Amicus Mortis Posts

The sound of rumbling, a gurney swathed in white, caused her to start suddenly.  She’d fallen asleep in the chair while holding his hand.  Eyes flickered, moving swiftly from side to side under lids in a face pale and gaunt.  Twitching, all too familiar now, rippled erratically throughout his body causing it to jerk and spasm.  What time was it?  It was morning when they had come into the hospital.  A grating electronic beeping sound from an overhead monitor broke her train of thought.  Her neck was stiff.  10:30am.  It was 10:30am.

”We’ll insert that cannula now,” a faceless voice echoed.  She rubbed her eyes.  His hand reached out to her.  He hated needles.  The doctor was gentle, steadily plumping the vein, and then just as steadily, slowly, slowly, inserting the needle.  His grip tightened, fingers digging into and compressing her skin.

He lay back when it was over, exhausted.  Voices echoed along the corridor.  Conversational snippets intruded into the room that had become their world yet again.  “I’ll be here for four days,” he said.  She wondered how long that would be.  It was hot; there was no window.  Laughter burst in upon them.  “Lunches are here!”  A whole world existed in this place, this bed with curtains drawn, and both of them were a part of it.  “We have a bed for him.”  “Kenneth?”  “Number 5.”  Number 5.  Number 5.  Number 5.  Number 5; it reverberated in her mind.  “How do you cope?” a kind voice asked her as they had walked down the corridor.  “Sometimes I don’t,” she had responded.

A-Bay Ward.  Sickening stifling heat.  Where were the windows?  God they were all old, horrible old men.  Sick and wrinkled and crabbed.  Suffocating, she felt like she was suffocating.  Dead, she felt like he was already dead and she was standing in a cemetery.  She pulled the curtain around the bed trying to block it all out, to shield him.  Or was it to shield herself?  Both.  More faces peering into theirs.  More intrusive, nameless voices.  When would she wake up, when would they both wake up from this nightmare that never seemed to end?

She wondered what went through his mind as he lay there, shrunken and small.  He never really spoke about it very much.  What did he think about during the long hours?  His eyes flickered, his breathing paced, fingers touching one another as if to seek assurance.  “Would the owner of car number NSB 448 contact the switchboard please?”  Beads of perspiration were forming slowly on his forehead.  An intake of breath, cool air flowing around her ankles.  “How do you spell origami?” a woman’s voice boomed into their space.  “Crippled, if you’re crippled you are…?”  “Does it mean you’re lame?”  The voices droned on around them, the woman’s loud, raucous; the man’s muted, barely audible.

Through a slit in the curtain she could see that the man sitting opposite was asleep holding his cup.  Would it fall she wondered?  She needed to touch up her lipstick, perfume too.  The ritualistic behaviour was calming, normal, something that made sense in a world that illness had manufactured for them.  It was a world where there was no sense anymore because everything had fallen in upon itself until reality had blurred.  He moved.  She wiped the sweat off his brow.

He was sleeping now.

She remembered that she had to pay the rent.  She had seen a jumper that she liked, perhaps she would buy it.  Voices.  “Are you going to the cafeteria?”  “No, I’m going downstairs.”  It might make her feel better if she bought something.  She felt her emotions rising to the surface.  She hated that happening.  She turned to check on him.  He seemed peaceful, silent.  It was so quiet at home without him.  She slept alone with a pillow in her arms.

She looked at him again.  She never really knew what he was thinking.  Was he dreaming as he lay there she wondered?  She must ring friend number one, and then friend number two.  Had she eaten today, yes at breakfast, some fruit, coffee.  Maybe she would buy that jumper, maybe.  “What we’ll do is get Beverly to bring your own frame in, if you can manage with this …”  Their voices drifted down the corridor as they walked past the room.  “Would the owner of a black Golf, registration number NSB 448 contact reception please.”

The cleaner emptied the bin next to his bed.  The man sitting in the chair opposite dozed.  Life went along in this world within a world as surely as it did out of it.  He coughed, twice, and was still again, his breathing regular.  She didn’t ask why any more, she just accepted that at this time it was this way.  Somebody had asked her once if she thought it was Karma that he had sickened in such a way.  Voices intruded.  “So which one is better, we have to decide which one you’ll be taking home.”  No it wasn’t Karma, it was just life.  Voices intruded.  “What about the pain, does it make a difference?”  No it wasn’t Karma, it was just life.  Voices intruded.  “That’s it, that’s the one!”  No, it wasn’t Karma.  It was just life.  Just life.  Just life.  Just life.  She blinked her eyes, her nose was running.

