Folk Beliefs About Death [UPDATED]
It’s surprising to me to discover how many people seem to hold, in a low-key, vernacular way, certain beliefs about the dead, or at least speak as if they believe these things to be true: that when people die they’re reunited with the people they love who died before them; that when you dream about someone who’s died, they are making contact with you.
It’s not that I disbelieve these things. I’m neither a believer nor a disbeliever (which to me is another kind of believer); I am a rigorous agnostic. To me, the more we learn about life and the universe, the less we realize we know. To me, the findings of science about the complexity of the cell and the dimensions of the universe throw both past science and past religion into a cocked hat. We’re growing up into the realization of our ignorance, of the complete mystery our existence is. We don’t know what we are, why we’re here, where we come from, or where we go. Well, anyway, I don’t.
So I’m surprised to hear these childlike, comforting, almost greeting-card-level beliefs from otherwise thoroughly modern people. They’re evidently part of the folk culture, the generic spirituality of our time. Not that I dismiss them. I would love them to be true. I hope they are. I sometimes go along and talk as if they are. I just can’t fool myself that I know for a fact they are. I don’t know where J went. I’ve felt his presence once since he died, about three weeks after. I know that he had a lot of busy conversation with ghosts the last weeks of his life. I have no idea whether this was the thinning of the veil or just the hallucinations of dementia. I’m very curious about what he was experiencing, but there’s no way to find out except to die myself. (And even then, maybe every death is as unique as the inward experience of being oneself. One of J’s favorite quotes was from Céline: “Experience is a muffled lantern that sheds light only upon the bearer.”) As he was dying, I sang out to him the names of the people and cats who would be waiting for him on the other side — if there is another side. It’s always “if” with me. I don’t believe or disbelieve, I entertain. I’m the Martha Stewart of agnosticism.
From a road notebook:
I was having such a sad dream when Ruth Anne woke me this morning. I don’t remember the early part, but I was in a dim house with some people. I was alone, while the others were talking in the kitchen. I had to go out — for food? or cash? or to mail a letter? As I was getting ready to go out, I looked out the glass corner door and saw J’s wheelchair, and some winter-coat-bundled guy helping him into it. Apparently I’d been unable to take care of him any longer and had abandoned his care to strangers. I hesitated for a moment, then decided the happiness of seeing me would outweigh the sadness, and darted out the door. J was settling himself uncomfortably but stoically in the back seat of what looked like a horse-drawn carriage (but no horse), squeezed in among 3 other old people, mostly befuddled old ladies. I saw his face twist as he tried to fit his shoulders in. I called his nickname, and he smiled at me, sweetly and without blame. His beard and eyebrows had been allowed to grow out to the point where his face was covered with an inch or two of soft brown fur — they weren’t even bothering to shave him! After another moment’s hesitation I called out, “Come over tomorrow and I’ll give you a shave!” Then Ruth Anne woke me.
Does this dream reflect my state of soul, or his, or an interface between them? Ruth Anne’s free association was that J is in Purgatory. (“Evangelicals think there’s a vacuum tube to heaven.”) Of course, that’s not folk belief, it’s Catholic dogma (using that word in the technical, not the pejorative, sense). But its sense of an in-between place or state or spell of time was echoed by my brother:
Maybe the same thing, not stated Biblically: he’s on his way, in the company of ancestors and the care of impersonal angels, to a place where personal care of the physical self is starting to be beside the point.
Chris said, “Well, at least he’s coming ’round.”
Then there’s my side of it. Someone, maybe also Ruth Anne, said that I feel guilty for feeling relieved of the burden of his care. But I don‘t feel relieved. I miss taking care of him, even though I don’t know how I could squeeze myself back inside that life (as much as I don’t belong out here in this one, either) if I had the power to turn the clock back. That is what the dream says to me most clearly: I feel as if I’ve abandoned him, not to strangers, but to death (what could be stranger?); and I long to turn the clock back — the Victorian motif is resonant of a book I love in which that becomes possible, Time and Again. His grown-out eyebrows and beard remind me of the way hair and fingernails keep growing in the grave — even though J is not in a grave — a perfect representation of the space between life and death. Maybe the departure of death is not as abrupt as it looks. I don’t know.
