The Thin Places

It’s been so long – too long – since I wrote. The reasons are many: crushing fatigue, busyness and unacknowledged dread. No – not unacknowledged – a dread I’ve been grappling with because it means accepting a world that does not contain my Dad.

Talking to him about it might help but this is the first ‘big’ thing we’ve been unable to discuss. No – that’s not precise either – we’ve never been able to have a frank discussion about death. Not when my Aunt Annie died, not when his own mother – to whom I was very close – died. Not when Piglet died. Death has always been taboo except as it appears in Gilbert and Sullivan or Carlyle’s French Revolution. Or as an abstraction – Death Be Not Proud; Every Man’s Death Diminishes Me; After the First Death There is No Other.

And now here we are, face to face with the hoary monster and his power grows, not because he’s so close but because we aren’t acknowledging his presence, his imminence. He’s come to call and we aren’t offering him tea. Muffins would strain both hospitality and human forbearance, not to mention general Dylan Thomas outrage, but this is a guest who should be offered a cup of fairly ordinary tea and some simple conversation. To look him coldly in the face and preserve the amenities, admit he’s a legitimate caller who’s going to take something precious with him when he goes but to offer some defiance, too: One short sleep past, we wake eternally/And death shall be no more; Death thou shalt die.

After I returned from my visit to the Excited States to see Ellie, towards the end of May, I spent the weekend at my parents’ so my Mom could get away and rest. “To a place where I can sleep as long and as much as I like and eat meals I haven’t had to cook,” she said. The Department of Veterans’ Affairs would have paid for a respite worker but my Dad refused to have a stranger stay with him so I was ‘it.’

I arrived bearing strawberries and real cream, gourmet salmon patties, a proper pepper mill, and a little whirry machine – a sort of hand-held blender that purees things. Mom had told me Dad was eating very little and favoured ‘mushy’ offerings.

A surprisingly smooth two days ensued despite a couple of minor tragedies. Mom left two pages of closely-written instructions which I earnestly perused – repeatedly – trying to memorize such details as which cup the decaf coffee should go in and which small glass the juice. She forgot to include how much water to add to the micro-wave porridge (one quarter cup oatmeal sprinkled with a tablespoon of bran), but it turns out that wrongly mixed porridge peels fairly neatly off the walls of a microwave oven, almost like strips of two-sided tape. I forgot to chill the Ensure (a protein drink) and put jam on the toast when it was a marmalade morning but we successfully weathered these small squalls and even watched a bit of baseball and most of a movie, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness.

None of our conversations took off, though, which troubled me because ever since I can remember I’ve had long, deep discussions with my Dad and always learned something new or glimpsed an alternate viewpoint. No more. He doesn’t have the energy. Or maybe the looming presence of Mr. Death has to be acknowledged to free our thoughts and words and we’re spending our stamina pretending we don’t see him.

Caregivers came in morning and evening to help him get up, dressed and out of bed and then into pyjamas and ready for sleep. Although he rarely uses the walker to get himself from bedroom to living room and back again during the day anymore, he did manage it two or three times – with me walking behind him, heart in mouth – and didn’t fall, which had been my greatest fear.

Over the 48-hours of my constant attendance, even in such a short time, I noticed an infinitesimal downward slide, a diminution of faculties and powers by less than millimetres; not a progress registered by the eyes so much as by the heart. This heart that loves him and doesn’t want him to go any more than he wants to leave. The Blue Jays ball game, for example, we turned on and followed for less than ten minutes before Dad lost interest. That was Saturday. On Sunday, he lost interest after five minutes.

This process, I decided, is just as hard as having someone die suddenly the way Piglet did. It’s the difference between being swamped by a monster tsunami that crashes down out of a clear blue sky and standing on the beach, knowing the tsunami’s coming but being unable to move.

The following Saturday, I went for lunch – a lovely lunch featuring prawns wrapped in bacon and ribboned in lime aioli – with my old friend Dannie. We’ve known each other since 1970 and shared a spectacularly naughty and rebellious teenagehood so can talk about anything. Her husband died of brain cancer last October. How could we ever have imagined, at 14, that we’d both find ourselves widowed in our early 50s?