When would they wake up?  When would they both wake up from this agonising moment that seemed to make a mockery of eternity?  He coughed, gently this time.  It was early afternoon.  The light had softened.  She had to go.  She tried not to feel sorry for herself.  She thought of what he was going through.  What colour was that jumper again?  How awful he must feel.  But he kept so much from her.  She never really knew, she had never really known.  Another intrusion. “Hello, I’m Peggy; I’ll be looking after Ken.”  So terribly pleasant in a world that was anything but.

The sun was low when she walked outside.  Something caught her eye.  A shaft of sunlight fell on a single cluster of daffodils surrounded by the large leaves of the mother plant.  In the midst of this sprawled a large, fat, ugly, prickly nettle.  The juxtaposition of the daffodil and the nettle seemed significant to her in some way.  She stood there pondering, and then she suddenly understood that what she was looking at was the reflection of a manufactured life which was as achingly beautiful as it was painfully ugly.

Moments are curious events, often catching one unawares.  Like life, which also has a tendency to catch one unawares.  I seem to have lots of moments which have a familiar theme.  I even recently wrote about that theme in the final assignment, an essay, for my masters Social Work degree which I have just finished after studying part-time since 2016.  That theme is the importance of spiritual growth and development and the intersection or relationship of that with the afterlife.

I’ve always known, since childhood, that there was a loving vastness standing behind what my senses told me was reality and that that vastness was the source of everything manifesting as matter in the physical universe.  I didn’t understand that intellectually, that came later when I entered the tavern of ruin.  But I felt it; I had the knowing of it in the depths of my being.  And though I’ve now grown into adulthood and have the lived experience of vulnerability in both its positive and negative aspects, that knowing has continually nurtured my soul, sustained it, and given it direction.  It has never wavered; it has always been true and constant as has the source from whence it came.

I have known many people in my life, some in a casual way, others more intimately or personally.  Amongst the faces there are some I don’t see anymore because life has taken them in a different direction to mine, but their presence, despite their absence, has been stamped on my soul.  In quiet moments I connect with them, reaching through time and space, knowing them again and comforted by the fact that though our paths may no longer conjoin in this life, it will in the next.  There are bonds between some souls which exist outside of space and time, which link them such that when death comes they are able to reunite once again, unfettered by the social mores and constraints of the day.

“Of all the sciences cultivated by mankind, Astronomy is acknowledged to be, and undoubtedly is, the most sublime, the most interesting, and the most useful.  For, by knowledge derived from this science, not only the bulk of the Earth is discovered … but our very faculties are enlarged with the grandeur of the ideas it conveys, our minds exalted above low contracted prejudices”.

James Ferguson, Astronomy Explained Upon Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles, And Made Easy To Those Who Have Not Studied Mathematics (1757).

The title for my March blog takes its name and inspiration from an article with the same name written by Neil deGrasse Tyson and published in the April 2007 magazine, Natural History.  Astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, Tyson writes with an exquisite eloquence, like Ferguson quoted above, about our place in the cosmos and offers an invitation to acknowledge a “collective immaturity of view”.

Tyson is talking about the possibility of a shift in one’s view of themselves and of their place in the universe from one deluded and influenced by notions of vanity, superiority and self-grandeur, to one in which a sense of connectedness forms a relationship with something bigger, something vaster than ourselves.  Many years ago, I entered a School which taught how to do just that and reading Tyson’s words took me back to the first time I encountered the teacher of that School and the knowledge of the Fourth Way.  Little did I know then what the impact of that would be, nor how it would continue to shape my view of myself and my place in the universe.

Everyone has unique life experiences which shape and influence how they live in the world and how they treat others, and realising one’s nothingness, one’s insignificance before the utter majesty and grandeur of the universe can be a profound humbling experience as much as a rich educational one.  When we feel our nothingness, when we understand and experience the meaning of that, the implication becomes clear.  It is our ego and its arrogance and its self-love and vanity which is seen for what it is, and it can be a bitter pill to swallow.  But with that bitterness comes the knowing, the assuredness, the certainty that there is a vast and loving intelligence, far greater than any human being is capable of, which is responsible for the gyrations of the universe and our connectedness with those gyrations.

