Switching Worlds
Earlier this week as my wife and I were driving into town to visit my dying mother, I mentioned to her that the world seemed different. I couldn’t quite lay my finger on it, but the sky looked different, the roads felt different, and the people we encountered seemed different.
We were on our way in to try to talk with my mother who is actively dying. It may seem peculiar to say, “try to talk to her” but that is exactly what I mean. It was one more of those matters that seemed different. Because of COVID-19 we were unable to enter the long-term care facility where she lives. We were making a rogue attempt to speak with her by cell phone while standing outside her window. Fortunately, she was alert enough to recognize us and utter a few parting words of comfort in response to our voices.
I’m still not sure what I was experiencing on our drive in. However, I just finished reading Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carry about the Vietnam War. In it, O’Brien talks freely of death, along with the fear and rawness which clings to a person long after they have brushed up against death. They carry it with them through life.
O’Brien also talks about living in an environment in which death is pervasive and imminent. He writes, “The presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid. When you’re afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world. You make close friends. You become part of a tribe and you share the same blood—you give it together, you take it together” (O’Brien 205).
O’Brien also tells about the moment when one is dying or thinks they are dying: they notice “the blade of grass” or “the white pebble.” For O’Brien, it was the polished boots of his officer the moment he felt the thud of the bullet enter his buttocks. At that moment he smelled the scent of death within his body. It is strange, the things we notice when death seems imminent. People talk of their life flashing before them.
Fortunately, I have never been around war in any way. However, I have had three brushes with death (that I am aware of, anyway). The first encounter was the result of an ill-planned spring ice-fishing trip near a narrows deep in the Canadian bush with a group of my shop students from the boarding school I was working at. A narrows is a place where water flows from one lake to another, generating a strong current. The evening before, a group of us had been fishing there and the ice had been three feet thick. As I approached a hole, that I had done well at the evening before, I noticed bubbles coming up through the ice. During the night, the current had eaten away at the ice around the hole causing it to honeycomb. Before I could back away, I broke through the ice, becoming fully submerged. I was fortunate enough to come back up through the hole I went down in and was able to break the rotten ice until I reached ice solid enough to enable me crawl out on top again. It is not unusual, when someone breaks through ice where there is a current present, to be sucked away and under the ice. Once I was back on top of the ice, one of my students asked me, “Mr. Devon, did you see any fish while you were down there?” I didn’t notice any; I just remember I lost my favorite fishing pole.
My next brush with death came soon after we moved to our current residence. A friend had convinced me to replace my outdated fuse box with a breaker box. He had given me instructions on how to go about the exchange. I must preface what happened next by saying my lack of technical language in describing this event is evidence of my lack of technical skills needed for the job. I was only doing this to save money. I was going about the task of connecting the main line to the breaker box when suddenly my screwdriver slipped, making a connection between the wire and the box. There was a sizzling noise, followed by smoke and sparks galore. Fortunately, I was able to maintain my grip on the plastic handle of the screwdriver, sparing me from being electrocuted. Once the smoke cleared, I took a look at the screwdriver and noticed the shaft had been burnt halfway through at the point where it made contact with the box.
Several years later, I was driving home from work when I came up behind a road crew mowing beside of the road. I found myself thinking, “I wonder if those mowers ever kick anything out into the traffic?” I felt somewhat reassured when I saw the chain guards at the back of the mower. I’m not certain that I had even finished this thought process when my windshield exploded. At first I was confused. Then I slowly came to realize what had just happened. The mower had hurled a Nerf football-sized rock through the air, penetrated my windshield, and struck me on my right upper bicep, finally coming to rest on the floor of the backseat of my grey Ford Taurus station wagon. According to my imprecise and unscientific methods, I calculated, had the trajectory of the projectile achieved a bit more curvature to its arc, the stone would have struck me squarely in the head. Instead, all I was left with was a gruesome yellowish-blue bruise on my bicep, a scalp and car full of tiny pieces of tempered auto glass, and a healthy respect for mower crews. Oh, and a stone that I keep in our bedroom as a conversational piece.
When I look back on each of these moments, I can honestly attest that I was never afraid. It’s scarier thinking about switching worlds than it is actually doing it. Those that brush up against it are left with vivid memories—fish stories, screwdrivers, and stones. I have never been present to watch someone die, though I have observed from a distance. In particular, I have noticed the way those who embrace the reality of death rather than trying to grasp for life have a way of experiencing their last days being fully alive.
Today I am watching my mother switching worlds. I know she struggles with a fair amount of pain, but I know she is not afraid. While she could still express herself verbally she kept saying, “I just want to die.” She has been a source of courage and encouragement throughout my life—and now in death
As I sit here, I am struck by the parallel between keeping vigil with my mother and waiting with my wife for the birth of each of our children. Both seem like they will never arrive. Both are fraught with travail. And both are moments in which beings are switching worlds.
It may be that this was what I was experiencing when I told my wife that the world seems different. The physical surroundings may be the same, but it feels like we are in the midst of a cultural shift, at the cusp of a new world that we know nothing about yet. With the restrictions brought on and the reports heard on the news regarding COVID19-19, there comes a “presence of death and danger” that has been spoken of in terms of “war.”
And this is the connection to O’Brien. He writes about the way language has a way of making war seem more palatable; a dead person “kicked the bucket,” unintended deaths become “collateral damage,” and so forth. We all know the lingo. It seems to me that on the other end of the spectrum we dramatize situations in order for us to feel the full gravity our situation. We rally the troops with our war cries, but Vietnam and the Coronavirus are not the same. I am not trying to minimize the seriousness of the pandemic, rather I am trying to understand the parallels.
As I said earlier,I have never experienced war, but from my own brushes with death, it is not death that brings fear but the uncertainty that comes with changing worlds. Not knowing what the other side of this global pandemic will look like brings with it a sense of danger. It also heightens our awareness of our surroundings; it offers opportunities to build new and existing friendships; it spawns innovative solutions to problems we otherwise would have been unable to address; it carves out a space to rethink the way our institutions are structured; it opens up the possibility to rethink the way we live in this world.
This moment in time—though it feels more like an age—waits for us as humans to courageously imagine and build a better world together—one that is better for everything—rather than fearing the darkness of the unknown.