Life, not death, separates us from life
Travel across the sea and distances has resumed. There is a sense of the danger easing up. airports are full once more and people, it appears, do not mind the crowding. While the mask is there to cover our nose and mouth, it has become a remembrance of safety, not an assurance. at cafes, we easily drop these defenses— the conversations up close, the tactility.
At meetings, I have developed this joyful phrase, “we survived the war.” The people I meet again, friends and acquaintances, I see as survivors. They are beings who have crawled out of the deep and dark tunnel because the air has cleared once more. Out in the open spaces of face-to-face meetings, lectures, workshops, the events are nothing short of the celebratory and the emancipating.
Life is good. It is short but it is beautiful and good. And while there have been deaths in these two years and more from afflictions, some of us have the distinction—also the burden—of identifying the mortality from those caused by the virus to those brought about by lingering diseases or aging. With the pandemic having covered a mighty swath of humanity all over the world, resignation comes with an unheard of fluidity, an acceptance that there are indeed in this world the vanishing that cannot be controlled, a respect toward that, which science was not prepared to face.
Think of the conditions of our earth covered in wind, with air to breathe that would either annihilate us, or make us inhale with difficulty,
exhale as if our soul goes now with the fog coming out of our lungs. We had, even at the tail end of the pandemic, to preserve that which seems to make us live, with fear perhaps, but make us live still. Limited by the open spaces that would have been given to us as steward of this planet in the age of the normal, we held on to what we could conserve.
It was at this time when the life of a sister-in-law, dearly loved, slowly began to fade. She was conscious of it, and she was telling us her condition, ironically in small doses of disclosure as if fearing for our weakness at the face of death. She moved in and out of the hospital and each time we countered an emergency, we had to field one person to accompany her. Each time we sent her a son or a daughter, there was a thought we were giving that child to the danger of the setting. Finally, when she expired, there were only two of her children with her. A friend who was with the medical profession joined them later. That was the caveat— somebody who understood clinical life would know the risk.
Death, as we would never accept it, is the most societal mystery countering Life. Death bids us to gather and be caring. With death, grief comes next. Grieving is the only part of death we can embrace, the way Denise Levertov strips that emotion: Ah, grief, I should not treat you/like a homeless dog/who comes to the back door/for a crust, for a meatless bone. I should trust you.
And so there we were on that day, away from the bedside of the big sister we cared for and respected, and lived with for most of our life. The air she had breathed last was all for her. We could not be there to touch her, or, in the golden opportune Fate sometimes gives us, talk to her without bidding farewell.
The only remaining act to do then was, as the poet said it, to trust sorrow.
Last week, an aunt, beloved as well, passed on. We had not seen her for some four years. A grave misunderstanding between her family and ours made it wise that we cease that part of kinship with her. It was easy breaking the link with her daughters but with her, we had to summon the power not to look at her window whenever we passed by her home. Used to giving her the most ordinary things like a loaf of bread or a plate of noodles, we had to forgo those acts. It was clear to us, however, that she was not asking that we take care of her and pay her attention—far from it. She was quite an independent person.
We know the nature of the gift. Marcel Mauss asks the question: “What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?” We know then what was lost when we were not anymore able to visit this aunt: we lost, with her, the magic of giving. That in the avowed reciprocity born out of giving a gift where the giver is magically changed, we breathed in loneliness. Every time we sent her those basic things—the boring gift as the Japanese put it ceremonially —we were multiplied several times in happiness and gratitude not to her but to ourselves. We saw, after all, ourselves capable of loving and ultimately caring for others, a wondrous, spectacular aspect of being human.
In life, she, living, was separate from us; in death, she is forever gone. Death has resolved a kinship. For us, at least. Today, there is only grief and sadness to hug, prayers to offer till we, too, are gone, as well as f lowers and candles to remember her remembering us.