On the way back from a meeting at Diocesan House (of which
more on another occasion) and visiting a couple of parishioners in the
hospital, only yards uphill from my house I noticed a squirrel by the roadside
and although I wanted to believe its tail was just flicking in the wake of
passing cars I suspected it had been struck by a vehicle but was not quite
dead. Inspection showed this to be the case. I have killed a squirrel before,
an injured one which had been discovered in the church vestry a few years ago,
and so, grimly, I fetched my shovel to do the same for this one. I couldn’t bring
myself to do it with cars thundering past so had to wait until the road was
quiet. The squirrel flinched backwards at my first strike, which – I think –
hit the ground just by its snout. This made me very shaky. I want to think that
the next blow killed it, although instead of hitting its neck, it struck across
the middle. The third would definitely have done it. I calmed down, dug a hole
in the bank, and buried the body, and went home and prayed.
The previous occasion was clean and precise, and the animal
was dispatched with a single blow across the neck. I remember looking into its
dead eyes and seeing into a sort of infinity, a very strange feeling of
communion. This time, it was all panicked and grotesque. I hadn’t wanted to
leave the squirrel either to die slowly or, worse, to be tormented by a cat
which was surely what would have happened. I suppose I could have scooped it up
and taken it to the vet, but I thought I could kill it quickly: I certainly wouldn’t
have tackled anything bigger. Who knows what it was thinking, whether in fact I
caused it more pain and terror than would otherwise have been. Perhaps I was
misled by my own inflated sense of responsibility, imagining that I have to do something
about everything.
We talk a lot of nonsense about death. I remember someone
from the Catholic parish telling me how his father had died in a car accident.
‘They think he had a cardiac arrest at the wheel. They say he wouldn’t have
known anything about it, but that’s just what people say, isn’t it? I can’t see
how anyone can know.’ He’s right. We know nothing about it. Some deaths seem to
be peaceful, and some don’t, but what’s happening in the mind of a person who
is beyond communication, even when they are outwardly serene, is a mystery. The only two experiences common to human beings, birth and death, are completely unknown
to us. Billions of us have undergone them and billions will, and we will never
know what either are actually like. We can’t even agree entirely about what
constitutes death. I have no idea whether appalling pain will usher me out of
this life, or whether I won’t know anything about it. Even if I fall into a
sleep which gradually becomes deeper and deeper, when I sleep now I am aware of
dreaming, or not quite being asleep; what is it like to lose awareness, to be aware of losing awareness? Will I panic?
Will I be afraid? Will faith be enough to help me across? Will someone do to me what I don't want, acting with the best intentions?
(I will aim at talking about something more cheerful next time.)
Irving Yalom calls it "Staring At The Sun," you can't do it for long. But you do it here, and your honesty is enlightening. I wonder if sometimes people talk about death when they actually mean dying. Death itself seems so absolute that - what can be said? "Where Death is, I am not," wrote Epicurus. I found "Intimate Death" by Marie de Hennezel of great value. She worked as a psychologist in a hospice in Paris.
ReplyDelete