On saying goodbye (when does death arrive?)

The morning arrives still, grey, humid.  Offshore the sea blusters with a coming storm, but here the water is a claude glass, the air full of black flies.  We swat them away as we walk out past the woodpile, up the slight incline to the barn, then along what used to be a fence line to the apple orchard.  The apples aren't any sweeter, but they are redder, and some have begun to fall on the ground.

Past the weedy patch and the mound where the rhubarb grows, past the gangling burr oak with its few clinging brown leaves and then we are there beneath a birch and some spruces: our own private pet cemetery. We stop there briefly to speak to all our gone ones: in 17 years, the litany of names has become very long.  Four dogs and now three cats and the ghost of a fourth haunt this grove, this section of stony earth. Enya, the new dog, who is almost two, sniffs the spot worriedly and then moves on, quickly, down the path to the pond. It is not a good place for living dogs to linger.

We buried our cat Dante there last week, after taking her to the vet for an overdose of sedative. In seconds, her poor stricken body, her paralyzed bent paws and stiff legs, the blind eyes and nictitating membranes that would not close relaxed. She bowed her head as if in sleep and all of the tension drained from her body. Her heart stopped and she was dead.

Sad as we were, as we watched her unfurl into death, we were also relieved, for her pain had become unbearable; despite her paralysis, she had tried again and again to run from what ailed her, only to fall, and her misery to worsen.

We'd had 17 years with her, our "big cat" as I called her, although she had always been small. Still, in the last year, as her kidneys failed, she had become tiny; two weeks ago, her legs weakened and began to stiffen. When I said goodbye to her on my way out the door to work that week, I thought it might be the last time I saw her.

She stopped drinking and eating that day, and because she kept falling, Marike took to carrying her around on a blanket or in her basket. She held Dante all night the Tuesday that I was in Halifax, and then when I came home Wednesday I did the same. We thought she died quite a bit that night, but was clearly still in pain.  Mostly blind, mostly paralyzed, organs failing, her extremities--paws and ears--cold, only her tail still lively, impatient, expressive, switching and twitching, we bundled her in a blanket and took her to the vet, where a needle full of sedative slowly stilled her heart.

But is that when death arrives, when the heart stops or the autonomic nervous system ceases? Or does it settle in by degrees,  as we who are living also let go, and the beloved body cools and stiffens?

I held Dante in my arms and petted her all the way home, speaking softly into that near space where it seemed her spirit, her particular character and being still hovered, touchable, keeping us company. We had not yet released our hold on her singular life, but what had been so lively and so alive without us now remained and shifted inward, circulating as memory and sensation and drifts of kitty fur, sewn through the cushions and corners of our lives.

In this way, she is not yet gone, but nestled into the forms of our gestures and habits. At night, in the dark, I still step carefully, as if she might be nearby, unseen, underfoot--as, in a way, she is. When I wake, I listen for her, sure I'll hear the drop of her paws on the floorboards, her soft purr as she climbs up on the bed, glad to have conscious company in the middle of the night. I put out my hand, curl my fingers around empty space.  Likewise the dog curls on the bench by the fire, nuzzling a stuffed toy, sniffing at it as she did Dante, clearly missing her animal companion.

How does Rilke put it, the character of such missing and the way it shapes our lives? In the Eighth Duino Elegy he writes:

                         Here all is distance;
there it was breath. After that first home,
the second seems ambiguous and drafty...

Who has twisted us around like this, so that
no matter what we do, we are in the posture
of someone going away? Just as, upon
the farthest hill, which shows him his whole valley
one last time, he turns, stops lingers------,
so we live here, forever taking leave.

So we live here, forever taking leave of our loves--until the days that we, too, will die.

Unlike Rilke, I do not think that we live or die differently from other animals, although he might be right that we tend to busy ourselves with preoccupations, with objects, as he puts it, rather than "that pure space into which flowers endlessly open." But now and then, as death creases us, we too may turn or wake and look, not at life, but at something like being, as its wings beat by our heads. These too are gifts, as if from the dead to the living: look here; see; and hasten not your mourning.

