards and scraps of old paper. Sarah set the postcard aside, thinking it was somehow appropriate for the ritual, even though it wasn’t on the list.

Digging through the papers, Sarah began looking for something—anything—with her name on it. Hadn’t she given her mother cards over the years? When she reached the bottom of the box, she felt oddly disappointed. Why had her mother kept letters from John but not from her? There was no denying that they didn’t get along. But to be so final, so dismissive … Sarah found it upsetting. It was as if she were being slowly erased. “What do you expect?” she muttered, piling the papers back in the box, careful to place the cards she had found first at the top. She didn’t want her mother to know she had been snooping.

Sliding the box to its spot under the bed, Sarah picked up the postcard of the three women and moved into the kitchen to collect the rest of the things she would need. But as she reached to open a drawer, a wave of dizziness set her back on her heels.
He’s doing this to me,
she thought, grasping the counter in alarm, then remembering that she had only had coffee with Donna earlier. Coffee and Advil. She would eat after the ritual, she promised herself as the dizzy spell passed.

The pin was easy to find, but there were no tea-lights in the kitchen. There were several half-burned white tapers, though, and a box of matches. In place of a candlestick an empty green wine bottle from under the sink would have to do. Sarah pushed the snub end of a taper into the wine bottle, the wax curling over the lip like a strip of old cheese. The apple she found in the fridge, its skin slightly puckered. She
checked her list: “An altar appropriately set up.” What that meant she wasn’t sure, but she felt it must involve a white cloth of some kind; a white towel from the bathroom was all she had.

Placing the altar trappings on her bed, Sarah cleared the milk crate, moved it to the centre of the room and covered it with the towel. The towel was too long, so she tucked it under at the sides, smoothing it with her hands. She set the wine bottle, pin and apple in the middle of the crate, took the jade Buddha from the top of her dresser, wiped it clean with her shirt and placed it next to the wine bottle. Retrieving her box of photos from the dresser, she chose a picture of John that wasn’t one of her favourites but clearly showed his features and his guitar. Leaning the photo against the wine bottle next to the card of the three women, she returned the box to the drawer.

To set the mood, Sarah drew the curtains on her bedroom window and sat cross-legged in front of the altar, book resting in her lap. But the effect of the whole thing was somewhat discouraging. With the wine bottle candle and the white towel, the altar looked like a prop table setting at a French restaurant in a high school play. It lacked authenticity, she thought, even though she had no idea what an altar was supposed to look like. It needed … something. Scouring her room, Sarah chose a handful of leaves, a small mesh bundle of shells she had purchased as a young girl and a tiny wooden basket the size of a walnut. Inside the basket, on a bed of cotton, a gold-and-green beetle gleamed, salvaged from the sidewalk years earlier. Rearranging the altar, Sarah placed the leaves and shells with the beetle beside the apple and was finally satisfied with the way things looked.

“‘Light the candle,’” she read in a hushed voice. She took
the box of matches, drew one from the carton and lit it. The candle guttered in the draft from the bedroom window, a clear teardrop of wax rolling down one side and spilling onto the green glass of the wine bottle before congealing and hardening into a translucent exclamation mark. Sarah reached over and extinguished the bedroom light with a snap; the candle bathed the room with its glow.

“‘Cleanse the pin in the fire and prick the deceased’s name in the skin of the apple, promising to resolve the conflict in your heart. Eat the apple and bury the core in the earth.’”

