from "Yellow Taxi"
from "Yellow Taxi"
by Eve Joseph
Having had firsthand experience of the excruciating death of a loved one, I find myself asking whether I can find a new path into the reality of death. I am entering the phase of life where death is becoming a frequent (though not yet monthly or annual) companion. Death is a breaking of the heart. It literally creates a break in the energy of love that two people share in our material world. But I am asking the question wether it has to be a complete break. I am touching the edges of my relationship with Roy after his passing. I am experiencing the possibility that our connection hasn’t really broken. It has just changed. When I remember the experience of my hand folded into his, I can still feel the sensation of connection with him. Don’t ask me to explain that. I can’t. But I hope others who have lost loved one’s can relate, or see what I am trying to say. This short story, excerpted from the book At the End of Life, True Stories About How We Die doesn’t really explain it either. It’s simply showing me that I have gained some courage when it comes to looking at my mortality and that of those I love. I am no longer turning my face away. I am wondering and pondering.
This short excerpt is published with thanks to anthology editor Lee Gutkind and the folks at Creative Nonfiction. You can find out more about his book and publisher at In Fact Books, 2012 https://www.creativenonfiction.org/books/end-life.
On my first community visit as a hospice counselor, a naked woman stood on the dresser beside her bed and flung a perfume bottle at my head; she thought she was in the war and her arsenal consisted of little colored bottles of eau de toilette. She had captured the ridge and was there for the long haul. Two injections of Haldol by the nurse eventually cleared the woman’s delusions, but what helped me understand what the woman was seeing on that ridge and to talk her down into the safety of her bed—the bunker, we called it—were my mother’s stories of the war.
It is a complicated thing to be employed to help people die. On the one hand, each situation, each person, is unique, and each death a profound experience; on the other, the job is like any other. You set your alarm to wake up and grab a coffee on your way to work. Traffic is bad, and you know the last parking spot is going to be gone. You vow again to leave earlier, but that never happens.
A man dying of leukemia once asked me if I did anything useful. In his last months he had built a farmer’s market on his land so that his wife and four sons would be able to support themselves after his death. Without thinking I answered that I baked loaves of bread. It was a lie, but it became a fortuitous lie. He told me to bring my loaves to the market and said his family would keep half the profit; the other half was mine. The first month after his death I decided I’d do what I told the man, and I made five hundred dollars selling banana, chocolate, blueberry, pumpkin, apple, and zucchini loaves. I followed recipes; I made them up. A few years later, when my marriage ended, I supported myself and my children with money from the loaves I sold at the man’s market.
It’s that way with the work of helping the dying; you start out with good intentions and sometimes end up in a bunker reeking of perfume.~
In one of the rooms facing the courtyard [of the hospice where I worked], cherry blossoms blew in through an open window and fell on a sleeping woman. I was in the room with her husband, whom I had met only moments before, when he had collapsed in my arms and said, “If there is a God and this is his plan, how can I ever believe in that God again; and if there is no God how can I live?” I was new to the work and had no answer for him. I hadn’t even begun to formulate the questions. I remember looking at her pale skin and black hair and thinking she looked like Snow White in a Red Cross bed. Her window, like all the others on the unit, was kept slightly open in order for the spirit to leave.
~
In my mother’s last year she was so weak she was unable to leave her house; in her last months she was confined to her bedroom. I asked the undertaker, when he arrived, to leave her face uncovered—which he did, although reluctantly, as it was against protocol. When we took her outside to the waiting van to take her body to the funeral home, rain fell on her cold face. The rain fell on her without knowing she was dead; it fell on her as it fell on earth. It fell on her the way it fell on Holly Golightly and Cat in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and it fell on her the way it had fallen on the attic roof when I was a girl and everywhere water was running, and my mother and I were dry in our adjoining beds and full of sleep.
We labor to be born and we labor to die. Breath is crucial to both kinds of labor. Prenatal classes focus on breath and pain; the progression in Lamaze classes is from deep to shallow breathing. The dying, too, move from regular deep breaths to rapid mouth breathing. At the end, the dying often look like fish out of water, their mouths opening and closing in a kind of reflex. One could almost mistake these last breaths for silent kisses.
Babies arrive on their own time; there is an estimated due date, but it is the baby who releases a signal and triggers labor. Sometimes the dying wait for someone to arrive from out of town; sometimes they die when people have stepped out of the room to have a smoke.
You can’t help but wonder. Once, I went with a nurse to the home of a woman who seemed unable to die; a bee buzzed insistently against the inside of a sliding glass door until someone finally slid it open and let the bee out. The dying woman took her last breath when the door was opened and was gone before it closed again. To find a honey tree, says Annie Dillard, paraphrasing Thoreau, you must first catch a bee when its legs are heavy with pollen and it is ready for home. Release it and watch where it goes and follow it for as long as you can see it; wait until another bee comes, catch it, release it and watch. Keep doing that and sure enough it will lead you home. Bee to bee leading us home. How does the spirit leave? We don’t know, but every window on the hospice unit is open, just a crack, just in case.
~
I can’t say that I’ve ever come up with an adequate answer for the questions about God and fairness from the man whose wife lay dying as the cherry blossoms drifted in through the open window. The closest I’ve come is my own realization of what hospice work asks of us: that we enter the darkness without a map of the way home, that we accompany people as far as we can.
Eve Joseph grew up in North Vancouver. Her first book of poetry, The Startled Heart, was published by Oolichan Books in 2004 and nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her second book, The Secret Signature of Things, came out with Brick Books in the spring of 2010. She received the 2010 P.K. Page Founders' Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the 2009 CBC Literary Awards in the creative nonfiction category.
* This essay originally appeared in the anthology At the End of Life: True Stories about How We Die (In Fact Books, 2012).