***
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 25th, the tree would be stark naked, jutting up amongst a
grey concrete sea under a grey sky. On January 6th, 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 28th 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 25th 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)
