things in the luminal and liminal world of the dying are very metaphoric and operate on a vast array of planes of meaning and action. One thing means more than one thing. This is always an important distinction when applying therapeutic skill toward interpreting a life lived.
This same sort of dreamtime or dreamlike living occurs in leaping poetry. The connections made between disparate ideas, concepts, and objects in this kind of poetry are not only metaphoric, but able to span the full range of the synapses in the brain. Things may not immediately make sense in proximity to each other, but then, all of the sudden, the link is illuminated and we have an “ah ha moment” that makes everything liminal and luminal at once. It is dreamy.
Things that do not seem to be connected, related, or meaningful together become so because of the awakening moment. End-of-life has a lot of these awakening moments. These same sort of things happen quite frequently in meditative or contemplative states and experiences. We are opened to a much wider field of interpretation and awareness. We can see how one thing may be related to, similar to , or connected to another in this arena of “larger meaning”. This gives it an underworld or subconscious feel.
People in the end-stage-of-life, and to an extent the people immediately around them, are forced into seeing through the looking glass with a bit more intensity than every other day in life. The best we can do to describe it is to compare it to those really serious conversations, thoughts, and pacts that come about in the evening as the sun is setting. You know those serious conversations that happen around the fire, or heart to heart, or over a glass of wine. Everything else in life—except that moment—is meaningless. This conversation bears the weight of our whole worth and of the whole world.
Things are so different in this liminal and luminal space that often the morning after one of these serious and clarifying moments, people tend to down play how vital those conversations, thoughts, or pacts were. They may even deny that they said this or that. You know what I am talking about. That is how it is all of the time in the lives of people edging closer to death. Everything is vital and means something. More of life leans into the liminal and luminal as death approaches.
* * *
I know this language sounds silly to you. But, play along; the journey we shall take will bridge the gap between your fear and your living. Hold the words and let them ring aloud a bit. Find out where the words belong and where you are in relation to them.
Without these impressions, you will hold the images below the luminal life and keep them at bay for ever. That will kill you. Let these tales become the solid matter in the field of your echolocation. They will give resonance to your soundings.
Someday—generally sooner than we hope—Death will come for you. Can you honestly say that at this moment now you feel ready to make the transition? Is everything in your life in order and up to date? Have you mended everything that is torn? Have you added everything you were here to add? If not, dance with me among the stories of Death and dying and find some flowers to hold onto for beauty and sustenance against the change.
* * *
Who was there that morning—the morning I was putting on my socks—I do not know. I do know that one of the Death squad was there. I could feel them: heavy and lingering like that fog. They wanted something. I had no idea what it was. I could feel they wanted something.
I had put my socks on inside out. I had to take them off and turn them “right side out” (the lumps of loose string facing thread in) and put them back on. This focus; this “little-extra-to-get-it-right” time with my socks gave me the chance to step out of the routine and feel him there. He was close: very, very close. Small acts of routine behavior are often the bridges into contemplative space. Somehow the repetitive nature of routine enables us to step off the bridge and into the Stream-of Life. Routine can plunge us into the underworld—the world of “that which is within”.
Routine helps us to step outside of ourselves and notice things like this. Things like the presence of Death. Things like how much we love the people in our lives. I let the routine reveal to me the path of my day. Someone was dying and I would be needed sooner, rather than later.
My pager went off. When I returned the page, the nurse told what house to go to. That is where I went.
Chapter Two
The Medieval paintings, and drawings, and woodcuts that depict skeletons rising from their graves and tempting the living to join them in “The Danse Macabre”, are not far off. They are not wrong. There is a clear reality that hangs on them like those wisps of smoke—like that carbon around the fire. Those images are clothed with hand-me-downs of the truth.
The macabre dance of the dead is something that goes on all around us. The living and the dead are always interacting. It is happening at the level of muons and quarks. Everything is in a transition from one state to another. Everything. We call it growth. The cosmos is bursting with things that are, things that have been, and things that will be. They are all always in relation to one another.
The freshly dead, the wandering dead, and the spirit-angels of Death himself all try to entice us to follow them. They are lonely. They want company. They need to create a reality that is communal. Without a community, they would feel dead and alone. That would be too much for them to bear. So, they mingle with us looking for companionship. They want us to join their reality. They need something we have.
We are pulled and pushed into growth and evolution by the play of energies and forces. The negative charge draws a positive charge. Things diminish to emerge renewed. Living begets dying and dying begets living in everything.
It is richer than this. Endings are everywhere around us. We are becoming adults and dying to our youth. We are becoming single and dying to our marriages. We are changing jobs and dying to our vocations. We are deepening in our understanding and dying to our ignorance. We go to sleep and wake up; we wake up and go to sleep. We remember; we forget. We are all always engaged in a process of dealing with life and death. That is the Danse Macabre.
Just as we are finding out in the New Physics, one event in our lives exists at the same time as all the other events in our lives. The thing we call time and the thing we call space are not as concrete as we had earlier depicted them—or, perhaps as we had hoped. There is more of an exchange between local and non-local events. There are wormholes and black holes in space, time, and in a human life as well.
Dying and death are whirling about us in a cosmic motion. One thing is transforming into another every second of time throughout all time. This is part of the macabre dance. This becomes that, and that becomes this. Cutting the atom of all life has revealed a massive force and dynamism behind everything. One thing is always dying into another—transforming into newness. We are no different.
Countless Classical authors wrote about these happenings, this dance under the titles of “The Nature of Things”. They tried to put the pieces together in everything that was. Contemporary scientists resurrected the idea when they began to search for the unified theory of everything. That theory would be one that would isolate and identify how each and everything fits into the whole of this thing we call life. The dance of life is also the dance of death.
* * *
When we start to tell the tales about Death and when we start to tell the tales about the nature of things we are weaving our own tapestry of myths. The stories are coming up and out of us; dancing if you will.
What makes myth so critical in the life of a human is not its simple ability to calm and soothe us—stories do tend to deescalate the anxieties in us and calm us down. What makes myth so critical is how it enhances our word power—it
