"Living"

I took a walk in the Beechwood National Cemetery yesterday. The sky was like the skies of my childhood, a crisp blue with no sign of haze, complement no doubt of the reduction in pollution during the pandemic. The temperature was a perfect 21℃ with a gentle breeze.

I wandered down a path that I seldom take in the older section of the burial ground, and was browsing at the names on tombstones when one of them attracted my attention. At first, I could not make it out clearly but then I finally deciphered the single word on it, the name of the person buried there: “Living”. I could not help but chuckle at the irony of such a name for someone who had been among the dead for many decades.  

I spent the remainder of my leisurely stroll musing about this. I wondered what it would be like to be “Living” instead of “Côté”. Would that change my way of seeing things? Would I not feel myself daily defying death and boldly challenging it by my very existence – a quixotic character, certainly, condemned to eventually fail, but nonetheless bravely proclaiming until my last breath and even beyond the grave, “I am Living!”

Setting all humour aside, I must admit that there is also something very prophetic about such a family name: are we not all destined for resurrection in Christ and thus to be “Living” for eternity.

Grappling with Death

Last month, I wrote an article in my blog on my very first experiences with death (https://experiences-impressions.blogspot.com/2021/01/sister-death.html) but did not post it on Facebook. I felt uncomfortable doing so. I must admit I thought few people would be interested in reading about such things. Grappling with death is not an easy thing to do, but I do believe it is necessary and important to do so. So here goes…

The heart attack I had at the age of 39 was totally unexpected. I knew intellectually that I was mortal, but that is a far cry from knowing it with every fiber of your physical and mental being. I had had no warning symptoms before that afternoon when I started feeling unwell.  

While I was still conscious in the emergency room of the hospital, I suspected that what was happening to me was serious and had a sense that I might not survive. When the cardiologist came to examine me, I asked him, “Is my life in danger?” With a concerned look, he simply answered, “Yes.” Strangely enough, I was not at all afraid. I was, however, seized with a sense of urgency to see a priest and I requested one. The doctor’s initial reaction was, “There are more important things to do right now than that!” But a minute later, I heard him ask a nurse to call for a priest. As soon as he had done that, I felt a deep peace, deeper than any I had ever felt before or have felt since.

In the hours that followed, I was in and out of consciousness, but completely unable to open my eyes, or speak. I was conscious when the priest came, and I was also intensely conscious of another presence there. I remember praying silently, “Lord, whether I live or die, it’s OK. I trust you. J’ai confiance en toi.” To this day I still believe that, because my body needed every single ounce of energy to fight for survival at that moment, the grace to “let go” that was given to me then saved my life.

Physically, I recovered rather quickly. I was back teaching two months later. Psychologically it took much longer. The peace I had felt in the hospital was gone. For almost a year, I went to bed at night wondering if I would wake up in the morning. Anxiety seized me frequently, at times so intensely that I had to call in sick. I would then go walking in the neighborhood where I lived until the fear subsided.

The staff and students at the high school where I taught were kind and considerate. I could sense their concern for me, and I am extremely grateful for that. But not one of them ever asked me to talk about what had happened. The subject of my heart attack was never raised. It was several months after the heart attack that I realized how much this silence weighed on me. I was talking to a friend about how things were going when, suddenly, I burst into tears and blurted, “If people reject my death, they reject me! Mortality is part of who I am!”

Since then, I have made a conscious effort to grapple with death, mine, and that of others. It is part of who I am and part of every single person I meet. I do not want to reject any part of myself or any part of them either.  

Sister Death

For a few months one summer and on weekends the following school year, I was a hospital porter at the old Ottawa General Hospital which was then located on Bruyère Street near the Byward Market in Ottawa. My task consisted solely of moving patients in wheelchairs or on stretchers. Most of the time, this was from their room to a department within the facilities where they would be tested or receive treatments and back to their rooms. Sometimes, however, the trip would be one way. I was in my early twenties that summer and the work I was doing would lead to my first encounters with death.

I remember making only three of those one-way trips to the morgue. Two of them were on the same day. In the morning, I received a call from the emergency room. When I arrived, someone pointed to a stretcher in a corner. I was told that the elderly lady on it had wandered out into the cold in her back yard and had died there of hypothermia because she had dementia and could not find her way back inside. As I wheeled her to the elevator that led to the morgue, her wrinkled forehead was uncovered, and I could see her gray hair. When I returned to the office where I waited for the next call, I was completely drained, numb, and felt as if someone had knocked the wind out of me. I just wanted the day to be over.

That afternoon, I received another call from the emergency room. On arrival there, a nurse was waiting for me with a small child cradled in her arms. The beautiful little girl she held must have been no older than 2-3 months old. The nurse insisted that I carry the child up to the morgue in my arms, not on a stretcher. The death of that infant had obviously touched something very deep in her. I was still reeling from the morning and I could not bring myself to do what she asked. It was not fear or repulsion that compelled me to refuse her request and certainly not indifference. It was a total sense of dismay and powerlessness. I brought the tiny body up on a stretcher.

I left both the old woman and that beautiful child with the attendants in the morgue that day, but I still carry them in my heart. These were my first experiences of death, but they would not be the last, far from that. I have encountered death scores of times since. I have also had to face my own mortality.

It is not easy to write about these things and probably not easy to read about them either. But it is in no way morbid to do so. I may never be able to sing praises to God for “Sister Death” as Saint Francis of Assisi did in his famous Canticle to Brother Sun and Sister Moon:

“Praised be You, my Lord through Sister Death,
from whom no-one living can escape.”

However, I am grateful that I have had to grapple with death.  Refusing to think about death and to come to terms with our mortality only allows death to haunt us in subtle ways. More than that, I have come to think that it prevents us from loving fully. If I reject the ultimate fragility that is in my brother or sister, their mortality, how can I love them fully? If I reject that ultimate of fragilities that is in me, how can I love myself as I am? And how then can I love as Jesus did: "Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end."?