December 3, 2012 | The Deep: An Essay

The Colorado River cuts through layers of the earth's surface to form the Grand Canyon, reaching what Norman MacLean has dubbed "the basement of time." Some of the earth's oldest rocks, thousands of feet thick, was lifted 300 million years ago by monumental geologic forces into a great range of mountains estimated six miles high, the height of the Himalayas. Over time, the mountains eroded into a plain. About one billion years ago that plain was raised into a second mountain range, also worn away by millions of years of rain, wind and frost. During later ages, the entire region sank beneath an inland sea, primitive shellfish fossilizing in sea bottoms eventually hardening to shale. Life was crystallized here, caught in time to be forever part of earth. Eons later the region rose again as a high plateau; the former sea bottom now on top and the ancient rocks below. What rises must eventually fall and what falls will rise. The Colorado River then carved the Canyon inch by inch over the millennia - down, down, down - reaching ancient rocks and exposing evidence of petrified life almost a mile below the surface.

***

“She leaned down and looked at his lifeless face and Liesel kissed her best friend, Rudy Steiner, soft and true on his lips. He tasted dusty and sweet. He tasted like regret in the shadows of trees and in the glow of the anarchist's suit collection. She did not say goodbye. She was incapable, and after a few more minutes at his side, she was able to tear herself from the ground. It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on...” - Markus Zusak as Death, The Book Thief

***

We drove toward the Grand Canyon last week on a road trip. We were never made it. “Don’t worry, it’s nothing worth seeing,” Doctor Earl tells me. The eyes of the Flagstaff Medical Center’s physician were playful and intimidating, eating away at my last hope of seeing the massive crevice. It is four P.M. and the light outside is fading. Dr. Earl sports a shock of wiry gray hair and peers through thick rectangle frames of glass, without which I wonder if the bearded man would have quite the air of authority he does. “It’s just a hole in ground,” he gives a chuckle, disinfecting silver needles on a white plastic tray. “But I’ve heard it’s a pretty big hole,” I try to grin, attempting to keep up with his morose, doctor-like sense of humor. I am crouched across a sterile plastic table, an insipid green hospital gown falling at my sides to expose white flesh and the knobs of spine that jut up the center of my back in an emerging mountain range. “Think Halloween Cat,” he has told me, and I arch for all I am worth, hugging my knees to my chest. I’m aware that my pale breasts are exposed at the sides but don’t mind, as here I am a body, an object of skin and organs and blood in need of testing and fixing. “Okay, here comes the prick,” Dr. Earl pierces a needle between two vertebrae protruding at the base of my spine. James holds my hand as my nails pierce deeply into his flesh. A murmured “sorry” emerges from my quivering lips as tears begin to pool in my eyes. The needle keeps pushing, forcing, driving itself into the bone. Something is wrong. The “stop” that leaks my lips is the desperate cry of a child. I feel the needle inching out, wrenching itself loose. And again it enters in a new place, driving forward, splitting. “This isn’t working,” a fervent whisper is given from Dr. Earl to the physician’s assistant. “She has thick skin”. I want to laugh and cry out. Thick skin? I thought having thick skin was being able to handle a little prick. I thought thick skin was what I was supposed to have. “What else have we got?” The men pierce a larger needle into my back as my world begins to spin and black and red patches simmer inside my tightly crushed eyelids. I wish my body to fall away into a sleepy abyss, yet the needle persists deeper and deeper, jerking me from any solace I find in desperate fantasy.