The afflictions of this dark night of the spirit are many.  One feels helpless as though imprisoned in a dark dungeon, bound hands and feet, and able to neither move, nor see, nor feel any favour from heaven or earth … When one feels safest, and least expects it, the darkness returns in a degree more severe than before …

St John of the Cross

Life can be challenging in often unexpected ways, and at times the individual can experience an overwhelming sense of despair and anguish which can darken the days and nights.  We can also feel a profound sense of loss but in truth, it is life which is showing us the reality of a particular situation.  We mourn the loss of what we thought was real, of what we thought was the truth.  We mourn the loss of the fact that we were unaware of that reality, of those circumstances, of that person, as we do perhaps the reality of the loss of our innocence, our good, our naivety; this is the price we pay for the truth.  Truth is merciless and will cut like a sword, but it has a purpose and we need it if we are to grow.

But there is another way to look at this period of emotional, psychological and spiritual disorientation and destabilisation.

St John of the Cross, a 16^th Century Spanish poet and Roman Catholic mystic monk describes such periods as ‘the dark night of the soul’.  This ‘dark night’ represents a time when the individual undergoes a  profound and powerful transformation, during which previous attitudes, understandings, belief systems and ways of being are literally cast off and replaced by a deeper understanding of life, of certain aspects of reality and of themselves.  It is an intensely painful process from which emerges a changed, more aware and more civilised human being.

The dark night of the soul represents a period of inner purification and spiritual growth of the individual.  During this time, external life is barely tolerable because of the profound internal crisis of meaning which is evoked.  Such an existential crisis has its use; it enables us to live more meaningfully and more fully in the world, and it helps us find our purpose in life.  Most importantly, it makes way for the ingression into us of something of a higher nature, and that is a blessing.  That is the gift we receive when we are shown a truthful reality.

If it – learning to live – remains to be done, it can only happen between life and death.
Neither in life nor in death alone.  What happens between two, and between all the ‘two’s’
one likes, such as between life and death, can only maintain itself with some ghost, can
only talk with or about some ghost [s’entretenir de quelque fantome].
Derrida, 1994, xvii, (emphasis in original).

What is it about ghosts and spiritual apparitions?  Why, particularly in the West, are we fascinated with either trying to prove or disprove their existence?   Why does the eternal battle between science and spirit continue, with social scientists, social anthropologists, physical researchers, parapsychologists, mainstream scientists and sceptics continue to play out in research publications and journals, conferences and on social media platforms?   Why do so  many of those who have the lived experience of other worldly phenomena feel they have, or that they want to, prove that such a phenomenon exists?  What is it about the afterlife, and the visible deceased, that is so difficult for so many to come to terms with?

I have hundreds of articles and books written by researchers and ‘lay’ folk about ghosts and the afterlife.  I’ve spoken about the afterlife at conferences.  My PhD explores the afterlife by way of bereavement and after death contact.   For me, there is nothing to prove, there is no argument to be had, there is just a reality to be shared. The afterlife exists, as do its denizens who continually herald its presence in diverse ways, and if there is one thing that life has taught me it is that we are not born just to die.  Death is the putting off of the physical body.  It is an event which allows us to live as spiritual beings in the spiritual universe.  Death does not diminish or extinguish our existence, it only changes it.

One of the things that the existence of ghosts appears to suggest, is that for various reasons they can linger close by, either to still embodied loved ones or to particular locations, and that they form a collective of sorts by way of being a body of spiritual beings who can make their presence known in various ways.  Edgar Allan Poe captures this engagement in writing stating that the boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague … who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?   I wonder if perhaps this is because the boundaries overlap?

There is a purpose in our being born, as there is in our dying, which is the greatest transition of all.  Our existence continues after our death.  In our newly disembodied state we are not bound by the constraints of linear time and space and accordingly, we experience life differently.  This is the great adventure, and it is here that the best is yet to be.  As Derrida observes, “In this mourning work in process, in this interminable task, the ghost remains that which gives one the most to think about – and to do” (1994, p. 98).

My question is this, why do we continue to seek approval and validation for the afterlife and its heralds from mainstream science?  Why does the existence of the afterlife need approval from mainstream science in order to be ‘true’, in order to be ‘real’?  Life is the greatest university of all, and when one has had the lived experience of the infinitesimal, in whatever its manifestations, there is nothing to prove, there is nothing to be debated.