Marble stele of a woman, Greek, mid-4th century B.C. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In Death is But a Dream, the report of research by Christopher Kerr that I wrote about last week, the author’s interviews with the dying tell of reunions between the dying and those they cared about who had predeceased them. Assuming Kerr’s investigations conform methodologically to those used in more conventional research projects, his conclusions would certainly challenge modern and postmodern assumptions that death terminates your story and mine, full stop.
That said, Kerr’s descriptions of these last encounters had a sameness of tone – reflecting the singleness of their reporter, Kerr himself. Since the topic is not exactly a boring one – rather one of ultimate concern – I turned to another book, Visions, Trips, and Crowded Rooms by David Kessler. There, witnesses write their own first-hand reports. Of course, those authors cannot be the dying themselves. But they are people both concerned and close at hand, such as spouses, relatives or nurses and doctors who’ve been willing to tell what they saw and heard from the dying.
Should such reports be deemed credible? Kessler tells something I did not know, namely that a dying person’s declaration is admissible as evidence in courts of law. The decision goes back to English medieval jurisprudence which held that “a dying person is not presumed to lie.” Perhaps the credibility of the dying was reinforced by the belief, then shared, that the afterlife would be a domain of divine judgment. But even today, generally speaking, the dying person is no longer looking for gains in this present world. One can imagine a last spark of malice motivating a parting lie, but – though I do know of malicious lies – personally I know of no such lie being told by someone actually dying.
That view from the law is in marked contrast to the typical medical view where “deathbed visions are considered hallucinations” and most likely a “side effect of medication or lack of oxygen.” That still-established view, while surely correct in certain cases, is pretty downbeat. It’s prosaic – not poetic.
By contrast, among the experiences of the dying reported in Kessler’s collection are some that rekindle and verify romance. For example, Nina, a health-care attorney, found true love with Bill, her second husband. He “had become more of a parent to [her] children than their own birth father.” Some years later, when her children were grown, Bill started to complain of headaches. Eventually his symptoms were tracked to a spinal tumor which all the approved medical treatments failed to reverse.
Accepting the inevitable, Bill checked out of the last hospital and finally went home to die. A few days before the end, Nina “realized that our small, self-contained world had a visitor … . I heard him say, ‘Mom, I can’t believe you’re here.’ He told her about the kids and me, as if we were being introduced, with no regard as to whether we could hear him or not. … On the last day of his life, he talked to his mom again. Then he looked at me and said, ‘Come here.’ He gave me the most passionate kiss – the kind you have when you’re dating, not when you’re dying. Afterward, he told his mother, ‘I knew I loved her from the first kiss.’ And to me he said, ‘To the last kiss, I love you.’ He died peacefully that night.” So it seems that, when we die, romance doesn’t have to die.
The two deaths I have witnessed were those of my father and my mother. My father took just a week to die, proving that, as my mother said, he wouldn’t drag it out. To the young physician at the Maine Coast Memorial Hospital who asked him how he was feeling, he replied, “I feel real resuscitated” – with ambiguity and irony mixed together, as was his wont.
At the end, I watched him die, my hand on his heart. From his chest, a current of sensation ran up my arm until – like the conclusion of a wordless paragraph or sentence – the current had conveyed everything it had to tell me. Which was that Love underlies, encompasses and supplies substance to all the perturbations, refusals and reversals, losses and victories of our lives.
I was not with my mother at the end. She died in the hospice during the night. But the last expression I saw on her face – from which by then all the feminine coquetterie had fled – was of the sternest and profoundest Love.
*. *. *
What do they prove or show, these books by intelligent writers that are now going public with their evidences that death is not the end? What effect will such evidences have, if credited, and what changes might they work on the culture, now virtually worldwide, that we share?
Such findings would make everything we do, say, feel and think more consequential than up to now we’ve quite dared to believe. Our lives are carriers of meaning. They are
nonfiction stories.
