  Happy Cinco de Mayo. Am reading Bird by Bird thanks to PBS. Love PBS, hate how corporate it’s getting. =>another stupid thing politics are doing these days. My mom spends a lot of time with dying people. She says they often look at a corner. My cousin Scott did. He died most recently of anyone in my life. He was a tragic, cut down in his prime death. Mom told him the angels must be coming from this one corner because he kept watching it as his death neared. And here’s the most interesting part for me: both of my babies when they were first born watched the same corner of my home. I think there is a connection. Babies are so newly crossed over from the spiritual dimension of life and dying people are so close again to it. There must be something spiritual about corners. Dying people also often say, “so light.” As if they are suddenly aware of the heaviness of life and as it begins to lift, they feel so much lighter, so much better.
So light. There is a corner in my bedroom that I watch sometimes. I thought for a while Scott was trying to come from it to talk to me. So I made an agreement with him, in case he was listening, that he had to come talk in the daytime because I was sick of watching it in fear at night. Then, when I went on vacation in Angel Fire at Scott’s parent’s place and I felt his presence again, I renewed the pact.
He’s never come in the daytime to talk, so I think it’s either a bad presence pretending to be him or it’s my imagination gone amuck. We have come so far from death in our society. Like birth, it’s become a thing that happens in a hospital room with one visitor and a nurse to tell you and your visitor how to act.
Why aren’t children allowed in these rooms? Shouldn’t they see life in it’s completion? Most people are ok with letting their kids see dramatic deaths on TV, but would never submit to allowing them to view an actual death. The first time I saw death close up was early in college when I attended an autopsy for extra credit. The medical examiner explained that the man we were viewing had been mentally ill, with slight down syndrome. He died of a heart attack alone, but had not been found right away and apparently anytime a body is found (rather than someone attending a person’s death), an autopsy must take place. The examiner examined the body, the diseased hearth—weighing it carefully then placing it on a table, the inner organs. When he came to the liver he announced an interesting find: a tumor. Had the man not died of heart disease, he would have died of cancer sooner or later anyway.
And I think, if not of a bus as he crossed the street, but that’s not a valid thought in health practitioner world because busses and streets don’t have morbidity and mortality stats. I stood and watched the entire autopsy, leaving the room at the examiner’s advice only for the part where he sawed open the brain to examine and weigh.
I did not go far enough to escape the sound, though. It was an awful sound of drilling bone and then of not drilling bone where I was aware that the man’s brain was being extracted from the head. After the organs were examined, they were placed in a plastic sack, which was placed in the body cavity, which was then sloppily sewn closed. The man’s shirt would cover the incisions and the family viewing the funeral, even in the case of an open casket, would never know the difference. In more traditional times and even in current times at more traditional places, the women of a family prepare a body for burial.
They wash and tenderly say goodbye in the process of washing. Younger girls help their mothers, aunts, and grandmothers and in the helping learn how to honor dead family members. Either the creepiness we tend to have here and now about bodies is overcome in this process, or it never sets it because a body is a familiar experience. Because these people are part of the process of seeing the end of life, then the body after life is extinguished, they must surely be more intimate with the spirituality of life. I have observed that doctors, seeped in their scientific training, are seldom very spiritual. If they tended to the bodies, gently washing and honoring after the life they cared for ended, I think this would not be the case. Maybe I’m wrong here, because then the doctors that care for the beginnings of life might also be more spiritually aware, and I do not find them to be.
The beginning of life is as fascinating, but also as overlooked by our culture. This beautiful experience brings with it a contact with the spiritual that is renewing and imparts within itself the wisdom, patience, and most importantly, the unconditional love that the coming task of parenting requires. After my children were born I swam for weeks in the high of coming so close to the spiritual side. That lovely, angelic glow slowly faded from my babies’ faces as the days passed and they became more and more aware of the senses that come through the body, and as those senses drowned out the spiritual ones they became less rooted in them. I mourned this passing. By the close of the mothering moon, each baby relied on sounds and sights to communicate with me over the spiritual senses. 
