Well she did write me a real letter. The letter was a very loving capture of what she felt about the passing of her grandmother. The letter was sweet and warm and tinged with the loss that we all feel at the passing of someone who had been an important part of our lives. There was also a juxtaposition of her life to her grandmother’s. Finally and maybe rhetorically, maybe not she asked me if I had ever watched anyone die. I responded.
I may have missed the mark in my response. Right now I am feeling awkward about my reply. Still what I wrote I really meant. Over the past 36 hours I have kept thinking about what I had written. My response to her beautiful post has been so much on my mind I decided to alter my response letter and post it as this week’s blog entry. Of course I have tried to remove all identifying information pertaining to the writer. Here is the text of my response beginning just after the salutation.
Like you I have watched a person die. In actuality I have seen several people die. In my time on this earth I have seen a bit of death’s spectrum. As you know I am not an ER room nurse or an EMT. My exposure to death has thus not been so high as to make me callous to the event of life’s end. The passings I have seen I remember vividly.
On the one hand I have seen a beloved aunt die. Her family was at her side despite the hour being very late. My wife and I had driven for hours for one last visit. Within five minutes of our arrival she quit fighting and was gone. All the care and compassion a matriarch should be accorded was in full play. Her children and grandchildren nieces and nephews were about the place. Tears of love flowed. The event was filled with real love, compassion and care. While I felt sad her death came at a time appropriate in the grand scheme of things, she was suffering and she had fought the good fight long enough. But when you asked the question of whether I had seen a person die that is not the death I remember. The one I remember I will recount below.
As you know I have faith, but I am not sure my faith is as strong as yours. Despite giving in and responding to an altar call or two, I never felt the electricity of a full and complete knowledge of God as I stood in the front of a church with a pastor’s hand on my head as he prayed for me. The scales didn’t fall off my eyes after being struck blind on the road to Damascus. My journey is one that is continually tested, continually challenged. My faith is tempered by what I have experienced and while I am a Christian, that is I a believer in the Christ and in his red letter affirmations (you know the stuff Jesus is directly attributed to have said) I have real moments of doubt. There are many paths in this life and I do have trouble ascribing that only one opens the door to the fulfillment of God’s love.
I am glad you have peace but I am not sure I will ever have that, at least not in a way that resolves all the mental and philosophical conflicts I try and work through daily. My path to faith is one walked with constant fear and trembling as I set about working out my own salvation. When I read the New Testament I see that the founders of the early church understood that the search for faith is never easy, Philippians 2:12-13.
On actually seeing death I offer the following. Experiencing another’s death is an odd memory for me. The first time I watched someone die was as unexpected as it was ghastly. I was in my second year of law school. The day was a cold sunny Saturday afternoon in March. It was long enough ago that there were no VCRs and cell phones. Both of these facts played a role in the events of that day.
In the days pre-VCR if you wanted to see a “classic” film you had to watch the local film societies’ newspaper adverts to see what was showing at their weekend screenings. Living in downtown Detroit in my 17th floor tenement apartment located in officially blighted neighborhood my nearest film society was run by the Detroit Institute of Arts. In the Friday section of the Free Press there was a listing that on Saturday at 1 p.m. the Detroit Film Society would be showing Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
McCabe was an anti-western; it was maybe to only real anti-western. In the film the hero runs a brothel and dies a cowardly death. The audience finds itself rooting for him to shoot the bad guys in the back. Such actions were clearly not the cowboy way. It was a film of its era and the chance to see it on a big screen was a rarity. Having read the Free Press on Friday morning I saw it was showing. As we were having coffee before our morning classes I convinced my friend Andi (Andrea) to go. As I remember it she loved Robert Altman movies about as much as I did. We agreed to meet the next day early, which by our sense of time and calendar was a highly flexible term.
