Crossing Points
You know you’ve been somewhere, but it won’t write itself down.
My mother, who had always been the best person to sit on the other side of the kitchen table, shared differently with me after. The old roles dissolved then, and we turned to philosophy. We could do this because I was catching up to her. We were both widows. Our bodies contained similar spaces created by loving and hard places left by pain.
So we could talk about the crossing points.
She, who was born at home on a Minnesota farm in the 1920s, raised her four daughters with detailed stories of how each of us came into the world. We all arrived between 1945 and 1956, a time when birthing was a colorless and cloistered piece of scientific precision. My own birth story reflects this era. My mother described how as soon as I entered the world I was whisked off for evaluation and cleaning and then ceremoniously brought to her arms several hours later. She took the carefully wrapped bundle that was me and began unwrapping so that she could count my fingers and toes. “Don’t touch her!” admonished the nurse. “She’s sterile!”
The nature of my beginnings had no counterpoint to balance its strange message about the taboos that exist at the thresholds of life until several years ago, when our family history matured to include the telling of the stroke and swift death of our father. Despite the fact that he was in a coma, there was no doubt in any of our minds (so our story goes), that he waited until the last child flew in from California to make the circle complete. Then, he let go with a great heave; it was almost as though his spirit burst from his chest, took a mighty leap upward, and was gone.
We were ushered out of the room in a state of collective awe. My next-youngest sister turned back for one more look. “Don’t touch him!” admonished the nurse. “He’s toxic!”
The door was closed and the hospital moved into its rubber-gloved routine of dealing with that strange euphemism called “the remains.” It’s not what any of us wanted, that wrenching of the shell that had housed his spirit, out of the sacred hollow of the family. It was wrong: the loss of the possibility of touching him in farewell, of knowing all he gave us to know about death. This could have enriched the telling, nourished and taught our traveling, because we had felt through our skins into our bones some aspect of earth in winter, the differences at the heart of seeds and stones.
Late summer, as I tell it now, my husband Jim had a seizure and we found the cancer had spread to his brain. Jim hated doctors and hospitals, but a combination of ignorance and fear led us initially through the familiar round of tests and radiation, even while knowing that the odds were not in his favor by any stretch. And when the pain intensified, there were the black holes and ravings produced by morphine and the attendant drugs that countered its side effects.
But Jim stayed home, eventually giving up all drugs, preferring to allow his body, in its wisdom, to let him go. A home health nursing agency became our biweekly support system, along with a sympathetic and courageous woman doctor who coached me in the old ways: the poultices and compresses, the massages and herbal remedies, the simple knowledge and work of women who for centuries have done the loving management of birthing and dying.
Because the state of Vermont permits “taking care of your own,” from the moment of death to burial in your own backyard if you have space, I was able to promise Jim that no stranger’s hand would ever touch him.
I’m of a generation raised in abstractions. My grandmothers, and my mother too, knew the metallic smell of passages, the steamy odor of lye and ashes, the feel of diminishing warmth inside a fresh-killed chicken or the way to watch for a fever to turn.
They knew about doing things because you had to, or because you had promised. I didn’t want the look of grim endurance I had seen in some dark, curling photographs. Some of that was there, but there was also a hope for some transparency, like in the eyes of the newly born, both wisdom and wonder.
Jim stayed for four months. His fierce-hearted mother and I took round-the-clock shifts to keep watch with him. Outside, fall burned red in the air, then grayed into November. Loving friends left food on the doorstep, raised money to pay the bills, and planted scores of daffodils in the lawn. “Don’t you want to take a break?” they asked, concerning and wondering. I didn’t. It was like being pregnant, I told them. The whole house was pregnant with life and I couldn’t step outside until it was time.
Was I afraid? Yes. I prayed for ancestral wisdom to course through my veins. I’d never been a midwife before.
No, that’s not exactly true. A neighbor around the corner had invited us twice to share in the home births of her sons. Although I had carried no responsibility those times, I knew well the sound of pain and effort, the mixture of fear and exultation, and the presence of light in the room after.
When Jim left, I was alone with him. Early morning, dark, and then, a sudden rush of rain. He left so decisively, without struggle, that I touched his chest and shook him gently, querying in disbelief. Then I called to his mother, his sister, my mother, who had joined us in the last days, all still asleep in the heaviness before dawn.
Then I cried: relief, triumph. Loss.
Neither toxic nor sterile, but the road where beauty walks. We washed and tended Jim’s body, his mother and I, just has we had every other darkening autumn day. And even though his body had been nothing but fragile bones and huge hands and slender feet before, it had been full of him. And now it was empty. But the light was there.
Some people waited for me to look familiar again. I could not go back because my hands had taught me something ancient and wise. I spoke to some about those of us who have held family, lovers, or friends until it is over.
It is about a time and a shared state of mind that honors death for its secrets: the transition from fear to knowledge that comes with holding your lover’s body as it becomes cool and hollow. The quest for a description of the light — it’s like the glaze on long grass in October afternoons. It touches everything. And there’s the sense of the open space behind your breastbone when you wake. You know you’ve been somewhere, but it won’t write itself down.
How would things be different if we knew better how to be at the crossing points? In my lighter moments I imagined it this way: you come into a room of people who knew you before your life took on a strange shape. Instead of turning away or looking awkward, they burst into howls of grief and celebration when they see you: howls, because you know something of a great mystery, something you can give away (when I told this fantasy to someone recently, demonstrating right there in a parking lot, crash! A nearby tree fell over with the first howl).
Or you find yourself in conversation with a complete stranger on a bus. You swear to yourself that you are not going to say anything, yet sooner or later your story comes out. This story is important, why apologize? It hides some kind of magical key to everything. The stranger asks for one of your tears as blessing, because of where you have been.