Notes
Dante cat died on Thursday 13 October 2016.  She had come to live with us when just a kitten sometime in the fall of 1999, a gift of Nicole Moser, who had heard we needed a mouser. We had two large black dogs at the time, Negrita, a black lab, and Binky, our three-legged wolfdog stray. Dante spent her first three days in the house on top of the kitchen cupboards; on the fourth day she descended, having somehow mesmerized the dogs, and despite her tiny size, whipped them into respect and obedience without ever extending a claw. In fact, that's how she got her name, for as Marike said, she was little, and needed a big name that was easy to hear and to call. Who better than after an exiled poet, who mapped heaven and hell and all of the regions between?

She was wise, scrappy, playful and clever--gave birth to five kittens, instructed Binky how to care for them rather than to eat them, and survived a neighbour's hate and traps, as well as an attack by roaming huskies that killed her daughter and wounded Elisabeth. Until a year ago, she kept the house free of mice and other small critters; she trained all of our dogs to be good to cats, and figured out that if she came and rubbed herself on our computers as we worked, she could be sure of nearly endless petting. She could play good jokes, sticking her paw in our water glasses, or dropping pellets of food in our shoes, and then watching to see how we'd react. And sometimes, when we played ball with a dog, she'd run interference, as if she could catch, but really to interrupt the dog's concentration, and make the ball drop. We'll not soon see her like again.

The Rilke I cite here is from Stephen Mitchell's translation and bilingual edition, Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (New York: Random House, 1982): 195, 197.

Running out into the rain: Remembering Bill Readings (1960-1994)

It has been twenty years since my friend Bill Readings died in an iced-up airplane that plummeted to earth in an Indiana soybean field. Twenty years since a phone call that Halloween night cancelled dinner plans, and turned our Montreal party into mourning. Twenty years since the world changed.

Twenty years is a lifetime, and no time at all. Enormous sorrow, but also every subsequent gift seems to flow from that catastrophic event; the finality of it has figured, one way or another in most of the major moves of my adult life, from the onset of an acute depression, to quitting my job, and an eventual recovery by and on the sea. I can trace back to that accident the fact that I've built an unusual but deeply rooted and sustaining family life, here, at the edge of my adopted country. I do not know if I would be a storyteller now, one who makes things with others, if that event had not interrupted the narrowing focus of my academic life and career, and derailed them. Now my life is filled with teaching, sure, but also with shared days and nights, fresh air, clouds or stars, frogs and owls, cats, dogs, poems, photographs, sailboats, sketches, videos, voyages, berry crisps, time to love, time to breathe, and walks with chickadees, who flutter by to feed from our hands.

Bill, I do not know if I would have had the courage to make those changes without the fact of your death before me, the stupidity of it, in a plane that had already been designated a "grave," on the return leg of an international academic commute, when what is routine turns suddenly deadly, and no fragment of you is ever recovered. How peculiar still to be thus suspended: we prepare for a meal to which you never arrive.

At first we waited. We thought you'd change your mind, come back from the dead. We thought we'd sit in your kitchen again while you pulled espressos and steamed milk from that machine that made you so proud, a salvaged restaurant-grade cappuccino machine you'd had plumbed in beside your kitchen sink. We thought we'd gather around your big glass table again, and drink and argue and eat exquisite meals (risotto with black truffles, seared squid, perfect greens), listen to tango, talk about politics and soccer, you with your slow deliberate French--your third or fourth language--carving enough room for all of us, no matter what or how we spoke. We thought we'd hear your reliable advice again, your homespun scholarly wisdom: the best way to pull down a grant, plan a trip, bend back the pages of a book so that it looked as if you'd read it.  You were expert at the rhetorics of the university, but you never let them master your zest for living. Until you died.