The relief was in waking up and realizing that, in fact, I saw it through, as I had pledged to. I did not become unable to cope and abandon him to strangers — except for those four respite days in the hospice facility, which may (or may not) have triggered his shingles. I steel myself against the pang of regret, against thinking if only I could have kept him at home he might still be here, by acknowledging that nothing much good awaited him here. It was better to go while he was still himself, and aware, and able to savor things, than to outlive himself and lie there in a coma for a year (as my grandfather, with a related dementia, did).
I don’t know.
Here’s what I do know: There is love. There is also hurt and accident and evil (destruction is one thing, reveling in destruction is a whole other thing). Love is just that much stronger. It wins by a nose, world without end. And that’s about it.
UPDATE: “Dr. Platypus” (Darrell Pursiful) linked to this post, and as I result I discover that one of the things he has been writing about is liminality. That is highly pertinent.
Christmas Clowning [UPDATED]
“Ridi, Pagliacci,” but not the original version — Donald O’Conner in Singin’ in the Rain.
UPDATE: Better view of the foam rubber reindeer antlers.
The Honeymoon is (Finally!) Over.
When you hear something three times, it no longer sounds like a coincidence and it gets your attention.
What I’ve heard at least three times this holiday season, as people — including at least one hard-core tech head — left for family gatherings or beach vacations or cruises, was: “I’m not taking my computer.” Often followed by, “And I won’t get a phone signal.”
Have you heard this? Or maybe even said it?
Vacation has, at last, become a getaway from electronics and virtual worlds and incessant, obsessive non-face-to-face communication. We now take our refreshment in what the tech heads used to contemptuously call “meat world”: the old world of the senses, movement, handclasps, facial expressions. Electronic communication and information sharing is a life-changing, world-changing marvel, but it also has severe limitations — sensory, social, emotional — and we’ve hit that wall. Enthrallment has turned to humdrum and even harassment. Screens are, finally, flat, and they can make you feel for all the world like a transfer ironed onto a T-shirt.
I think this is a good thing, in that it restores a sense of proportion and of appreciation for poor old jilted reality. I’m not suggesting that people should throw away their computers (I’m writing this on a computer), only that it’s a good sign that we can get sick of them.
(Another of the biggest tech heads I know — a professional in the field — got off the plane back from a conference on digital publishing and left his iPad in the back-of-seat pocket.)
You’ll Never Guess Who Wrote This.
Try and guess without Googling. If you know . . . wait. I’ll post the answer later or tomorrow.
We are spirits. That bodies should be lent us while they afford us pleasure, assist us in acquiring knowledge, or in doing good to our fellow creatures, is a kind of benevolent act of God. When they become unfit for these purposes, and afford us pain instead of pleasure, instead of an aid become an encumbrance, and answer none of those intentions for which they were given, it is equally kind and benevolent that a way is provided by which we get rid of them. Death is that way.
There Are Two Kinds of People in the World . . .
. . . those who think there are two kinds of people in the world, and those who don’t.
In My Pajamas
An article of mine appeared on Pajamas Media in early December and I didn’t even know it.
“You Are Not Your Brain.”
My fascinating friend Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz — very serious, ebullient and funny — may be doing some of the most important thinking and discovering on the planet. You Are Not Your Brain is the title of his next book, coming out in June. This long video is completely enthralling to me. It’s about basic stuff like mood, addictions, and overeating, and how much choice and control we actually have.
Jeff’s companion in the video is Kellie Madison, a young filmmaker who is raising funds for a dramatic (not documentary) movie, Machine Man, about a man tormented by obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD, Jeff’s specialty as a neuropsychiatrist) and redeemed by love. If you’re interested in the subject of OCD, she and Jeff discuss it at greater length here. A fascinating topic of both videos is Jeff’s work with Leo DiCaprio to prepare for the film The Aviator, whose subject, Howard Hughes, was an unknowing victim of OCD. With today’s understanding of the disorder, to which Jeff has been a major contributor, he would not have had to be.
Ms. Gottlieb Regrets . . .
