The Big Sleep (part 5)
Why is it that when you have been writing about a subject (death in this case) your life imitates art. Not that I have died since my last blog, nor anyone that close to me, but the subject of death has entered conversations and I am sure that I have not guided it there. Maybe something happened telepathically, the way it can. Jung called it synchronicity, a sort of juxtaposition of events, thoughts or feelings that seem beyond normal understanding. (I have just read that paragraph and it raises the interesting notion of communication from beyond the ether by blog. You wouldn’t know whether I was dead or alive, would you?!)
Anyway, I was asked at a dinner party whether I believed in God and I said no, I was more of a rudimentary Buddhist. The conversation went on to whether there is an Afterlife. I said that no-one, as far as I know, had come back to tell us that there was. I remember once going to a spiritualist church where everyone believed their families were out there or up there, waiting for them with open arms but it seemed to me to be on a par with end of the pier magic shows.
Anyway, one of the group, a seemingly staid vet, told a gripping tale about the death of his mother. When they were gathered together as a family, to share out her jewellery and other possessions, an argument broke out between two of her daughters over a particular piece which was missing. Then a third daughter broke in. Speaking in their mother’s voice she declared that this particular heirloom was hidden in a drawer and described where they might find it. The girl had never spoken in tongues before or since and they were all rather scared by hearing their mother speak through her. Whether this constitutes proof of life after death I know not. But it did to them. I am unsure whether Christianity embraces ghosts or otherworldly communication, since my religious education ended when I was eleven and thrown out of the choir of the local church but I have a feeling it doesn’t. Heaven has air-locked gates and no email, wireless or sepulchral voices to communicate with us.
My own mother swore than when people in the family died, the fire irons would rattle in the hearth but I never saw it.
There are plenty of stories but they never happen to me. I am a Doubting Thomas, I suppose and want to see the wraith or hear the disembodied voice, myself. I would willingly spend a night in a haunted house, happily waiting for the chains to clank, the doors to creak and the hollow tread on the floorboards.
Back to the dinner party, it emerged that all of them missed their parents – mothers in particular – so much so that they wanted there to be an afterlife so that they could rejoin them. Maybe I am made of sterner stuff or maybe I am an unfeeling old sod but I don’t experience that longing, much as I loved my Mother. It seems to me that whatever this life has for us, it does not include extensions into other dimensions. Buddhists believe that there is a connection between this life and the next and the others that follow but the analogy I heard one of them use was that of a snooker ball striking another and then that one striking a further ball. The first ball makes the others move but they remain, sadly, separate and unable to communicate, otherwise.
So, if you wish, the hereafter is all balls, unless you are a believer.
The Big Sleep (Part 4)
Going to funerals was not something that grabbed my younger self. Life was for living and these events usually meant a kind of farrago of hypocrisy about resurrection, whatever the religion - Buddhist and humanist ceremonies being the exception. I am thinking about this subject because yesterday I went to another Ghanaian funeral, this time one that was almost patrician in its panoply. It is the first that I have attended where the body was on show and everyone was asked to file past and pay their last respects. The deceased was an indomitable woman in her 91st year. I had met her a couple of times. While I waited my turn to be ushered forward, I observed that more than half those who were paying their last respects, did not look at her, keeping their faces averted. One or two others later told me that they thought she had been prepared well and looked at peace. Someone else told me that this was a step forward because, in Ghanaian terms she was fair skinned which means of mixed blood, going back generations and embalmers are not so used to the cosmetics needed for whiter skin. Indeed, this friend told me that a few years back a white man’s skin was bright yellow as a result of the injudicious use of the wrong pastes. All of this had immediate surreal resonance for me since we have bought the entire box sets of Six Feet Under, that miracle of ensemble acting which takes place at an undertakers.
So, back to my thread, here are some memories of such events, although I can’t include among them a single final get together where the priest, the vicar, the imam, the rabbi or the humanist proclaimer, said anything that added to my store of knowledge about the human condition.