I remember one late meal on a cool fall night. Your house was full of visiting artists and scholars. One from Japan, two from Brazil, a friend from Switzerland, where you'd once taught, a scattering of friends from Montreal. I'd helped you cook dinner. You were telling stories about the first time you'd come to North America, on an open ticket that let you fly around the world. For a moment you were sober: I've taken so many flights in my life, you said, that sometimes I wonder if I've flown my number.

We all shouted you down: no, don't be silly! You're joking, right?

Two weeks later you were dead. And your comment haunted all of us who were there.

Would you have gone anyway if you had known how it would end? I know you hadn't planned to die; you'd come to see me just before you left. I'm sorry I can't stay longer, you'd said, but I'll be back next week. You were worried about your recent weight gain; we'd made a date to repot some houseplants, and to talk about something serious,  but what that was I no longer remember. How to survive the pressures of a long-distance relationship? Perhaps. Both of us had partners in the US and insanely large phone bills; we knew and shared those vicissitudes, the miscommunications and the loneliness of long-distance loves.

I remember one of the last nights I saw you. As I prepared to go and you hugged me goodbye, you clung to me, tearing, as if I were a life raft.

But that's what you had been--and continue to be in some respects--for me: the one who saved me from drowning, even as the storm of year death nearly sank me. Surviving that and the storms that have followed it have taught me what I know about strength and weakness, sadness and joy, living while and as you can.

Sometimes I still think I see you, tall form striding down a damp autumn street in your lemon yellow raincoat. You emerge from the crowd then slip back into it: ghost, old friend, guardian angel. Choose how you want to live, I hear you say; don't simply withstand. Reach out if you're unhappy; do something. Raincoats are so you'll run out into the rain.

I still miss you Bill; I always will. But now I'm putting on my coat and going out into the rain.

Notes
The first two pictures are copies of photos taken in 1994--of Bill's last birthday party, on a ski holiday with his wife, Diane Elam, and friends Annie and Carolyn, as well as me and my partner then, Kristin Bergen.

The last photo is from a collage of images of an early snowstorm in La Fontaine Park, which was near my house in Montreal.

Mourning

Full clear light, sunshine, sharply
etched colour, and I am
mired in fatigue.

Is this how sorrow feels,
slipping along your spine?
And whose sorrow?

Unjust that
I should open my eyes, should
look upon grey sea and implacable

isles (they break
the waves and are not
submerged)

when he won't rise
or see another
day.  By what

name or
reason comes such
undoing, such

cessation,
such unroping
loop of heart or life?

He stops
now;
forever slips

away.
Instant;
accident;

her world,
their world,
our world

unmade.

In memory of Steve Rowe.

Valdesca: On Cancer and Courage

 

"Fear is the field where courage grows"

Fifteen years ago, one of my best friends died in a plane crash.  We had been planning to meet for dinner that night; in fact, we and several others had planned a Halloween night party.  Instead, on the first leg of his journey, the plane, a turboprop used on short commuter hops, had been forced by a landing queue to circle in freezing rain for an hour.  Ice built up on the wings; the plane became unstable, flipped and slammed into an Indiana bean field.  Nothing larger than a bread box, it was said, could be plucked from the wreckage.  No identifiable portion of my friend's body was ever recovered.

In the weeks and months following this accident, I came, myself, disassembled.  The simplest things seemed difficult, even impossible; I did not know how or why I ought to struggle on.  I had not known death could strike so suddenly so near.  I had not known it would start to call me too.  I gave myself over to death in some way, even while it terrified me.

While I was in this state, another friend--an acquaintance really--came to visit and decided I needed a change of both scenery and ideas.  He packed a picnic lunch and drove us from Montreal to Lake Placid, in upstate New York.  There was someone there he wanted me to meet, he said, a man in his nineties, a veteran of the "Great War."

I don't remember much about that day--in fact I couldn't remember at all where we'd gone; I had to look it up in a road atlas and make probable guesses. I can't even remember either man's name: such holes in my recollection are signs of how terrible those days were, how far I'd dropped into sorrow.  But I remember the meeting--in the library of a private school--green and maroon volumes in wooden shelves ranged along the walls.  And I remember the story the old man told me, for it was about his own experience of grief.