For once Nietzsche may have been right when he gave a nod to the dazzling realm of music and literature, ballet and drama: “We have art in order not to die of the truth.”

But no – I won’t believe that. The truth can also be beautiful if we can stand the awesome might of its flame. Is it not written, And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free?

During lunch, I mentioned that one of the things both Tickles and I find difficult is that my Dad often cries. He cries if we express affection; he cries when we’re leaving. I have never in my life until now seen my Dad cry. It simultaneously puzzled and irritated me because I don’t know how to deal with it and lumped it in with the whole refusal to discuss death syndrome. Dannie suggested a very simple explanation – he cries because he doesn’t want to leave us – and I was grateful for the insight. Although I can’t say it makes things any easier.

One day less than two weeks ago – it seems much longer – Mom called me at work and said, “I think you should come over on your way home.” Needless to say, this threw me into a bit of a panic.

“Do you want me to come over right now?”

“No, I just think you should come over on your way home.”

To say Mom is a master of understatement and euphemism would be a vast understatement in itself. When Dad had his horrendous accident in 1962 and was lying at death’s door, she told me he had “a couple of sore legs.” Granted, she was attempting to project serenity and allay fears in my sensitive, six-year-old self; nevertheless, it’s vintage Mom and not all that much different from the way she describes catastrophes unto this very day.

When I was 19, she called me at work and chattered on about the price of hamburger and Tickles’ latest misadventures, then concluded the conversation by saying, “Oh, and by the way, Auntie Annie died last night,” and hanging up. I started crying and couldn’t stop. My alarmed supervisor sent me home. I didn’t ever tell Mom how much she’d shocked and upset me because I didn’t want to upset her.

And so it goes...

And so, on that day less than two weeks ago, dithering and worrying and repressing panic, I eventually left work 15 minutes early and sped over to the family home.

“Things have taken a turn,” said Mom. “I think Dad’s gotten very weak and I don’t like the sound of his breathing. I just wanted to see if you agree with me.”

I walked carefully into the bedroom where Dad was deeply asleep, his breathing uneven and shallow, interrupted now and then by a sort of hitch or gurgle.

“It doesn’t sound good,” I said to Mom, thinking to myself, His lungs are filling with fluid; this is a stage of congestive heart failure.

“And he’s hardly eating anything,” added Mom.

Since he’s had the appetite of a delicate five-year-old for the last several weeks, this was definitely another worrying sign.

“What does Dad think?” I asked. “Has he said anything?”

Mom paused, as if to gather strength. “He thinks he’s dying.”

Taken aback, it was my turn to pause. “Has he said anything else? Is he feeling more comfortable about it all yet?”

“I think so,” said Mom. “A bit anyway. But he doesn’t want to leave me.”

Of course he doesn’t, I thought, He’s been married to you for over 55 years and you haven’t spent more than a couple of weeks apart in all that time.

We sat and discussed our theories of heaven until we heard, unbelievably, the sound of walker wheels sliding across the carpet. Dad had gotten out of bed and was painfully navigating inch by inch, propelling himself by sheer will power to his chair in the living room. I had the feeling – humbling and poignant – that he was doing it for me; walking out to the living to sit and converse, to honour my visit.

Mom and I fell silent and watched his slow progress, aghast. I thought he’d miss the chair entirely and subside onto the floor but he managed, at last, to sit down at an awkward angle, pale and shaking, more exhausted than he’d been the night of the Healing Service and unable to speak.

We conferred, Mom and I, and decided that she’d call Toy and I’d call Wumbles. It was time.

We have arrived at a strange crossroads, a fearful junction where the unknowable seems strangely commonplace and the commonplace is imbued with mystery.

It is a place akin to those known as “thin places” in Celtic mythology...these are threshold bridges at the border between the real world and the other world, still points where the barrier between the human and the divine is stretched thin as a membrane that may finally be permeated and transcended.

Now I see that the opposite of knowledge may not be ignorance but mystery, that the opposite of truth may not be lies but something else again: a revelation so deeply imbedded in the thin places of reality that we cannot see it for looking: a reverence so clear and quiet and perfect that we have not yet begun to fathom it.
Thanks be unto God for his unspeakable gift.

-from Diane Schoemperlen’s Our Lady of the Lost and Found