Anam Cara

IN OUR TRADITION, THE LONELINESS OF DEATH IS USUALLY described with reference to those around the deathbed and the heartbreak that death brings. Yet for the one dying, how lonely it must be to lose the world. This is the first time that it is about to happen. All difficulty and sorrow up to now still happened in the world, in the home or some other familiar places. No matter how intense the devastation of the pain was, one still continued here, picked up the rhythm of one’s life and continued on. There are things of primal familiarity so deep that we never notice them. Being here in the world is a wondrous gift. Because we have always been here, we never render the surprise and shock of ‘being here’ explicit. From day to day we assume fully the role of being here; there is no elsewhere to consider as a destination. And because we are always in our bodies, we never gain distance. Every feeling, thought, delight, danger and confusion we have experienced, we experienced them all in this one body. The body is the inestimable gift that grounds our memory, perception and imagination. The horror of death is that we are in the same moment forced out of both worlds. We lose the world and we lose ourselves. There can be no greater distance on earth than that between the moment when life ends and the new moment when our post-life begins. The distance is infinite because of the utter break in physical continuity. We know nothing of what it is like to step onto that other shore. And it is incredible that no-one has ever been able to cleanly return to explain the journey. This raw factuality renders the loss of the world poignant and helpless. We may ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light’, but we cannot hold our grip here. Like the fall of sleep, it comes over us. However, this sleep will allow us no dreams and will never let us through to morning.

This is forced eviction from the world and from the body, the only home we know. To ordinary human eyes it seems to be a total and definitive eviction. Once evicted, we can never return. Within the whole sequence of life’s narrative, there is no cut like death. Every other ending in life is gathered forward into some other new beginning. The end of childhood is the beginning of growth into adulthood. The loss of a friendship can become the space for a new love or for a sorrow that can blight your life. One way or the other, the narrative continues. Not so with death. The continuity ends. The line of a life is left suspended from a cliff-edge. Everything is gone.

T

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HOREOGRAPHY OF

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EATH

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ILENCE AND

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TILLNESS

Nothing for us there is to dread in death.

LUCRETIUS

WHEN SOMEONE WE LOVE DIES, IT IS STRANGE COMING TO TERMS with their disappearance. At death it becomes clear how invisible a person’s life really is. The body still remains somewhat visible. But it has already become empty and is crossing the threshold into its own transformation. The crucial event is that the life of the person has now departed. Like a candle blown out, the flame has vanished. This was the old philosophical question: where does the flame go, when the candle is blown out? In one, unseen swiftness the life goes out. We see nothing. It seems that the essence of a person, the spirit which pervades every pore and cell and is expressed in every thought, feeling and act, can withdraw in one sweep like a wave from the shoreline. It is strange that something which was invisible in the first place can actually vanish and cause the ultimate collapse of everything: the memory, the breath, the body, the thoughts, the knowing, the Eros, the dreams and the eyes and the touch. Nowhere else in creation does an ending take so much with one stroke. Quantitatively in terms of objects there are larger endings. Yet because the object called the human body holds a world that death stops, it is an incredible event. Death is the end of a world; it unravels a unique geography of feeling, tenderness, creativity, sorrow, doubt and shadow; it all comes apart like a piece of knitting unravelling, stitch by stitch.

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EMARKABLE

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HING

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EARD

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