He'd come home from the war, body intact, but mind utterly blasted, another shell-shocked survivor, unable to imagine how he might rejoin the legions around him simply living everyday lives and petty concerns.  "I knew nothing," he told me. "On my own, I would not have survived.  But there was this school here, and someone asked me if I could look after the primary students during recreation times.

I did not think I could.

Children terrified me.  They were fearless, wiggly; they moved erratically and asked questions.  They were energetic, alive, a kind of future--and I wanted nothing to do with them.  But standing with them while they played, that was my job.

At first I stood at the back of the playground, my face to the wall; I couldn't even look at those children.  But they would not and did not leave me alone.  They asked me questions, wanted me to throw a ball or look at a bloody knee.  And gradually, day by day, as they played, they returned me to the world. 

For you see," he said, turning to look me in the eyes, "fear is the field where courage grows.  If I was to live, I had to dare to walk there.  I was brave--I had been in the war--I'd seen terrible things.  And because of that, I was afraid.  I entered my fear like a shell and tried to hide there. But as the man who gave me the job of watching the children knew, I couldn't stay there and live."

When we left Lake Placid a few hours later, I felt as if I'd been delivered an oracle. But exiting the state I was in wasn't easy--it took years, in fact, of effort and therapy.  Grief casts a long shadow; once it touches you it never quite leaves, but always hovers just there, alongside you, over your shoulder, almost out of sight. 

Still, what I took from my meeting that day was a handhold, a grapple, a tool I've since used again and again when I've needed to haul myself back to hope, to reason, to the pleasures and accidental joys and engagements of life.

Often at sea I think of the old man's line--fear is the field where courage grows--and use it, like a mantra, to calm myself down.  For even if you set out feeling fearless, a match for anything, the sea will educate you otherwise.  An experienced sailor is someone who's been scared silly again and again but refuses to be paralysed.

Fear is the field where courage grows: you don't do brave things because you're somehow especially brave, but, in fact, because you're mortally afraid.

We go to sea in a stout, ocean-capable "blue water" keel boat packed full of survival gear and food and a watermaker and spare parts and tools and communications devices and elaborate medical kits--everything that Marike's lifetime of sailing experience and our combined foresight can imagine to put together. And still, often enough, I feel anxious, bounced around, at some edge.  So when I see people who embark on long voyages in kayaks or other small boats I am full of admiration--these people must be very courageous indeed.

One small boat in particular moves us--the Drascombe Longboat, a yawl-rigged open boat--in part because it is so pretty and so practical at once.  NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School) operates a small fleet of these "teaching boats" in the Sea of Cortez, and it is a lovely thing to watch them come around the corner and into a sheltered cove.  They're versatile--one can attach a little outboard motor, or row or sail these 22-foot beauties.
  

This year, in San Juanico, we encountered another Drascombe, home for three months to Claudia, a geologist, and Tim, an artist.  Right away, Claudia asked for our story--how had we come to be sailing in the Sea of Cortez? What accident of life gave us the urge and the capacity to be away from Nova Scotia for a chunk of time and living on a boat there? Mix the feeling that life is short and not to be squandered--we'd left jobs we hated after too many friends had died and tried to make a new life-- with the wish for a boat, the chance that the boat we most wanted was for sale at a very good price in San Diego in 2003, and our story unspools from there.  Having answered, we turned the question around--how did you two come to be sailing a Drascombe here? we asked.

The answer was short, sharp, shocking and very clear: Claudia, a geologist who had worked for Los Alamos labs, had had three rounds of cancer.  Last April, everyone had thought she might soon die: she'd even registered for a place in a palliative hospice, so it would be available when the time came.  But then she got an idea. She'd quit her job and get into shape and they'd have an ADVENTURE in the Sea of Cortez, where she'd done fieldwork for her PhD. And that made her feel like living, which is exactly what she was doing. When we met her, she looked hale, tanned, strong; you'd never guess she'd so recently been so ill. 