Driving away from the Grand Canyon the next morning we made a promise to be back one day, and four days later I am lying flat in a bed at James’ grandfather’s house. It is the night after Thanksgiving. I urged James to leave tonight, to visit friends of his childhood in town. For days my head has been plundered with needles in any position other than lying dead flat, and I have relegated myself to bed, away from the world that blinds my eyes. “Everything is fine,” I have told my mum and her partner, Guy. It’s just a spinal headache: leaking spinal fluid. They’re common after a lumbar puncture. Yet Guy has just left a message on my phone. I clasp my legs that are beginning to sprout soft winter hairs as I rock side to side. “This is serious. I know it is heavy and this may be the most serious message you have ever received,” Guys’ voice echoes from a million miles away. “Bethany, you have two options. You can lie back and pretend nothing is wrong. You have one of the highest pain thresholds of anyone I’ve met and I know it is tempting to do so. Or, you can choose to fight. You can start banging on the tables. You can make this choice and only you alone can make it. Bethany I just don’t want you to finally see someone and they have to say, “I wish you had come in sooner”.” I know Guy is speaking on behalf of my mother and is speaking with love, yet my breathing hastens. “I know this is heavy but it is time,” he says. “It is time to start banging on the tables”. The room is cold and silent apart from my raspy breath. It’s just a headache, that’s all we know, just a headache. Yet why, I ask, was I just up a few minutes ago, secretly and furiously punching a will into a keyboard, making promises and prayers to a God I don’t believe in? Why do I fear for life and death in a way I have never felt before?

I am on my knees to life, I write. I promise I have more to give to this world. I promise I have more love to give. I promise I have a legacy of love to give. I’ve been thinking about it as I lie here in fear. If or when I make it through this, I need to have James’ child. I’ve been so afraid of that thought. I’ve avoided it like the plague. But I realize now the fragility of life. I’m not guaranteed. My mind is wandering. Imagine if I was gone and there were nothing left, no bastion of our love, no legacy of the dream we share? He deserves a part of me. I realize now that love truly is everything, love and family. Nothing else really matters. Tears rack my body and I begin to shiver. I’m trying to be strong but I’m scared. I’m really scared. I know something is wrong.

***

“A small fact:

You are going to die.... does this worry you?” (Zusak, 1)

Like many humans, Death tries to find ways to give meaning to his work in The Book Thief, the favorite novel of my childhood. Death, the narrator, collects stories of courageous humans such as that of Liesel, our young and idealist main character. He searches for hope in the gathering, reading, and telling of human stories, saying it is, "to prove to myself that you, and your human existence is worth it." At the beginning of the novel Death says the most painful part of his job is seeing, "the survivors, the leftover humans…the ones who are left behind, crumbling among the jigsaw puzzle of realization, despair, and surprise. Unlike any ideas of grim reapers and sickles, Death tells us that if we want to see what he looks like, we should "find a mirror". All humans die, and so, he says, we all look like Death. In a way, we're all united with Death, and he's the thing that unites all of us. He is part of what makes us essentially human.

***

It was always a race to find my brother’s grave. My family would visit him twice a year at the Awanui cemetery. My other brother Aden and I would leap out of the car and begin to scamper through the crowded concrete rows, our small hearts beating and eyes darting across the sea of pillars. Our brother, Campbell, rested somewhere between five and seven rows back from where we would park, and about five segments inward. This is very loosely approximate: we were never able to keep count to any more definitive measure as the cemetery was designed like a racetrack. So it was that Aden and I never knew quite where to find him, as we never knew if we were parking in the same place. The asphalt strip encircled the graveyard in a perfect oval, cutting a neat path between the fake flowers and neatly trimmed gardens that separated the military and commoners, the older sections and the newly passed on. If you kept on driving you could drive around it forever.

***

 “The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place,” said Percy Bysshe Shelley in Adonais. To one that had to visit a sibling twice a year, this proposition seems rather preposterous. Yet if you look at a cemetery without one’s own selfish fear of soon abiding in such a place I suppose it really is a rather beautiful place. There is not a place that brings people together in such a reverence for our fragile life, with its scattered flowers and wreaths, climbing with ivy and green mosses. In fact, the cemetery, in its tranquility and unity, could be rather heaven-like. "Since the soul of the deceased was thought to need provisions for various wants in post mortem existence,” John Heller writes in Burial Customs of the Romans. “The ground about the tomb was often laid out as a garden, where the spirit might wander and enjoy itself in its own bit of the Elysian Fields”. Life divides many, death brings us all together.

***

There was once a solitary tree in the Awanui cemetery. It stood deep within the asphalt oval, one row back and three sections beyond Campbell’s grave. I don’t remember what type of tree it was, but I do remember it being deciduous, unlike the native evergreen trees that grew in the area. On Campbell’s birthday, August the 25^th, the tree would be stark naked, jutting up amongst a grey concrete sea under a grey sky. On January 6^th, the day he died, acid green leaves were budding, cloaking it from head to toe with new life.

