Saturday 24 February 2018

From a View to a Death

[Warning: I didn’t like writing this post so you may not like reading it. There are unsettling elements.]

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.)

1 comment:

  1. 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.

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