First memory: a new friend, but one who I sensed would become very close, was killed in his twenties. It was the first time I had seen artificial grass covering the mound of soil. An old friend (now himself dead) said that he had visited D H Lawrence’s grave in New Mexico and there were artificial flowers everywhere. Poor D H, the defender of all that nature brings! My second memory concerned a little church where, as the service came to an end, a red admiral butterfly flew into the light of a stained glass window like the fleeing spirit of the deceased. Next, a very dear friend, internationally lauded for her illustrative work in children’s books was being lowered into the ground at a humanist farewell, when a steam train shunted its way past the cemetery, hooting to her. This was in the present epoch of electric and diesel railways, quite recent in fact, but her work is chiefly remembered for its evocation of the 1950s when such trains were the conveyance of the time. The ghostly engine and its quaint wooden carriage had come to carry her off. My final illustration is of a burial of my boy Joseph's great grandfather. Joe must have been six or so. When we asked him if he wanted to go the the cemetery he said no because he did not want to walk on the planks. Staring at him, I asked him what he meant. It turned out that he had been to an archeological dig with his class and fully expected that a burial would involve walking along planks and looking down into holes where bones lay exposed!
There are other such memories of goodbyes to dead folks I once loved and/or enjoyed but I want to finish with the events of yesterday. All the hymns were from that time in the 17th and 18th centuries when the evocation of the Christian god was of a wrathful Father, carried by missionaries to Africa. One stanza, for example, talked of Heaven being a place where one could lie forever at His feet, able to look upon Him forever - if He so allowed. The Methodist preacher occasionally thrust his face forward and spoke in an impulsive, declamatory resurrectionist screech, as he sought to impose a frisson of mortal fear in us all. Apparently he was very restrained compared to what is the more usual. What was really touching were the personal tributes and the visual intimacy with the dead woman, the emotions of the bereaved and the symbolism of everyone wearing black and white, the mark of a long life that must be celebrated as well as mourned, though, from the priest himself there was too little of the former.
I mentioned ‘living wills’ in an earlier blog in this series on death and it made me think. I suddenly recalled The Big Chill, a rather endearing film about friends coming together for a funeral in which the church resounded to The Rolling Stones great track, Love in Vain and I began to wonder how my own parting could be effected. I should choreograph it, I thought. One last chance to impose my taste and general cultural interests and ideals upon those left behind. A bit of an Irish wake, bawdy and rumbustious with the forest or the sea or the mountain top (yes!) rocking, and everyone having a laugh.
But I could not do it here in Ghana. The wishes of the dead are usually ignored and the imperatives of the various church denominations rule. Here, their god can be a vindictive old beggar, who judges harshly, expects your life to be pretty miserable and full of sin, but who, in some act of last minute teasing forgiveness, allows you supplication at his feet.
Labels: Death. Funerals. God.
I saw something the other day which was new to me. I like to keep myself as fit as possible, swimming, multi-gym, running on a trampoline and so on. In Ghana this requires true dedication to the contours of the body. Even in the evening it is close to 30 degrees and the humidity is extremely high. Thus, exercise is both a challenge but also a reward as the sweat pours of me and so I can cut down the time I spend in this masochistic pursuit of a few more years of life.
Perhaps you have heard that at seventy you can have three-quarters of the strength you had as a young, vibrant, semen-rich twenty year old male. I can’t think of the equivalent hyperbole for women but it must exist. At the same time we know that the body replaces cells at a fantastic rate (some, every three days!). So, the question arises, why do we age? The answer appears to be that when the body replaces cells, it copies the last known version as its prototype. Now, imagine taking a photograph and then scanning it. And then scanning the last scan, on and on for eighty years. What would you have? The answer is a very decrepit version of the original. A pixelated morass. It is another example of entropy. In the academic world, plagiarism is a crime probably worse than homicide and here we have the body managing it on a huge scale. It seems irrevocable then that we just break down. That is why there is such a buzz about stem cell surgery. Take some stem cells from me when I am very young and store them until I am very old. Then begin growing and replacing bits and bobs of my body, not with the zillionth copy but with relative originals. It will happen but nor for my generation.
This entropic process continues all around us, from New Labour ‘running out of steam and ideas’, to houses needing constant upgrading, to businesses who forget to develop their workforce, to crockery and glassware. The universe itself is heading, it seems, for its own final Big Sleep where all the atoms that comprise it are spread through an infinity of icy blackness, so far apart that they can no longer interact and make stars, planets or us.
