Free In the Slender Margin by Eve Joseph

believed, with complete certainty, that crows were harbingers, and in our house, strangely, that seemed to be the case. I remember her screams one morning when a crow fell down the chimney, and the phone rang shortly afterwards to inform her of the murder of a close friend’s daughter. After that, she warred with any crow that came close to the house—shaking her fists at the ones who squawked at her from the telephone lines.
    “Don’t be hanging around here, you bloody bastards,” she’d yell out the kitchen window at six a.m.
     
    In the fifteenth century, the art of dying was laid out in the
Ars Moriendi.
A good Christian death, as prescribed in the two Latin texts, involved departing in a state of grace, denouncing Satan, praying to God, repenting one’s sins, and—for Roman Catholics—receiving the sacraments. The
Ars Moriendi
survives in two different versions. The first is a longer treatise of six chapters that prescribes rites and prayers to be used at the time of death. The second is a brief illustrated book that shows the dying person’s struggle with temptations before attaining a good death. In one of the illustrations, the Devil, pictured with a hooking staff, and Death himself, with a lance, are seen trying to snare the soul of a dying man while an angel hovers at the head of the bed. In another, demons crowd around a bed offering crowns to a skeletal figure who looks as though he has died of fright. The art of dying, in the fifteenth century, was not for the faint of heart.
    The battle for our souls is no longer played out the way it was in the fifteenth century. What, I wonder, is the
Ars Moriendi
of our time? Whereas in the past we turned to priests or holy men, we now look to doctors for miraculous cures and extended lives. And yet we often pray for some kind of divine intervention even when we’re not sure what or whom we believe in. There is a fundamental difference between saying “I’ll pray for you” as opposed to “You’re in my thoughts” or “I’m sending you love.”
    Religions point to the realm of the supernatural, assuring people they are not alone in the world, and yet, in an increasingly secular society, how do you bring people to God? “Through parking and bathrooms,” says Scott Weatherford, lead pastor of Calgary’s First Alliance Church. Weekend services in the church are high-tech multimedia spectacles with rock bands, big-screen monitors and fair-trade coffee, and a cupholder in every one of the 1,704 seats. It is harder to pull people in these days without a gimmick. Harder to believe in a God who, as one young pastor says, causes a place to boom economically in order “to do the good in the world that needs doing.” In this case, that would place God smack dab up to his elbows in the black gold of the Alberta tar sands.
    In the twenty-first century, how would we illustrate the art of dying? Gone would be the Devil with his hook, Death with his lance, the angel at the head of the bed. Replace the cot with a hospital bed, the angel with a doctor in scrubs, and put the Devil in charge of the IVs, heart monitors, ventilators, catheters, bags of blood and canisters of oxygen. As for Death himself, look as you will, he’s nowhere to be seen. Of course, if all this talk of devils and demons is too much,you can dab—on your wrists and behind your ears—Ars Moriendi, a perfume oil made in California’s Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, whose most popular blends are Dance of Death, Darkness and Les Fleurs du Mal.
    Many of the people I met were dying without the structure or comfort of traditional belief; it was no longer clear exactly what life after death might look like. The promise of an afterlife brings peace to some, but it is also fraught with many uncertainties. For Catholics, the souls of the dead spend time in purgatory until fully cleansed of imperfections. Limbo, derived from the Latin
limbus,
meaning “hem” or “border,” is the region on the border of hell