Mar
13
Afterlife
Filed Under Feuilletons |
One of my wife’s first cousins died about 2 weeks ago. She was only 25 (or was she younger). She’d had this infection in her ear, and somehow it had spread into the brain stem. The hospital gave her some morphine, I believe, but then - for some inexplicable reason - she gave a desperate gasp, according to accounts, and slipped into a coma. She was on ventilators for about two days before they pulled the plug. She was a recent mother, is leaving behind a baby girl, just a few months old. Her husband, who had just now returned from Iraq, is only a kid, too. They were planning to move out to Texas before all this happened, finally a family again. From what I understand, no one knows how to best take care of the baby girl, which really wrings my heart.
In Eliot Weinberger’s An Elemental Thing, the author remembers a conversation he has with his dying friend, when his friend relates to him a passage from Chuang Tzu in which the philosopher uses an old skull as a pillow and falls asleep -
In a dream, the skull appears and tells Chuang Tzu that among the dead there are no rulers or subjects, no work to be done, and spring and autumn are endless. Chuang Tzu asks: ‘If I got the Arbiter of Fate to give you a body again, make you some bones and flesh, return you to your parents and family and your old home and friends, you would want that, wouldn’t you” The skull replies: “Why would I throw away more happiness than that of a king on a throne and take on the troubles of a human being again”
“It is comforting,” my friend said, “but I don’t believe it.”
It really is hard to believe. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, it is said that the children lead the dead by hand to an acacia tree. Regrettably, I forget what happens after that. But in that moment which probably feels both brief and expansive at once: hard to believe that the innumerable souls of the dead do not look back and feel the nostalgia for the life of flesh and blood. Yearn for the ones they must leave behind.
But, still. Rest in peace.
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