Andi and I met that Saturday morning at the University of Detroit Law School Library. As should be expected, we were running late. What else was new? The law library sits on East Jefferson Avenue near the base of I-75 South as it passes through downtown Detroit. Andi lived on the eastside and I lived downtown so it was the ideal rendezvous. The Detroit Institute of Arts is just a couple of miles north of the school through a warren of urban blight off of I-75. Trying to insure we would make the opening credits we jogged out to Andi’s little bullet shaped Civic.
Her car was the original Honda Civic; it was a two seater and had a steering wheel that was a mile across. We were running late as always and we debated whether we should smoke our joint then before we drove to the movie, in the car on the way to the movie or outside the theatre. We decided to wait. The rationale was that this was Detroit and what city cop in his right mind was going to bust a couple of people for doing a doobie in the Cass corridor? In retrospect it was a far better choice than we ever would have contemplated.
We jumped in the car and Andi drove, actually she drove like a bat out of hell. The Civic proudly wore a bumper sticker that a mutual friend had affixed as a testament to her driving skills which read, “I Break for No Apparent Reason”.
Merging onto I-75 we were headed up to Warren Avenue. From there we were going to work our way to the DIA. Hitting speed in front of the Lafayette Clinic, the Wayne State University mental health facility we were at a solid 70 m.p.h. Andi tapping the steering wheel and me the dash as we sang along to Tom Petty’s “Even the Loser’s Get Lucky Sometime”. We sang out of tune and loud, like was there any other way?
Just as we were hitting the song’s crescendo a body came off the hood of the car in front of us and flew over our Civic bouncing off the car behind us rolling brutally in the roadway. The body of that man is suspended in mind forever passing over the windshield of the Civic. No I didn’t see his face. For the life I me I can’t tell you if he was in pain at that moment. I remember his clothes were gray and he had a jacket on. But when I rewind the movie, and it does come to me late at night more frequently than I would like, it is just the shock of seeing a body there in mid-air that stands out. It is as if the cassette player went silent right then. It was if we had slipped between the light rays of the sun into a moment of unreality. All I can say for sure it is that the man was airborne and twisted in ways not meant to happen in nature.
Wrenching my head around I saw the man’s body rolling down the road. Andi was screaming and in tears. I think she was shouting something like “What was that, did you see that, what was that, what do we do?” I was not mentally there at all, shock perhaps, but my thoughts focused in a couple of seconds and I told her get off at the next exit. I didn’t care if we were in the heart of the ghetto we had to call 911. Andi was crying and I was shaking and sweating as we pulled off. I honestly can’t say what my body was doing right then.
Trying to find a pay phone in a ghetto in 1980 was not an easy task. We rode around through neighborhoods that looked like Sarajevo after the worst of the fighting. Boarded up facades and burnt buildings were everywhere. It took a couple of minutes but eventually we found a phone and put the 911 call in. I still wonder what diseases I picked up off that handset.
It was our mutual thought that we had better go back to see if anyone had helped the poor bastard. I wasn’t sure what I could do I had no first aid training. It wasn’t for voyeurism that we returned, we also thought that the cars who had hit the guy might need witness statements. Even if we were sometimes stoner law students we took our obligations under the law quite seriously. We were witnesses.
After a drive south on surface streets which seemed to take forever (time works funny in dire stress doesn’t it, things just hang there and everything seemingly takes so long), we eventually got on I-75 north again and came back to the spot by the Lafayette Clinic. The police had arrived on scene and an EMT was just getting there.
I don’t know how to refer to the man struck by the car, the victim, the man, the guy in gray so I guess I will just go with the man. When we pulled up the man was lying on the curb and a police man was over him and had a blanket covering him partially. From what I could see he was twitching and bloating up with blood that must have been pooling in the spots where he had taken the body hits from the cars that had struck him. His breathing was noisy, irregular and kind of gurgling maybe. Then the things his muscles and body were doing just stopped and the EMTs didn’t seem to be in a hurry anymore. When they put him on the stretcher there was no sense of urgency. He was gone.
