True colors

by Margaret Hartford

Last week one of my students who works at a local veterinary hospital walked into the school room looking a bit different around the eyes-you know the look-when we have seen something that allows us to see a wider world, or perhaps the world more deeply. Anyway, this is the way he looked. Wider and deeper eyed.

He held an animal the night before who had an accident of some sort, and while he was holding it, it died. He did not know the animal, and yet one could see he was deeply affected. His affectation was not sentimental. He is not the sentimental sort. He was not sad that the animal died. Obviously, it was fatally wounded and needed to die.

What he felt was more substantial than that. What he felt was something indefinable, a depth of experience uncharacteristic within the context of our ordinary designs of daily life.

Holding something as it dies one feels, as the life slips from the creature, what I call a brick-to-the-forehead sensation. One feels, significantly and intensely, what we all assume happenstancely as we walk about breathing one breath after another without any recognition of how resilient yet thin the membrane is that separates life from no. Or without acknowledging what this life is, and what our responsibility is to it. Or without allowing ourselves to shine forth fully.

We spoke later about how difficult and yet simple it is for a living creature to "give up the ghost" so to speak. And about the possible connection between the struggle with the door between life and death and its relationship to development of will. And about how bright and clear the eyes of a creature are as they die, and of how we wait to show our true selves when we believe perhaps we have nothing left to lose, or prove. Of course it was all hypothetical, but each of us saw something that allowed us to ponder matters we frequently refuse to glimpse, or remember.

I first pondered some of this several years ago I had the honor of holding a friend's cat as she died. Red Cat was quite old and tired and sick and it was clear that it was her night to go. I took her into an office adjoining their apartment and held her in my lap, sang to her, and watched her stillness. I let her know over and over that it was okay for her to give up and go, though it may have been myself I was trying to convince, as she seemed fine with the process. I sat for several hours with her on my lap, my legs quivering with discomfort, and finally going numb. She seemed to glow more as her death came closer and her breathing became increasingly raspy. Sometimes she stopped breathing for a while, and then she would gasp and start up again. I was amazed at how long it took. She seemed to be garnering some sort of strength, as though she wished to draw out her dreadful suffering to the last possible breaking point; as though she was busy doing something, not undoing something. When she finally took one last breath, she appeared all fire to me, all orange and red flame, and then, nothing. The color disappeared, the brightness dissipated, the glow died. It was as though she became ash and blew away with her last breath.

What circled through my mind at the time was a singular question. It had to do with her eyes just before she died. It had to do with how beautiful her coat shone and how clear her eyes looked as she went. She had looked rather ragged for the past couple days, probably for the past couple months, but just before she died she shone like she had shone when she was just a kitten and all her life wriggled out of her all over. And the question was, and remains to this day, why do we shine so brightly just before we die?

I had a similar experience last year, when I held one of the school goats, Mooey, after she suffered a stroke during the night. It took her all day to die, and as she rallied toward the finish, she became more and more beautiful. She wept (goats cry real tears like us when they are sad or ill) and i wept with her. Through the tears, she seemed more clear and lovely than i had ever seen her look while she was alive and well. I have also witnessed this brightening from chickens i blessed and slaughtered, and once from a doe who had been hit by a car and was dying in the Rondout Creek near where I canoe. All these creatures seemed to emanate some sort of life force (or whatever you want to call it) full hilt and all of them reminded me of what it looks like when we burn fully-full flame, no strings attached, no promises made, no holds barred.

You hear stories of it all the time, and if you are fortunate enough to witness death first-hand, as i have been, though it is frequently a painful event, you also see something that leads you to believe that we maybe could be living brighter and clearer lives if only we remembered something it has become all too easy to forget. Something we seem only to remember as our lives slip from our bones.

My gahms, the Irish matriarch of my particular clan, died at the ripe old age of 98. Her last words, as she clutched me mum's hand, were rendered rather desperately. "But I didn't do what I came for," she whispered in a horrified voice. For just a single unbreathable moment, we all had to remember that we too were here to do something. To remember this was a gift. That we weren't on a treadmill for no reason.

Yet too frequently, as with any holiday gift, we play with these reminders for a while and then lose them in the back of some dark closet. Until we are reminded again that they are there. But we have to be willing to open the doors to the reminders.

Just a few weeks ago the last of the brilliant leaves fell from their autumn perches and slipped rather inconspicuously to the ground. I used to think the leaves "changed color"-became something they really weren't as a sort of chemical reaction to the colder weather and shorter days. A few years ago I found I was mistaken, and that leaves, in fact, are exhibiting their true colors just before they die and slip into ground cover for the white-tails to cuddle up in. Now it is a time of black and white, a time of hibernation, of moving inward, the darkness of genesis such that the year, and our lives, and the earth, can be reborn. Leaves, like everything else in the universe that I have met so far, actually show their true colors just before they unfurl completely and die. We have all seen this. We are all afforded this annual reminder, along with many daily others if we open our gaze.

It is true that we watch death daily-though we do so from a strange conspired distance that not only doesn't allow for us to truly experience it, but perhaps even makes it less likely that we will truly understand such experiences when we are afforded them.

Ever since Vietnam we have been watching deathon the news, death in the movies, death in the headlines-thousands in war, hundreds in airplanes, waitresses in small towns, children in the cities. But it is all viewed in such a strange sentimentally-distant context. What can we learn from all this distant death except numbness?

We have relegated many potentially fiery experiences to this distant surface sort of perception. As though we are only willing to perceive life's truest forms through lenses other than our own. Our ill and dying are locked away safely in hospitals; our vivid loving and angst happen behind closed doors, rarely mentioned in the open air. Our moments of bliss and suffering are hidden away as too intimate to share. And yet all of these we view from our cushiest chairs as if it is only happening to someone else, somewhere else, at a distance and pace that render it difficult at best to be felt deeply. What are we trading and for what?

We have framed life and death in a fanciful untouchable gilt frame-watching it on a screen or reading it in a print that exudes a sentimental and false light. We have severely limited the opportunities of placing ourselves in the midst of life's own tactile light, a light that allows us to listen from our hearts and see with our mind's eye. And so we miss out on hearing and seeing something that might allow us to ponder a multitude of reminders about how fine life's membrane is, how necessary it is to develop will and about how possible it is to shine brightly all the time.

We spend zillions of dollars on scientific research and new age hope as though to better understand something. But what are we trying to understand that we could not experience simply by looking each other in the eye or walking through the wood or holding the field mouse breathing its last at our porch door? What do we wish to know that we do not already know? Maybe we just need to open our doors and accept a few reminders.