A Little about Death

Life is not a straight line. The fireworks in my head are not individual rockets, ascending from a single point of ignition through an unswerving trajectory to a solitary burst of illumination. My thoughts are a farrago of firecrackers, flashing in rapid randomness to throw a noisy glow over the dark horizons of my understanding. Looking back across the vista of my journey to Now, I find that my mind leaps about in time and topic. It is very hard for me to reminisce in a sequential fashion.

And Time is not linear. The notion that it has a steady, one-directional flow from the future, through the present, into the past is an illusion. A convincing one indeed, but still an illusion. There are moments when all of time comes together, in a sort of Eternal Present, and everything suddenly seems to make sense.

But Time is another topic for another day. I could (and will) write pages on that alone. Not just yet though. Today I want to write a little about Death.

Yesterday, Fatma, the trusty, tried-and-true grande dame of our small llama herd, died. I was with her during her dismal final hour, and I was with her at the very moment when she shuffled off this mortal coil, and slipped silently into that endless sleep.

What struck me most was the ordinariness of it. It just happened, like things do. One moment I was supporting her long, firm neck, cradling her head in the crook of my arm, carefully trickling water into her thirsty mouth, and whispering soft encouragement to her to “hang on in there”. The next moment, she keeled over sideways, twitched and shivered for a few seconds and then went completely still. The light quite simply went out of her eyes. In that instant I utterly understood how people across eras and cultures have come to believe in the notion of something like a soul that departs the body at the moment of death. It was as if her connection to the Universal grid had just been shut down. A terminal power-cut.

Even before I put my face to her nose, to feel for any signs of shallow, moist breath, I knew that she was dead. I tried to lift her head, but her long neck was suddenly soft and floppy, so that her head hung and rolled like a wet towel fished out of a pool. Within seconds she had transformed from a living creature with personality and sensitivity, into a heavy, inert thing. A lifeless lump that needed to be dealt with.

The transition in my head from nurse to labourer was shockingly instantaneous. We certainly could not leave her body where it lay, immediately in front of the other llamas eating hay in the field shelter, in full view of the constant stream of interested passers-by. Too many people would be distressed by the sight. Simon fetched the tarpaulin bag, that we use to carry hay, from the car. As we gently folded up her body, like an oversized, unborn cria, and gradually manoeuvred her into the roomy sac, I was touched by the symmetry of it all. “Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature” (Marcus Aurelius). I was surprised by how small she seemed – how little space her inanimate body actually occupied. It was as the flight of her Life Force had somehow diminished the size of what remained.

Until yesterday, I had always imagined the moment of death as something sickening and unpleasant. I had always expected I would be unable to touch something dead. I had never seen anyone, or any creature of any size, die before.

My father died alone in hospital during the night. The consultants, in their dubious wisdom, had advised my mother that we should not share with him the news that his condition was terminal. So, even in the face of his attempts, interrupted by hacking coughs and body-racking wheezes, to discuss with my mother the ‘financial situation’, and what she would need to do ‘after he had gone’, we all maintained the pretence that he would soon be well, and up, and home again.

No farewells were said. No minds put at ease. No final words of comfort or wisdom exchanged. Instead my mother received a phone call from the hospital early one morning, to say that my father had ‘passed away’ during the night, and would she please come to the hospital to collect his things and make the necessary ‘arrangements’. My final memories of time spent with him, were of sitting on the end of his hospital bed, gamely attempting, with cheery remonstration, to break the doom-laden silence that bedumbed my mother and sister when he had asked us if he was dying.

I did not cry when my mother told me he was dead. I did not cry, I think, until the funeral. Ever since then, I have hated funerals because they make me cry. I am not a heartless person. I shed copious tears during sad-and-emotional films. I weep myself into a red-eyed, fat-nosed frenzy reading fictional accounts of unhappy circumstances. Even the occasional soft-hearted speeches of Homer Simpson have been known to bring an embarrassing wet shimmer to my eye. And other people’s sadnesses invariably choke me up.

But to cry in response to something as ultimately astounding as death seems somehow out of place. When death stares you in the face, and the enormous finality of the fact of it hits you, there is no well of feeling from which tears can spring. There is only a sudden, deep hole of emptiness resounding with the stone cold knell of the inescapable recognition of mortality.

It is only afterwards, when there is sufficient distance for you to replay the situation in your memory like a film, like something happening to someone else, that the story in which you find yourself begins to make you cry. It seems to me that it is sentiment, the emotional overlay to our memories, rather than death itself that makes us tearful.

So even now, thirty-six years after he died, a sudden image of my father frowning over the crossword at the table with a big mug of tea, and a roll-up tucked behind his ear for later, can make my eyes sting, and my throat constrict as I resist the desire to let a tear or two fall unhindered onto the keys of my lap top. And the blog photographs of Fatma as she was in life can make me cry in a way that her death couldn’t.

It is not Death that causes us suffering, but Loss. And the tears I shed today are not for Fatma or my father, or for anything or anyone that has died. They are for myself, and for what I have lost, and for what I fear to lose.

For mortals vanished from the day’s sweet light, I shed no tear; rather I mourn for those who day and night live in death’s fear.
– Greek Epigram