It happened around 1982 for the first time. Then again, in 2009. Only twice in my lifetime. Maybe there will be more. The events stayed with me and so I remember them well. Both times, grace filled. I remember the cavernous silence between words, the echo of them in my head, unsure if they were mine. Yes, only mine – but as if thrown from the throat of some distant expanse I felt growing in the room. Thought... silence... words... silence. An immense sky of memory lifting itself up into the sheltering stillness above the bed.
And I didn't think of time or place or the events of the day. I was emptied and filled at once, over and over and over again with the moments in front of me; time expanding out then slingshot back to the breathing. Always the breathing. I watched for the chest, rising and falling. I watched for it, taught and constricted. I held my own breath between the in and the out of the movement, aghast at the gap of motionless air. How long? How long between the holding... the letting go. Holding... letting go.
There are three things adjusting your awareness at a time of someone's dying. Three things present in the bubble of the room. Memory, presence and words. It's the words that ground you whether spoken in a whisper or heard through the mind's great voice. Presence floats and focuses on the rising and the falling of the blanket, the pattern of the carpet, the light filtered through the curtain, the freckle perhaps, at the base of the chin that you never noticed before. And memory, that squeezes under the closed door of the room and into that presence, taking you away momentarily, from the waiting.
An entire lifetime can be lived out in the room. And when you enter that space, you want to enter clean. But you never do. You bring in the threads of your own life to the occasion. The costume of who you are in the world, that the one in the bed is in the process of leaving behind; the clothes they have shed lying at your feet. You can't help it. It's not your fault. There are far too many roles you are still playing, far too much clothing to drape yourself in. But at some point in the proceedings, you wish, you pray, you long to be naked. You hope for clarity. Please, let them know who I am and how I have loved them. Let the reality of what matters wash over me, at least a little; their reality - so that when I walk back out through the door, I walk out more alive, more grateful, more aware of the frail and removable skin.
I know the sanctity of the room. Holier than a church. Limitless sky and black earth. Fragile firmament and rich soil. No real walls to speak of in the mind. No rules. And maybe even the sound of trumpets, albeit only in the head, that proclaim to the new ground, the new frontier, that he/she is dying. Prepare to receive them! While time is a ball that bounces in and out of questionable moments of now?... now?... now? The blink of an eye where the past is present, the present has passed, and the future is forever coming.
It's that room that informs me of my freedom. The amount of love possible. The hopefulness of human beings to change the décor of the spaces they find themselves in, change the helplessness of despair. It's the room I walk out of that allows me to walk into the world fresh. It's the ghosts in the rooms I've left behind, the loved one's spectres, free and flying; and my own, still bound – that opens fissures of possibility to make the world I walk through here on this earth, more welcoming.
Hundreds of thousands of rooms and ghosts; and I have been in and with two of them. And how many, I wonder, who were torn from the fabric, have never set foot in one of them? The sanctity of their personal passages needing to be entreated to love alone without a physical presence watching over them. Just a sense of love. Deep, yet incomplete.
And anyway - this love that exists in the ephemeral span of a lifetime, how long should it last? It's never undone. Never completed, even upon departure. That is what is to be understood; there's always some left behind to pay forward to those just like us – namely those who will die; namely, everyone. And for those we cannot know, in faraway lands, in all the neighbouring houses, all of us out on the street - those who will, despite all coverings, also shed their clothes.... it is for their sake and ours too, that we must care enough to imagine each other's lives.
BLINK OF AN EYE
