The party was over and the darkness beyond the tiki torches was denser for the descending fog. I was more than ready for bed and one beer over where I should have been, but she wanted to stay later. “She” was a retired nurse, and even as her husband shifted uncomfortably in his seat, she projected a great interest to talk. Things hummed around recent events and church stuff for about an hour until we got around to spiritual things, where death inevitably entered, and where, it became apparent, she wanted to be.
I did too, even as I had to fight slipping into sleep. I had been against the thought of death until well into middle age, when it finally appeared to me as the great arbiter of truth. I explain how this happened in the story “Dark Angel” in my book, Beneath the Turning Stars. I have spoken of it before here, so I will not go into details, but in summary, it is about a car accident on a road deep in the woods of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that a friend and I happened upon on the way to the family cabin. A few other people had already stopped, and something in the feel of things out there in the middle of nowhere compelled us to stop too. It was as we began to walk to the wreck that we felt it, the eerie presence of spirit that I called the dark angel. It was still and calm and frightening in its depth. We were to find that a 17 year-old girl had died in the accident, and the feeling from her death hung with us for weeks. It was unavoidable and totally otherworldly.
The retired nurse knew it well, but she insisted that death had a feeling of complete peace and was not eerie at all. She did admit that new nurses often ran from a room where someone had died exactly because of this feeling, but they were then talked into returning. Death and its attendant spirit was, as these seasoned nurses knew, normal, and only once had it ever been horrible. Our guest had not witnessed this, the screaming of a woman dying of cancer, but she and all the other nurses who were not there said that they were relieved that they had missed it. That would have been horrible. But this was exceedingly uncommon. To the people who worked in death, it was almost always a peaceful and solemn experience.
I had read of this before, about the “beauty” of the after-death spirit. In the sweet little book Night’s Bright Darkness, by Sally Read, the author opens with a remembrance of an Irish nurse who washed and wrapped corpses. The nurse treated the bodies politely as one would treat delicate people, and after the preparation would part the curtains to the day and open the window, saying, “Now we open the window and let his soul fly…,” just as she said for the man who Read had helped to prepare with her. Read had been terrified up until then, but suddenly she felt the corpse become small and insignificant. How, she thought, could this happen in a modern London hospital where, “The soul was long out of fashion.”?
I still recall with a bit of shame the last time I saw my terminally ill father a short time before the incident in the woods. By then I lived far away, and my visits to him were infrequent. He had been in an old folk’s home for over a year, ever since he had become incontinent and blind, and in that time he had become almost totally silent, sleeping most of the time. They said he had cancer of the brain, but no one really knew for sure. Really, to all involved, he was just another dying old man with no future.
The hallway to his room had the usual stink of urine and antiseptic, and lost-looking old people with walkers and wheel chairs wandered about. I found him in bed and asleep as usual, but he awakened instantly when I said hello. He replied very brightly and with great pleasure, “It’s good to see you again, Fred!” Still oddly uncomfortable, I began to mention some political shenanigans then current, as my father had always had a keen interest in the news. The words fell in the air like lead. It was not just that he was not listening, but that this other spirit was there, the same one that I would come across a few years later in the UP. It had no interest in the politics or daily life of Man. Rather, it spoke of truth as a deep cave speaks of silence. Both my words and my attitude felt irrelevant. My dad would slip into death a few months later.
In the Book of Exodus, we find Moses tending a flock of sheep near Mt Horeb (Sinai) when an angel of the lord appeared to him in a fire flaming out of a bush. As Exodus 3: 4-5 says, “When the Lord saw him coming over to look at it more closely, God called out to him from the bush, ‘Moses! Moses!...Come no nearer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground.’” This is it: in the presence of death we are on holy ground, which can be anywhere. This is what we feel. Death does not bring all of the Holy down upon us, but it is the opening, an unwavering and undeniable presence that is stunningly real, so much so that the uninitiated run from it in fear. Some become callous to it, and some use it in mockery out of defiance, but this only underscores the point that “it,” not just death but the “it” that comes with it, is a big deal.
My conversation with my dad fell flat because it was as nothing in this presence; so it is with any social pretense or discourse at all. Death tells us, “Here, look. This is your true home” - not the cold stillness of the dead body, but the awesome “other” which greets what comes out of the body, now finally free to acknowledge that which was always there. The rest of our concerns are like the golden calf worshiped by the Israelites even as the Lord spoke on high to Moses. We swim through this “other” like fish through water, but are overwhelmed by the frenzy of active life. It is often only death that reminds us of what our priorities really are: the peace-filled reflection and awe-filled worship of the holy presence. For if we understood, we would know that we are always on holy ground, just as our still bodies and freed souls will one day proclaim to all in the sacred sound of silence.