I realize now that we always visited the cemetery at two distinct times of year: the very middle of summer and the heart of winter. In my faded memory there was not a time in January that Campbell’s small patch of earth in the middle of the sea of concrete wasn’t bathed in sunlight. Meanwhile there was not a single time in August that I didn’t catch a glimpse of my mum pulling her coat tightly around her body as she stood on top of my brother under gathering rainclouds. There were never any birthday balloons. This realization seems contradictory, yet I can’t manage to wrap this thought into a profound metaphor. He should have been born in summer like Aden and I were, when the leaves were budding, and he should have died in winter, not the other way around. Some say death is “meant to be”, but to us, it always seemed unfair.

***

The word cemetery derives from Greek koimētērion, or 'dormitory', which comes from koiman, 'put to sleep'. “Like death warmed up” means to be tired or ill, and the Germanic word “Tod” is the root of ‘to die’ (here I think of Hot Toddies and sleepy winter nights). Indeed I found cemeteries to be strangely sleepy places – there was something dreadfully calming about sharing a field with thousands who have fallen into the deepest slumber. After Campbell’s death due to suffocation after rolling over in the night, sleep didn’t come to my mother for three years. I wondered if she too, feared dropping into that same eternal state. As for myself, a young girl at the time, I don’t remember ‘sadness’ yet do remember long nights lying awake, defying sleep in fear of not waking up. The concepts of sleep and death blurred over the post-mortem months. Perhaps sometimes it was the simple daze of life, passing along from day to day. Living without sentient consciousness didn’t seem too different from death (I still feel this in shopping malls sometimes).

***

The tree was our one point of reference. I arrived on a hot summer’s day after being away in the United States for two years. My mother waited in the car first as she always had, and I climbed out to begin the search. Aden, walking beside me, veered off at a row that I am sure is too early. I chuckled. Wandering aimlessly, I tried to find clues in the names I have scanned over for years, treading over the grass growing from their remains.

Here is the old man and his wife who died together, they always have red roses placed neatly above them in silver pots of water. Here is the boy who passed at Campbell’s age who has a giant powder blue teddy bear engraved on his headstone. Here is Sophia – she was seven. Here is Mr. Matthews, whose stone is cracked down the middle with moss growing in the crevice. My Poppa tried to clean it off for a time – it grew back every time and we soon gave up.

With frustration, I span around in search of Aden. Pacing a few rows ahead of me, his head was cocked to one side in concentration as he scanned the rows. My brother’s feet were steadfast, no longer running as he once did, but methodical in his quest to find his younger brother. His shoulders were now broad and hair darkened, his rounded cheeks of boyhood given way to chiseled cheekbones. It was a strange place to realize my brother was no longer a boy. “Any luck?” he yelled at me, his hands raised slightly in defeat. I shook my head and he began striding toward me. Only then as I watched him striding tall above the strewn graves I realized the tree was gone. My jaw fell. Aden now at my side, his gaze also reached the empty spot my eyes were locked onto. With a sharp inhalation, forgetting our quest, we wandered over to the tree while a certain sadness gripped my heart. I wondered if this is the tug of sadness one is supposed to feel in a field of the dead. A shiver ran down my spine. 

The stub jutted from the ground, its trunk beginning to crack apart and gather rainwater in its crevices. Aden reached it at the same time as I, and together we stood peering at the quiet passing of life. “I guess we took for granted it would always be here,” I said to my living brother, still staring at the wooden stump. Behind us, our mother had arrived at Campbell’s grave. Silently apologizing to her son in the ground beneath her for taking for granted that his breath would continue, she knelt to the ground.