In 2008 I made a deal with my New York landlord. He (or rather, they) knew I wasn’t living there, and were preparing eviction proceedings, but the department that renews leases had automatically renewed mine anyway — they sent a renewal lease, I signed it, they countersigned it. Their lawyer was so pissed. The market was still going great guns then, they could probably have taken both my two studios and gotten the full market price of two for them instead of less than the price of one. (How I came to have two tiny skylight studios, side by side, for such favorable rents is one of those New York real-estate shaggy dog stories you really don’t want to hear, unless you’re a New Yorker, for whom this stuff is like porn; but it involved the kind connivance, back in the ’90s, of my surviving neighbor, who had her 98th birthday this fall). The landlord’s left hand had basically screwed the right hand by signing away two more years on the one that has a lease, because it is rent stabilized. My other studio was rent controlled, which meant I was a statutory tenant. I had moved into the building in May 1971, one month before rent control ended. What can I tell you, I have a real estate guardian angel.
I went up to New York for just a day, because my home health aide was turning into a crackhead. (The one visit with friends I didn’t cancel, providentially as it turned out, was this one.) I shocked the landlord and his lawyer by telling them the unvarnished truth (something that possibly no one in a landlord-tenant proceeding had ever done before): yes, I wasn’t living there; here’s why; here’s where I live; here’s what I want. Long story short, I gave up the rent controlled studio I’d lived in since 1971 in exchange for one more two-year lease renewal on the rent stabilized one, the one where my beloved neighbors, two women, art-book editors, had lived and painted and partied since 1939.
It was a hassle and expensive, in time and lawyer’s fees, to pull off that deal, and many times in the years since I have thought it was a costly sentimental folly, though understandable. My homesickness for New York gradually faded, or so I thought. It seemed as if Jacques could go on indefinitely — well past the end of my last New York lease — and I was so fine with that. Ready to go on indefinitely with him.
The deadline was February, 2011.
Sometime in October, when J was already so sick, my subtenant up there informed me that the landlord (presumably his left hand) had once again sent me a renewal lease — no doubt again by mistake. (The landlord owns a lot of buildings and has bigger fish to fry.) I signed it, and sent it back, and waited. I was still hoping against hope that J would live on, incidentally sparing me what seemed like a tough decision: to move back to New York, or not.
When he left this world, my feelings changed. For one thing, there wasn’t a place or a sight or a gesture in Chapel Hill that meant anything to me but taking care of him. Everywhere I turned, everything I did, stabbed me like stepping on broken glass. For another thing, he would want me to go back to New York. As far as he was concerned, we had never left, and I figure he took off for there immediately if he hung around Earth at all. (Someone asked if I had felt his presence around me since he died. “Not until one night about three weeks later,” I told them. “I think he had trouble finding Chapel Hill.”) And finally, it seemed to me that if I was presented with the chance to live semi-affordably in New York City for a few more years, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse and would never forgive myself if I did. There’s all kinds of full-circle, or maybe spiral, stuff going on.
So I waited to see if the landlord would execute the renewal lease — by mistake — again. If that was going to go off automatically, I didn’t want to rock the boat by notifying him prematurely that I was coming back. Any vestigial impulse he (they) had to fight it (they couldn’t have won, but who needed the anxiety?) would, I reckoned, crumble before a fait accompli.
I waited . . . had they caught their no-longer-a-mistake?
Finally I texted my subtenant, “No lease, time to notify landlord? :( ” The next day I got back, “Hi Annie, good news!!! lease finally came on Monday. Sorry flew out to Seattle same day visiting family got caught up. Will send to you when I get back.”
So today I took another step on that foggy road ahead: I wrote and mailed this (address redacted for privacy).
To whom it may concern:
Regarding my tenancy of West 4th Street, Apartment 5B, which I agreed in a negotiated settlement (in May 2008) to vacate at the end of this lease period (February 2011) if my husband’s illness prevented me from returning to 5B by that time:
This is to notify you that my husband died on November 19th, 2010 (I will be glad to send you a copy of his death certificate on request), and so, somewhat to my surprise, I will be returning home to 5B as soon as I settle my affairs here. Accordingly, I have signed a renewal lease for 5B, which has been executed, and am in the process of changing my legal residence, driver license, etc. back to that West 4th Street, NYC address preparatory to returning.
Thank you very much.
Sincerely,
Annie Gottlieb
Ambiance 