In many respects, the way they were sailing took a lot more physical strength, planning and courage than the way we were sailing.  It could be much colder, much less sheltered; they were constantly closer to the elements, at risk of being swamped; they had to camp on the beach each night to sleep. But Claudia was clearly thriving--obviously much to Tim's relief.  To risk her life was, not to save it so much as to seize it and make it worth living; because she had courage, because they had courage, they were also utterly alight. 

Same lesson, different, thrilling, example.  Thank you, Valdesca, thank you.

Notes

For more on Claudia and Tim's adventure see

http://valdesca.blogspot.com/

For more information on the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) and their sailing program in the Sea of Cortez, see

http://www.nols.edu/courses/locations/mexico/bajasailing.shtml

A Rough Sketch, A Sense of the Fold

2 March 2010
Ballandra Cove

Trying to capture the folds of the mountains, but the boat swings around too quickly for me to finish the sketch. Oh well, a sense of the fold is there, the spiny cordillera.

It's a beautiful morning: cool, clear, wisps of cloud reach across the sky. I am feeling well in my body, relaxed after our six hour walk up and back along the stony path carved by the arroyo through the mountains. We'd aimed for Salinas, but stopped short at the last range crossing the island.  There the stream bed had become narrow and steep and strewn with boulders; water, when it ran, had etched a canyon into the range.  We'd not started early enough to keep going and still make it back, and we were hot and a bit tired--the sun in our faces the whole way back.

In that other world in there, in the mountains back of the sea, there are flowering plants, birds, lizards, even long abandoned waterholes and ranching projects.  And clinging to everything, the heady purple scent of flowers in bloom.  Even in the middle of the night, beneath the full moon, when we got up to haul the dinghy, to stop it from banging against the hull as we rocked in the swell, the scent was still there, billowing out from the land and perfuming the cove.

Today the bees send out messengers to investigate us: they are looking for water but sip remnants of yoghurt; they cling to the rims of our breakfast dishes, buzzing, wings aflutter.

The water is clear and light green today, each ripple reflects the red rock of the mountains, so the whole looks like a weaving of red and green strands glittering in the sunlight.  Wind catches the flag and slaps the halyards against the mast; we turn to the north, nose into the wind.

Emotions wash over me out here when we are afloat--yesterday, for example, we spoke about my poor dead wolf dog Binky, and then I found myself weeping, missing her, feeling sad for all of the times I'd misunderstood her.  I think often of my grandmother too.  It seems strange to do so, to remember the orderly stones bordering her garden, the rows the petunias, the passion flower--a single vine--she trained up the side of the house. Everything so genteel, so well-ordered, at times, so ersatz-- at all like this wild environment where nature (sun, desert, dust, heat, sea, wind, creeping vines) overtakes signs of culture within weeks and months, breaking apart most human endeavours, rendering them transient, decomposng their order almost immediately.  Why here, then, do I think of her?

Why do I carry a sense of her with me like a comfort, a guardian angel?  Perhaps because she, of all of my nearest ancestors--grandfather, father and mother--was not a worrier, but had an adventuresome soul.  A weak heart, but little or no paranoia. 

Perhaps I hold her to me here as the ancestor best to travel with, the one who would let me be, and not plague me with too much fearfulness.  Those others, they're installed in my body, in my shortness of breath, in my nausea and mild seasickness, in the anxiety that grips we when we're away from the boat: what if it's drifted off of its anchor; what if we encounter an uncharted rock; what if something we don't know how to fix breaks down?  These are the worries that make me leap up in the middle of the night to look around or to stow the breakables as we rock gently side to side in the swell.

Nothing really moves at such moments: the bowls and cups are all stuck fast with inertia.  But I move perhaps so I will not be, and pay the price with anxiety, with fear. 

How to find the balance between these emotions, these bodily sensations, that's the struggle, every day. Most days, that's nothing more than a very rough sketch.  If that.