***

“I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race - rarely do I simply estimate it. The same thing [can] be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant. I am haunted by Humans.” (Zusak, 550)

***

We are in a lavish hotel room - my mother, James and I. My headaches have departed and the three of us have walked out of our third hospital today arm in arm after three days spent as an inpatient. James and I have arrived back from dinner, a festivity my mum professed not be interested in, to find a half-empty bottle of wine. She wakes as we walk in. “Why are you back?” she asks, bewildered. Her blonde hair nests softly above her head and she blinks as we turn on the lights. “Aren’t you supposed to be gone? Where is Guy?” I walk over and stroke Mum’s forehead. “It’s okay mum, we’re back from dinner, that’s all”. I sit beside her on the couch. “Are you drunk?” I ask gently. “Oh, maybe,” she grins girlishly at me. “We brought some food for you mum, here, I’ll help you up”. And so the three of us sit around a polished hotel table high above Seattle, the city lights outside glimmering their winter lights, eating James’s birthday cake (it’s his 28^th today). Around the table we talk about Campbell for the first time. My mum tells us of the unfairness of it all, how she wishes Aden had a brother to grow up with, and how she still thinks of him each day. My mother’s eyes lock onto mine. “Death isn’t fate. I always hated when people thought my son was supposed to die. He should have lived.” I stare at her. The room is silent. Death hangs in the air like an unwanted guest.

Death: the permanent end of someone or something. Today it was confirmed a brain tumor is spreading through my right frontal lobe. Today I lay in a hospital motionless, peed in a bedpan too small and felt the warm liquid run down my skin and soak the bed sheets beneath me. Today the tears of my family and I sitting in the stark room sprang like a mountain spring, and today I told my husband that I would always love him and that I’m not afraid of dying. We lie awake every night in the large hotel bed, as the lights outside glimmer and our tears become one, knowing we will always be together.

***

I’m not supposed to talk about death and I’m not supposed to write this. I’m not allowed to wonder if I’m dying. I’m not supposed to plan for death, or think of it, or look up the meaning or origin of it. Death is a dirty, soiled word. But death, it’s a fact we all live with. It’s a place we are all moving toward. On Tuesday I will have a portion of my brain removed. A week later I will find out what kind of tumor I have, dictating the course of my remaining life. I no longer pretend that it will be forever. Tumors, they have told us, don’t go away. They grow by invasion. The average life expectancy ranges from eighteen months to five years. Granted, I plan to live much longer than any estimate they lay upon my life, as my mother cannot lose a second child and James cannot lose his best friend, colleague and wife, not yet. Yes, my heart aches as I write, and the tears I have learned finally to spill pool beneath my eyes.

We will return to New Zealand soon. We will return as autumn approaches the Northern Hemisphere. This time on August the 25^th I will kneel at the grave of my younger brother with a reverence for the impermanence of life never known to me before. Human to human, animal to animal, I will kneel at the base of the tree, forever now bare. The road around the cemetery will likely still be an unending asphalt path. And as usual, we won’t find my brother until passing the graves of many other fellow spirits who have fallen into their dormitories, from where they slumber eternally to sip their toddies, reminders of our lucid dream. Perhaps I’ll join my brother with these tired souls someday. Yet isn’t that the real key? Someday.

It’s a cliché a million times over, but it certainly stands. We are all going to die. By no means does my brother’s tombstone, or my brain’s tumor bode that I shall join the depths in an unnatural order. I do not resign my body. Not yet.

As for my spirit, the physical world may never take that. I’m told that energy cannot be created nor can it be destroyed. It can only change form. Does it not do that constantly, even in a lifetime? Mother’s lessons become truths, dreams become quests, journeys fulfill our metamorphoses, and new perspectives dictate our daily choices. In love and family my spirit, like all spirits, will continue shall I join my brother. I’m not supposed to write of death. But I cannot and perhaps should not run from the word. I am comforted that a garden awaits us: our body and our spirits. Cemeteries are indeed the Elysian Fields, the continuation of human life, the garden of our souls. It seems that the earth remains our eternal home, the most beautiful and sacred garden of all.  With that said, I still plan on returning to the Grand Canyon, whether it be in the near future or years down the road. For if I am to end in a hole in the ground, or ashes in the sea, why not take solace in the greatest grave of all? One that freezes time in fossils, in which ashes can breathe and rivers run eternally?

***

“At some point in time I will be standing over you, as genially as possible. Your soul will be in my arms. A color will be perched on my shoulder. I will carry you gently away.” (Zusak, 4)