I do not like chainsaws but cannot get myself to work for hours with a saw and ax when chainsaws can work so well - when they work. But they can cut off fingers and hands and even legs in less time than seems possible. They get stuck in trees, and the growling roar blocks the sound of the wood as it is about to fall. With a large tree, one has to note carefully its every twitch, its pressure on the saw or lack thereof, to determine when the sinews that hold it upright are finally broken, and in which direction it will fall. Still, it can twist or kick back, thousands of pounds, tons that can take off your head in an instant. It is madness, really, but that's what we do to save money or to make it. I am nervous about it as I speak. It is a monster that has lived for over one hundred years, and it will obey the laws of physics no matter my good humor or moral standing.
It is a monster like death. It will do what it will do and there is nothing to stop it. Touch it with that maddening saw and it is like being born - our lives are put into danger the instant we start on the journey. Hopefully, I will live past this tree. I will not live past life. Death will come like the cold winds in November, no matter what.
Kathleen Singh, in her book "The Grace in Dying," writes from her experience as a hospice worker, one of the hardest jobs the world might have. She said that at the beginning of her work, a single word would form in her mind as she went from house to house, from hospital to convalescent home: tragedy. The terror and hopelessness of the relatives, the depression of the dying all brought up that one word. But we know she could not write a book about that, and soon she lets us in on what time and experience has taught her: that, somewhere in the dying process,an epiphany is reached, not just by a few, but by everyone. Some in the dying process - she calls it the near-dying experience - reach it sooner, weeks before actual death and have told her such things as "I am being filled with light" or "I can understand now..." Others reach it only at the moment of death, where she can see the radiance of eyes and skin and feel the relief, as if a great simmering energy were let go. In all cases, she says a "hush," a sacred silence fills the area - often followed by the grief of the relatives, to be sure, but always, always bringing that sense of the ineffable, of the ultimate in understanding.
Our death, then, is our Nirvana, our Risen moment, our glory. Early in the book she has intimated that perhaps this does not last past death for some, but that all have it, at least at that moment. Death, she said, is not to be feared. Death, she says, shows that we are loved.
We will see what else she brings to us in the following blogs, but I know the feeling from my own experiences. I have written about deaths before, a few recently, of the girl in the car and my father. With the girl, there was the element of tragedy because of her health and her age. With my father, it was simply the hush, the silence in the depth of unspoken knowledge, of the logos as the Greeks called it, the Word that is beyond words, straight to meaning. It was there for the girl, too, palpable behind the human tragedy. Singh is right - death is our call to grace, our reward for simply living, whether as heathens, Christians or as pick-pockets. Everything else is small in comparison, and no one can take away the freedom that is in our personal death - no dictator or concentration camp commander can control us then.
But still I fear it, probably to the end. But it is a strange fear, for it compels, not repels. That is why I read these books, why I write this blog and website, and why you read it (among others, I know). It is the secret, the key to the mystery, the one thing that drives the characters in the best of plots. This, though, is no work of fiction. We are the main characters in the greatest plot ever made, and sooner or later we come to the cliff-hanger - and drop off. The resolution, unlike in novels, is what happens after we drop off the cliff.
More to come from Kathleen Singh. We will see what the living metaphor of lives on the edge can bring to our own understanding, to our own key to our own mystery. FK