The pin made tiny puncture sounds as it pierced the skin. When she was finished writing John’s name, Sarah started to eat. The apple tasted dry and slightly sour. She couldn’t finish the whole thing but made sure to eat the parts with his name, placing the rest on the altar beside the candle. She closed her eyes, the way the book said, and thought about John. How did seeing him make her feel? She sat in silence for several minutes, allowing images to flicker through her mind. She wasn’t sure, really, how to summarize the way she felt. John’s ghost beside the bed; his face reflected in the bathroom mirror; the constant, unsettling feeling of being watched … Was that what the book meant? Sarah opened her eyes and peered at the page in the candlelight: “What message do you wish to convey to your loved one?” Her mind was as blank as the piece of paper in front of her. She could think of nothing except her own fear at seeing him and the niggling guilt over her errant thoughts when he was sick. The candle flame sputtered. A shiver ran like a millipede up the ladder of her spine. What message would he want to hear? she wondered. What would make him forgive her?
I love you,
a voice in her head said.

“I love you,”
she wrote in heavy letters on the page, then added several Xs and Os as an afterthought.

She folded the paper in quarters around the photo, the way the book had said to do, creasing the edges neatly with her thumbs. Holding one corner of the bundle to the candle, she watched as the fire leapt to consume her message, the paper curling and blackening quickly, the photo burning more slowly, blue and green flames moving over John’s face like phosphorescent liquid, blistering his eyes, his smile, his hair. She held the photo, the smoke rising to the ceiling of her room, until the flames threatened to singe her fingers, then dropped the bundle into the glass ashtray, the fire ebbing as the photo withered into a small pile of delicate ash.

“Recite a prayer,” the book said. There were so many to choose from. Sarah finally decided on one called “Releasing the Spirit.”

The weight of silence bore heavily upon her as she spoke the final words of the prayer. Was that all it took to relieve the dead? It didn’t seem like enough. She looked at the altar. The postcard of the three women stared back at her. Picking
up the card, she held it to the flame. It resisted burning, but the cold faces of the women succumbed at last to the heat.
A spoonful of your own medicine,
Sarah thought, dropping the card into the ashtray and watching as the women were reduced to cinders next to the remains of John’s photo. Feeling she should do more still, she leafed through the book again, stopping at a page marked “The Wisdom of the Dead.” “The living,” the book instructed, “can benefit by divesting themselves of earthly trappings such as clothes to experience the true freedom of surrender.”

Removing her clothes for the sake of ritual seemed strange at first, but by the time Sarah was completely naked she had to admit that she felt surprisingly light. She laughed as she licked her thumb and finger to snuff the candle before tucking herself beneath the blankets. Lying in bed, the sheets felt cool and comfortable against her bare skin and she found herself feeling somewhat relieved, even hopeful. If the ritual worked, she would be free of John’s ghost—and maybe even her own guilt. She began to think about him, about the months he’d spent in bed. His hopelessness. The fire of life guttering inside him. Waiting for the end to come. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. It wasn’t the big things that got you in the end, she knew, it was the little things, innocuous little bugs and invisible viruses that normal people could easily fend off.

“A cold can be fatal to a chronic care patient,” the nurse carefully explained. “The immune system, already ravaged by disease, can’t muster the forces to battle a simple virus. Most of the patients that enter the chronic care ward die from pneumonia or some other unrelated illness,” she added. And perhaps it was better that way. Better than waiting for the
unconditional surrender of a heart that didn’t know enough to stop beating. The body, long since decayed by disease, could give up weeks—sometimes months—before the heart stuttered to a halt.

The announcement that the nurses had detected fever made her delirious with worry, and then, surprisingly, shamefully, hopeful. If there was the chance to slip quietly into unconsciousness, to die peacefully while asleep, wouldn’t it be better for all of them? But it was unbearable to think about, now that it was a distinct possibility. Rounding the corner to find the empty bed newly made, the floors scrubbed, curtains drawn to let the sunlight in.

In the morning it was business as usual, though, the irritation and anger rising before the nurse arrived with the morning meds. The fever descending slowly throughout the day, stabilizing by dinner. The priest showed up all the same, sparking terror throughout the ward, gliding silently down the hall in his blackfrock, a benign expression described artfully on his face. Sitting in a chair beside the bed, he didn’t talk at all about death or dying, or even God, but spoke instead about horses and Ireland.

