Anam Cara

IF SOMEONE WERE TO ASK ME: WHAT IS THE MOST REMARKABLE thing you have ever heard? I would say: the most remarkable thing I ever heard is, there is death. When we were children there was an old woman who minded us now and again. She lived across the river and it was a real treat when we were brought to visit her. She was like a grandmother to us. Though everyone was poor, she could always manage to have some surprise put aside for us. Then one day, she died. It was the first time I heard of death. To a child’s mind, it was the most incredible news. She was gone and would never come back. We would never see her again and no-one could say where she had gone. They talked of heaven, but it seemed like a feeble fairytale when pitted against her vanishing. I could not believe it. Death had come out of nowhere and taken her. I had never once even suspected that there was such a thing as death. It came as a pure shock. To think that everyone had known about death all along and that they could continue working and talking while knowing this awful end, this bleak disappearance awaited each of us. To a child’s mind it was a massive breakage of innocence. What struck me too was how silently death came to take her.

One would surely have expected that such an intensely dramatic event would have been accompanied by a great whirl of sound and colour, and yet the opposite happened. Death was not an action; it was an anti-act. It came silently and left an awful silence in its wake. There is deep silence in death. It can carry out its task without invitation or warning. Death needs no word to frighten or force anyone. In silence it takes you into a silence from which no echo returns. From the moment of your beginning, through all days and climates of mood and dream, the music of your heart has never stopped. Sending its rhythm along vein and bone, it has held you alive and present. Even when you visited deep into the realm of silence, your heart’s music never ceased. Only death’s silence will stop it.

Death is also the master of stillness. Everything that has life moves. Raised on a farm, we learned early to notice the slightest movement against the spread of the landscape. The hill-man’s eye could spot something stirring far off on the other side of a hill; it may have been a hare, a rabbit, another animal or a bird. The eye was trained to the rhythm of the place. Against the backdrop of this familiar landscape, if an animal seemed too still, that alerted the eye too. The animal could be sick or dead. In the world of nature, life moves, but death makes still. When you first see the remains of someone who has died what strikes you is how a presence that was always astir with voice, gesture and gaze is suddenly enveloped in cold stillness. Your eye wants to believe the person is merely asleep. You imagine you glimpse the chest stirring with breath. You stare deeper and your eyes recoil from the unnatural stillness. A neighbour who lived near two elderly ladies told me how he was called to the house as one of them had been taken ill. As soon as he came into the kitchen, he realized the woman was dead. Poignantly her sister was holding her hand, shaking her and calling her name over and over as if trying to awaken her from sleep. The neighbour gently calmed her and explained that her sister had gone. Her inability to register had been due to shock and also to the inability to see her loss. In a way, it was a natural response. She had never seen her sister dead before. It is a tremendous shock to come upon a loved one freeze-framed in that stillness.

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THE ACT OF DYING IS A HUGE PERSONAL EVENT. NOTHING ELSE that you do in your life will bring such change. In no other experience is the transformation as ultimate and irreversible. In no other experience in your life do you have the opportunity to become invisible. Your death will make you permanently invisible. You will become free of the human gaze and free of place. While you are alive you are always somewhere. Through death you will be no longer bound to any location. Death is the absolute and irreversible event of change. Friends and family who surround the departing one are confined to the outer perimeters of the event. There is a journey beginning here but it is not a physical journey. It is a real journey: someone is leaving and will not be returning. Yet the journey is into an interior and it is an invisible journey. At birth the journey here creates the traveller, the invisible becomes visible. At death the return journey re-creates the traveller, the visible becomes invisible again.