Surely I must have given a statement to the police, but I don’t remember it. I know that the time for the movie came and went and we were still at the roadside. Eventually everything finished up and we left.
We drove over to the Union Street bar on Woodward. I am pretty sure we didn’t smoke the joint it just didn’t match what we had experienced. Instead we drank shots of nasty burning liquors chasing them down with beers. We drank a shitload of them. And we cried and we talked about how fucked up watching the guy twitching by the road was. I think even though we weren’t a couple we went back to my apartment and had hard nasty sex and even that didn’t feel good.
I watched the paper for days to see if there was a blurb on what happened. Detroit however is a big city and one vehicular death doesn’t merit much mention. In the end I think I found out the guy was actually a patient at the mental clinic and had been released that morning. Nobody could really come up with a reason why he was trying to cross the eight lanes of I-75 on foot trying apparently to get back to the clinic from the other side of the highway. He had not been identified as a suicide risk. No one knew the why.
Did the experience give me faith or challenge my faith? It didn’t give me faith for sure, but I don’t think it really impacted on my faith. Watching that man die did something to me that has happened only a couple of times in my life. It focused me on life and its difference from not life. It made the world seem a little more real for a couple of days. Colors were a little clearer. The air felt a little more real on my skin. I felt forced to be in the moment and to be alive. The victim’s death was not one that seemed anything but mundanely horrific, still to me it showed the world was anything but mundane. Eventually that feeling faded.
When I was almost killed in an automobile accident the feeling came back. When I went on a luge run in Norway the feeling came back. No matter how I tried to hold onto that feeling it faded. But I have the wisps of the memory from those events to remind life matters.
Watching a loved one die is very rough indeed. This is especially true when the death is slow and when bits of that person’s life are stolen incrementally. Alzheimer’s is one of the cruelest of death’s emissaries. It is not alone. I have watched friends die of AIDS and that in many ways was the worst from my perspective. No matter how your rational mind tries to process the death it is filled with pain and conflict. There are tears that should have been cried but remain locked away in all of us.
I have known people who possess the selfless nature you describe when talking about your grandmother. If such a life of love and sacrifice was her choice or a choice she came to embrace then it can serve as a point of reference for how your life might evolve. Still you really don’t gain some greater awareness or share some incredible value by living such an almost monastic life if it is not an appropriate choice for you. “No one else can give me the meaning of my life; it is something I alone can make. The meaning is not something predetermined which simply unfolds, I help both to create it and to discover it, and this is a continuing process, not a once and for all.” Milton Mayeroff, On Caring, p 62. Being other focused is fine but you have to be you for it to matter.
In one larger section of the above book Mayeroff takes time to talk about what he feels are critical components of caring; they are trust, honesty and patience. This quote seems relevant to what your were talking about.
Courage is also present in going into the unknown. By following the lead of the subject matter or the direction of the growing child, I have no guarantee where it will all end or in what unfamiliar situations I will find myself. The security of familiar landmarks is gone and I cannot anticipate fully who or what the other will become or who I will become. This is the courage of the artist who leaves the fashions of the day to go his own way and in so doing comes to find himself and be himself. Such courage is not blind: it is informed by insight from past experiences, and it is open and sensitive to the present. Trust in the other to grow and in my own ability to care gives me the courage to go into the unknown, but it is also true that without the courage to go into the unknown such trust would be impossible. And clearly, the greater the sense of going into the unknown, the more courage is called for in caring.
The total subjugation and suppression of who you are or who you have been does not benefit anyone you care about or the world. If you grandmother’s selflessness came from her courage and not from stereotyped sex roles imposed by the society and faith of the time many decades ago when she was young then following that path may make sense. If her role and her apparent selflessness were imposed on her from outside, then maybe it does not make sense for you at all.
We all change. Our musical tastes may shift radically or our interest in music may die out altogether. Our friends will come and go. The space we occupy in terms of dwelling and family will vary. But the key is to have the courage to face these things and have the focus to work toward the meaning of your own life in fear and trembling, if need be.
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