Thought for the Week: Dead or alive?
Peggy Heeks reflects on the ambiguity between life and death
Have you ever played ‘Dead or Alive’? I used to as a girl and still remember the game’s excitement. You jumped up and wound your legs round the waist of a stalwart adult, who swung you close to the ground. ‘Under the water, under the sea: catching fishes for my tea. Dead or Alive?’ I always chose ‘Alive’ and was swung high in triumph. It was so simple in those days. One was either dead or alive. Now I’m less sure.
Celtic Christianity has the concept of ‘thin places’, where we sense the presence of a world beyond this. Perhaps most of us have had such an experience. If so, it will remain always. When I was among the mountain peaks in Yosemite National Park I had the sensation of losing my individual identity and being absorbed into a greater reality. Something of this kind can also happen in quite ordinary surroundings.
The ambiguity between life and death came to me strongly a few weeks ago, on the No. 39 bus from Oxford to Reading. At almost every mile on the journey I remembered someone who had played a significant part in my life. There have been claims recently that this is simply a scientific phenomenon. Nevertheless, such claims cannot negate what is a highly significant experience. Working in a hospice I have seen many people in a transition stage – neither dead nor alive. Although technically alive, they were moving to a different way of being.
In the weeks before he died Leonard, my husband, told me: ‘It’s strange, but I keep seeing my grandmother’. She was an important figure in his life, and he felt that he was living in two worlds: this one and the next. What are we to make of this? At least it helps us realise the value of being supported out of this life. Like Gerontius in Newman’s poem, we will find comfort in being midwifed out of this life.
‘Go forth upon your journey, Christian soul’ says the priest.
Often, those bereaved feel the palpable presence of the one who has gone, but eventually that fades. So where is my husband now? Where are the husbands of my widowed friends? The American philosopher OW Holmes wrote:
Most persons have died before they expire – die to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is only, as it were, the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion. Almost always there is a preparation made by nature for unearthing a soul.
That fits my hospice observations. Just as I feel continually in touch with people from the past, so I hope that my influence will be felt in the future. So, we become part of others, and they of us. Dead or alive? Perhaps there is a third state.
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