So what those of the end-game generation are doing is encouraging cells to copy cells that are a bit stronger than they would have been otherwise. The finishing line may or may not remain in the same place but we will run as close as we can to it before the final crawl.
Labels: Ageing. Keeping fit. Death.
The Big Sleep (Part 2)
I saw a documentary clip about comas. In it a woman was exhibiting on what has become a familiar medical screen, the nearest to a flat line that you can get without being vegetative. Her children were going scatty with worry and despair. What did they do? They assumed that she could hear, though the doctors were doubtful. One of them told her that their father and her husband (of forty or fifty years) had decided to take another woman on their long planned cruise around the world. The effect was instantaneous. She sat up, opened her eyes and proceeded to be highly indignant!
I suspect this might be a good dinner party game. What would wake YOU up from a coma? Since science recently is theorising that our emotional centres rule our logical consciousness to the extent that we respond to situations by gut reaction – and then summon up post-hoc rationalisations, what wakes you up must be exceptionally disturbing/passionate or even obsessive. We hear that people have been woken from their Big Sleeps by being played their favourite musical tracks – the karaoke cure, by the arrival of their dogs or cats – animal magnetism, or by smelling the scent of their favourite flower – pollination. Yet without these mysterious trial and error interventions, they might have lain there forever, puttering along in their interiors, happily ignoring their physical interaction with the world in favour of floating ever closer to the great abyss.
Death will arrive all too soon and flatten out, forever, the lines of our mental functioning. So, the sooner we leave instructions on what our nearest and dearest must do to raise us from this simulated extinction, the quicker we will click out of comas and engage with the business of living each moment as if it is our last. This is probably a better definition of a ‘living will’ than the usual.
Labels: Death. Coma. Emotions.
I have had computer problems despite supposedly being well protected. Everything ground to a halt a few days ago and the last escapee from its innards was the latest update of the book I am writing called Azimuth. The fact that it has taken me 8 years and is 600 pages long, added to the frisson of despair that attended my attempts to right the sinking ship. But this is Ghana and around the corner a fellow dived like a BP engineer off the Florida coast to where the wreckage of my data was spewing into the ether and rectified everything; data returned and all working properly again for the princely sum of seven pounds and fifty pence.
I have written often enough about entropy – how everything we do, no matter how exacting we are as task masters over our own destinies, gradually breaks down and chaos ensues and here was yet another example. Meanwhile, in parallel, I am watching quite an old but brilliant series called The Human Body, fronted by that genial doctor with the perfect mix of humility and curiosity, Robert Winston. If you have not seen it, please take this as a strong recommendation. It follows a journey through the life of human beings, from egg to dead. The science is fascinating and the lessons, extraordinary. I am at that age where much of the journey represents where I have come from until this moment. The last of all episodes deals with the death of a German in Eire. It is poignant, challenging and uplifting. The camera does not show his last breath but it is a pretty close run thing. He didn’t want the cancer drugs, preferring a slightly shorter life of greater quality than being hospitalised in an intiseptic, clinical environment. He was an atheist and somehow this added lustre to his struggle.
All of us have to face the final curtain, as the cliché goes but most of us want it to come down while we are asleep. I’d prefer to be awake and see it come down. Winston says that we cannot divulge what happens in the end-game, despite the thousands of near-misses that people have had – reporting tunnels of light with their loved ones waiting with outstretched arms. It turns out that even this is a trick of the mind. Astronauts on high speed simulators report the same illusion as they lose consciousness. If it is to be so private and personal that no-one will ever know how we moved from dead in our heads, then so be it. But it would be worth being awake. Our last lesson learnt as the brain ceases to function.
Then our atoms break free from the little force fields that held them in body colonies and are carried away in the universal tide. They were there from the beginning of time and have travelled through suns and planets and cold empty spaces all their existence. Nice that they spent a few brief flickering moments as part of a human life, don’t you think?
It’d be great to have someone take me, at the penultimate second of existence, round the corner and have all my data and processing restored for seven pounds fifty. But, since that day belongs to a genetic progeny of mine far into the future, I will be content to keep my eyes open until the last.