The party was over and the darkness beyond the tiki torches was denser for the descending fog. I was more than ready for bed and one beer over where I should have been, but she wanted to stay later. “She” was a retired nurse, and even as her husband shifted uncomfortably in his seat, she projected a great interest to talk. Things hummed around recent events and church stuff for about an hour until we got around to spiritual things, where death inevitably entered, and where, it became apparent, she wanted to be.
I did too, even as I had to fight slipping into sleep. I had been against the thought of death until well into middle age, when it finally appeared to me as the great arbiter of truth. I explain how this happened in the story “Dark Angel” in my book, Beneath the Turning Stars. I have spoken of it before here, so I will not go into details, but in summary, it is about a car accident on a road deep in the woods of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that a friend and I happened upon on the way to the family cabin. A few other people had already stopped, and something in the feel of things out there in the middle of nowhere compelled us to stop too. It was as we began to walk to the wreck that we felt it, the eerie presence of spirit that I called the dark angel. It was still and calm and frightening in its depth. We were to find that a 17 year-old girl had died in the accident, and the feeling from her death hung with us for weeks. It was unavoidable and totally otherworldly.
The retired nurse knew it well, but she insisted that death had a feeling of complete peace and was not eerie at all. She did admit that new nurses often ran from a room where someone had died exactly because of this feeling, but they were then talked into returning. Death and its attendant spirit was, as these seasoned nurses knew, normal, and only once had it ever been horrible. Our guest had not witnessed this, the screaming of a woman dying of cancer, but she and all the other nurses who were not there said that they were relieved that they had missed it. That would have been horrible. But this was exceedingly uncommon. To the people who worked in death, it was almost always a peaceful and solemn experience.
I had read of this before, about the “beauty” of the after-death spirit. In the sweet little book Night’s Bright Darkness, by Sally Read, the author opens with a remembrance of an Irish nurse who washed and wrapped corpses. The nurse treated the bodies politely as one would treat delicate people, and after the preparation would part the curtains to the day and open the window, saying, “Now we open the window and let his soul fly…,” just as she said for the man who Read had helped to prepare with her. Read had been terrified up until then, but suddenly she felt the corpse become small and insignificant. How, she thought, could this happen in a modern London hospital where, “The soul was long out of fashion.”?
I still recall with a bit of shame the last time I saw my terminally ill father a short time before the incident in the woods. By then I lived far away, and my visits to him were infrequent. He had been in an old folk’s home for over a year, ever since he had become incontinent and blind, and in that time he had become almost totally silent, sleeping most of the time. They said he had cancer of the brain, but no one really knew for sure. Really, to all involved, he was just another dying old man with no future.
The hallway to his room had the usual stink of urine and antiseptic, and lost-looking old people with walkers and wheel chairs wandered about. I found him in bed and asleep as usual, but he awakened instantly when I said hello. He replied very brightly and with great pleasure, “It’s good to see you again, Fred!” Still oddly uncomfortable, I began to mention some political shenanigans then current, as my father had always had a keen interest in the news. The words fell in the air like lead. It was not just that he was not listening, but that this other spirit was there, the same one that I would come across a few years later in the UP. It had no interest in the politics or daily life of Man. Rather, it spoke of truth as a deep cave speaks of silence. Both my words and my attitude felt irrelevant. My dad would slip into death a few months later.
In the Book of Exodus, we find Moses tending a flock of sheep near Mt Horeb (Sinai) when an angel of the lord appeared to him in a fire flaming out of a bush. As Exodus 3: 4-5 says, “When the Lord saw him coming over to look at it more closely, God called out to him from the bush, ‘Moses! Moses!...Come no nearer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground.’” This is it: in the presence of death we are on holy ground, which can be anywhere. This is what we feel. Death does not bring all of the Holy down upon us, but it is the opening, an unwavering and undeniable presence that is stunningly real, so much so that the uninitiated run from it in fear. Some become callous to it, and some use it in mockery out of defiance, but this only underscores the point that “it,” not just death but the “it” that comes with it, is a big deal.
My conversation with my dad fell flat because it was as nothing in this presence; so it is with any social pretense or discourse at all. Death tells us, “Here, look. This is your true home” - not the cold stillness of the dead body, but the awesome “other” which greets what comes out of the body, now finally free to acknowledge that which was always there. The rest of our concerns are like the golden calf worshiped by the Israelites even as the Lord spoke on high to Moses. We swim through this “other” like fish through water, but are overwhelmed by the frenzy of active life. It is often only death that reminds us of what our priorities really are: the peace-filled reflection and awe-filled worship of the holy presence. For if we understood, we would know that we are always on holy ground, just as our still bodies and freed souls will one day proclaim to all in the sacred sound of silence.
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