T
he ritual didn’t work. Sarah knew that when she woke and found John sitting on the edge of her bed. He was hunched over, face in his hands. She would have screamed right away if she hadn’t glanced at his feet. He was wearing blue dress socks, no shoes. Wasn’t that how it had been in the end? His feet, too swollen with illness for anything but socks or a pair of knit slippers. There was something innocent and sad about his sock feet, as though he wasn’t quite ready for the trip he was supposed to make.
Haven’t you got your shoes on yet?

Sarah closed her eyes and counted to ten. She must have done something wrong. Instead of freeing his spirit from its earthly chains she had invited it back. He began calling her name, his voice thick and distorted, like he was speaking with a throat full of milk.

“No!” Sarah shrieked, covering her ears with her hands. When she opened her eyes again, he was gone, the end of the bed empty, the room oppressively silent. She burst into tears of hopelessness and frustration and rage. What recourse did she have now? A flash of hatred seared her heart. Why
wouldn’t he just go away and leave her alone? And then her mind flipped instantly over. This was Donna’s fault. Her and her stupid ideas.

Picking up the book from the altar, Sarah hurled it at the bedroom door. It missed its mark, hitting the wall with a loud clunk and flapping like a gun-shot partridge to the foot of her dresser. She yanked one corner of the towel, crashing the contents of the altar to the floor, the ashes spilling over the apple as it tumbled.
The apple.
She was supposed to have buried it. She kicked the milk crate to one side, got dressed and stormed from the room, leaving the mess behind. She was going to Michael’s. She would stay with him.

Michael slept, his hair an ebony river across the white fabric of the pillow, the gentle rhythm of his breathing as soothing as a cat’s purr. Sarah felt safe beside him. She didn’t mind that he slept while she lay awake. He hadn’t questioned her when she’d arrived, tapping on his bedroom window. He’d simply helped her through and then held her, kissing her eyes and mouth as he worked her clothes off and eased her into bed next to him. They’d slept, holding each other, until Sarah had startled awake. She’d looked around the room, frantically, before realizing where she was and settling back in again.

Inching herself free from his embrace, she rolled onto her side and casually inspected the contents of the cubby beside his bed. Her eyes rested on a small plastic bag. Dehydrated stems of some sort—maybe mushrooms. She held the bag to
her nose and sniffed. She’d never done mushrooms before but knew people who had. It was an outdated high, a hippie drug. She wondered what it would be like to be stoned on mushrooms, to really let go and hallucinate. She’d always been afraid to lose control—she’d seen it happen to other people. Mushrooms were strong medicine, she’d heard. Maybe as strong as morphine.

Morphine was for terminally ill patients only. The doctor had been quite clear about that. There were concerns about addiction and substance abuse. The hospital had rules.

The doctor was a hard sell. It took arguments—several of them and quite heated—before he relented and signed the release form. Moments later a haughty young nurse strode into the room, syringe in hand. She jerked the gown sleeve clear up to the shoulder, swiped the elbow joint with an alcohol-soaked cotton ball and stabbed the needle in, depressing the plunger with unnecessary force, the morphine shooting in, until it seemed as though the vein would burst. She left without a word, leaving the gown sleeve still pushed up and crumpled at the shoulder.

Michael rolled over and spooned up behind her. “You found my stash,” he said, nuzzling her ear.

“I want to try it.”

“You’ve never done it before?”

Sarah lay silent.

“Okay, babe,” he conceded, pushing her hair aside and kissing the back of her neck. “But I have rules.”

Michael moved easily through the forest, a leather bag on his shoulder. He helped Sarah along, holding branches for her, guiding her over stumps and around rocks. They walked through the cedars, the sweet green branches scenting the air with the fragrance of pepper and lemon. The night enveloped them, the moon hiding shyly behind a veil of clouds. At a small clearing encircled with stones they stopped, the cedars creating an arbour above them. “Sit here,” he said, moving her toward a boulder that shone like a bone in the dark.