my way back home from a track meet, I was thrown seventy feet when the car I was riding in was struck by a semi running a red light. What a passerby would have seen was a girl hurtling through the air—a human projectile. What I remember is the silence, reading the letters on the side of the truck, falling in slow motionthrough space. I came to, on the ground, in the arms of a stranger. It felt as if I was cushioned. Laid down so gently, caught by what, or whom, I can’t really say.
I like to think my brother experienced something close to this. Something other than what Bowering described in his poem as a
horrid air-filled explosion, shrieking steel … a twirling upside down rubber wheel, sirens.
But I don’t know. The writer Christopher Dewdney, who was a passenger in a streetcar that was blindsided by another streetcar one late spring afternoon, remembers people flying out of their seats and safety glass erupting like a floating mist all around him; but mostly he remembers that all of it took place in deafening silence, in slow motion. “It seems,” he writes, that “we are able to experience accelerated time for brief periods. But we cannot experience anything like what high-speed film can capture now—bullets slowly plunging through apples, hovering hummingbirds flapping their wings at the speed of a crow.” For a brief moment we are outside time. Falling through the air. Caught by what or whom we cannot say.
Time changes for the dying too. In the last days and hours, they often seem preoccupied and outside time as we know it. Joseph lived most of his life on boats that he built and sailed around the world. He was always working: sewing sails, fixing rigging, sanding and varnishing the decks. There was an oak tree outside his hospice room. When I visited him shortly before his death, he told me, “One leaf falling can occupy me all day.”
Angels were often left by patients’ families in a small alcovein the hospice unit: some with their heads bowed in prayer, some looking skyward; crystal angels from Birks and plastic angels from Walmart; winged and haloed last hopes, with the tacky, overly religious and just plain ugly ones being culled from time to time. For those who wanted inspiration, there was a shell with angel cards beside a white porcelain angel with a worried look on her face.
Far from the fiery six-winged beings crying “Holy, holy, holy!” with their flaming swords held high, angels today have come to represent sentimental presences that shine with New Age light and can be purchased everywhere from hospital gift shops to the china section in thrift stores where the glass ashtrays used to be. People often called us angels when we arrived on their doorsteps, but it was our strangeness with death as much as our familiarity with it that allowed us to help in whatever ways we could. Angels we were not.
“Estrangement is at the root of suffering,” writes Rabbi Dayle Friedman in
Jewish Pastoral Care.
Caregivers must find the stranger in themselves to understand what it might be like for the dying who are becoming estranged from all that is known.
According to Miriam, who calls upon her Jewish faith in the work she does, there is a notion that Jews should be kind to strangers because they too were strangers in a strange land. “I was excited by the connection to strangers,” she told me, “because it disrupted the favoured metaphors of angels and ‘special people’ doing ‘special work.’ “ The truth of it, she says, is that this work is best done by people who have hovered on the outside edges of comfort, by choice or circumstance or temperament. People, a littlerough around the edges, who have seen a few things. In a society that encourages us to shy away from death, we had to learn how to walk towards it. To open the door and make ourselves at home.
Miriam recently wrote to me,
Last Friday, I went into a patient’s room. I had heard, during the morning report from her nurse,
I like to think my brother experienced something close to this. Something other than what Bowering described in his poem as a
horrid air-filled explosion, shrieking steel … a twirling upside down rubber wheel, sirens.
But I don’t know. The writer Christopher Dewdney, who was a passenger in a streetcar that was blindsided by another streetcar one late spring afternoon, remembers people flying out of their seats and safety glass erupting like a floating mist all around him; but mostly he remembers that all of it took place in deafening silence, in slow motion. “It seems,” he writes, that “we are able to experience accelerated time for brief periods. But we cannot experience anything like what high-speed film can capture now—bullets slowly plunging through apples, hovering hummingbirds flapping their wings at the speed of a crow.” For a brief moment we are outside time. Falling through the air. Caught by what or whom we cannot say.
Time changes for the dying too. In the last days and hours, they often seem preoccupied and outside time as we know it. Joseph lived most of his life on boats that he built and sailed around the world. He was always working: sewing sails, fixing rigging, sanding and varnishing the decks. There was an oak tree outside his hospice room. When I visited him shortly before his death, he told me, “One leaf falling can occupy me all day.”
Angels were often left by patients’ families in a small alcovein the hospice unit: some with their heads bowed in prayer, some looking skyward; crystal angels from Birks and plastic angels from Walmart; winged and haloed last hopes, with the tacky, overly religious and just plain ugly ones being culled from time to time. For those who wanted inspiration, there was a shell with angel cards beside a white porcelain angel with a worried look on her face.
Far from the fiery six-winged beings crying “Holy, holy, holy!” with their flaming swords held high, angels today have come to represent sentimental presences that shine with New Age light and can be purchased everywhere from hospital gift shops to the china section in thrift stores where the glass ashtrays used to be. People often called us angels when we arrived on their doorsteps, but it was our strangeness with death as much as our familiarity with it that allowed us to help in whatever ways we could. Angels we were not.
“Estrangement is at the root of suffering,” writes Rabbi Dayle Friedman in
Jewish Pastoral Care.
Caregivers must find the stranger in themselves to understand what it might be like for the dying who are becoming estranged from all that is known.
According to Miriam, who calls upon her Jewish faith in the work she does, there is a notion that Jews should be kind to strangers because they too were strangers in a strange land. “I was excited by the connection to strangers,” she told me, “because it disrupted the favoured metaphors of angels and ‘special people’ doing ‘special work.’ “ The truth of it, she says, is that this work is best done by people who have hovered on the outside edges of comfort, by choice or circumstance or temperament. People, a littlerough around the edges, who have seen a few things. In a society that encourages us to shy away from death, we had to learn how to walk towards it. To open the door and make ourselves at home.
Miriam recently wrote to me,
Last Friday, I went into a patient’s room. I had heard, during the morning report from her nurse,
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