The Weirdness of Death

Within a week of my husband passing away I began to look for stories on YouTube of people who had had near death experiences. I kind of wanted to get a sense of what his experiences might be now full knowing that if near death experiences expressed some kind of reality that a near death experience might not be the same as a successful death experience so to speak. What's more is I had studied to be a medium more than a decade ago and I'm very comfortable with the idea of life after death a continued sense of consciousness, a continued degree of agency post-death. Of course there was a palpable sense of his presence often during the day - not just for me, but also for some of the children and some of our friends. I suspect this might be a common psychosomatic experience for bereaved people, but at the same time having studied mediumship, I am also tolerant of the idea that at least some of this sense is true.

I chatted briefly with a friend of mine who recently decided to become a death doula and whose job it is to facilitate the death of the loved one within the family context. Something like a Hospice worker, but less hampered by strictures of the medical field. I discovered that even from within her far more orthodox religious approach to life and death, she too had begun to investigate near death experiences and had begun to tolerate the idea that an instant transportation to heaven was not the simple mythological truth. I am glad that she and I have many more conversations to have on this subject considering that it was the death of her daughter more than ten years ago over which we first became fast friends. And it is also reassuring to me that there is somebody whose no-nonsense good brain can consider a more subtle and invisible world that surrounds us.

So, I visited the medium down the road whose skill I respect a great deal. But not immediately, as I had a sense that I was already getting as much information as I needed from my late husband without needing to get additional clarity and detail. After a few weeks, once things had calmed down a little bit, and I was able to look about me somewhat, I chose a moment and went to visit her. The messages she brought through were mostly good or pertinent. But it did demonstrate to me that even the best of mediums sometimes say things that they think will comfort rather than what is true to their perception of the departed person.

I did not go there to hear from her lips that he loved me or that all of the things we shared were good and wonderful. Nor to find out if there was a hidden document or a secret stash somewhere. All of these things I already knew the answers to. I went there to ask him about simple and practical domestic things. I went there to ask his advice about the broken bakkie. I went there to have a conversation with him as I would have had he simply been coming home from work at the end of the day. I also wanted to establish for sure what his cause of death was, because to my untrained eye I assumed it was a heart attack. The medium said it was a coronary aneurysm which was much quicker and happily he said he was dead before he hit the ground. Such a good death.

That information proved of course that my gargantuan efforts in trying to revive him had always been doomed but of course how could I not have tried? It wasn't immediately obvious. The medium also wanted to impress upon me that he was determined that I should not grieve. And even though I understood what he was saying, that he didn't want me to make of my life a mausoleum of his, that my pro-life instinct was exactly what he would have wanted me to have expressed. That he would have wanted me to walk on, move on, keep on growing and, of course, to take care of his children. These are things we had discussed that the medium had no prior knowledge of, and it was reassuring to hear it expressed from her lips again.

And so here I should say that our marriage had been so much about our mutual healing and becoming whole that any other post death strategy for the survivor would have been a horrible waste had it been him or me who remained. During our time together we had that great privilege of being older people falling in love and understanding that we needed to learn the skills of being happy in a relationship and in ourselves. We both knew that we needed to be whole people in order to conduct a healthy and happy relationship. As a result, I feel confident in my ability to be happy and even now, when I often fall into some kind of abysmal grief at the loss of him, my life is not unhappy. I am surrounded by beautiful and vital things. I am motivated to get out of bed every day. My spiritual evolution continues. My children continue to grow and mature and build new lives in a new generation. I have the extraordinary privilege of being able to participate and witness this miracle.

And of course he knows it's daft to say, do not grieve. A man who was so well loved cannot have his death go by unmarked by tears. Even where he is now he knows full well that grief is a natural process that can be healthy and elevating if it can be managed adeptly.

Virtually the moment my husband died, the corner of the house that he died in stopped working. It was as though he'd been struck by a bolt of lightning I didn't hear. The geyser broke in the ceiling above him and it began to weep copiously making a soggy puddle on the stoep below for weeks afterwards, until I could get it together to get it fixed.

The same night he died, after all the commotion and the removal of his body by the undertakers, the two cats took up position on either side of the bathroom door, one on a chair, the other in the laundry basket. This was not at all usual for them, but they seemed to be stationing themselves as if to guard the door, either for me or from me, as I fell asleep mere metres away from where his body had fallen.

A couple of days after my husband died, I learned that at that moment, the kitchen clock in my mother-in-law's house leaped off the wall where it had hung untouched for years, and smacked her on the head in exact the same place my husband's head smacked into the floor of our bathroom, above the outer corner of the right eyebrow. To be honest, the moment I turned his body over and saw that wound fail to bleed, I knew his heart was done. But I had tried to revive him anyway. Theatre, with only myself as audience.

Mercury was in retrograde. Poor man, with his ruling plant stationing and moonwalking backwards across the sky, he had to go then. And other electrical chaos began. 

Loadshedding suddenly ramped up, mains cables were stolen, and we were plunged into the stone age. When the boys tried to turn on the generator, a loose battery connection turned it onto a welding machine and nearly set the veld on fire. They managed to get it jump started with another battery - it's just a simple diesel engine - but then failed to get it to turn off once the power was restored. A bee farming neighbour happened to arrive at that moment to plant beehives in the corner if the yard, and showed them how to turn off the fuel to the engine. Just in time for load shedding. 

But consider the bee connection. My husband loved bees, had dragged me to a bee-keeping course in our courting days to win me over to the practice. He had established a couple of hives near the house which we harvested from a couple of times before the one hive succumbed to a runaway fire, and the other to wax-moth the following year. But the bees loved him, clustered around him in a low calm hum as he worked with them. The rest of us they liked less. And it was for us a trial to hang by as he worked with them, sweating and belaboured in the cumbersome bee suits and the cloud of pine-needle smoke, living a lesson in panic management as the bees explored us looking for a way in to punish us in their kamikaze way.

But to return to the generator. It is seldom used, but my husband had fixed and serviced it only months before he died, leaving only the replacement of the batteries to me post mortem. And this we discovered closer to the time of his death the first time we had tried to start the generator in a power outage. I had to drive to Industria West, an old work zone for him, to find the right size batteries, and it was like he'd sent me on a quest. I try to not revisit old haunts I've walked away from as fastidiously as I rip the band aid off reclaiming current haunts back into the world of the current, but he sent me there. Man up, girl. Except, in the end, I was the strong one, physically, emotionally, mentally.

The problem with not having power, of course, is that the borehole pump depends on it. So too many hours and days of no power means our tanks run empty. The generator is therefore a lifeline. And the water did run out, and I wasn't there to solve the issue, and it never used to be my job. I'm fifty-something, small and a bit arthritic. But invariably as I confronted each of the catastrophes that befell us in those first three months, all it took was a reaching out in my head to his mind floating untethered in the nearby universe, and the answer would arrive in my thoughts in words, pictures and vague memories of when he had explained how things work at a time when I wasn't really listening.

I'm listening now.