Free In the Slender Margin by Eve Joseph Page A

reserved for pre-Christian saints and unbaptized babies. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe that heaven is divided into three separate kingdoms of glory: the celestial, the terrestrial and the telestial. The celestial kingdom is reserved for married Mormon couples who are on their way to becoming gods and goddesses; the terrestrial kingdom is for honourable people who have allowed themselves to become blinded by the wickedness of the world; and the telestial kingdom exists solely for liars, adulterers, murderers, thieves and whoremongers. Salvation, according to the Quran, depends on a man’s actions and attitudes on earth. The afterworld is a place of reckoning. It is the promised land and the place where we will be judged.
    Sometimes it isn’t death we fear, but something else. Once, upon returning from a community visit, I was met at the elevator by a nurse who said there was a patient who was very distressed and wanted to know what it was like to die. “I told him that you would tell him,” she said.
    Right, I thought.
    When I went to his room, Alistair was nodding off in a recliner with a glass of Scotch in his hand. “So,” he said, opening his eyes, “you are the one who’s going to tell me what it’s like to die?”
    All the things I had thought about saying on my walk down the hall to his room flew out the window. “No,” I said, “I don’t have a clue. You need to tell me.”
    Alistair took a long drink, and for the next two hours he talked and I listened. He talked about his fear that he had not been a good enough man and that, if there was someone on gatekeeping duty in the heavens, he would have a lot to answer for. At one point, motioning to a vase of slender purple irises on his dresser, he said, “Death has been sitting there for three nights, and tonight I think we’ll sleep together.”
    “God is, or He is not,” wrote Blaise Pascal in the seventeenth century. But which side to choose? His wager, as it was known, went something like this: weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is…. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. Heads or tails. In the end, maybe it doesn’t matter so much what we believe.
    Danish physicist and Nobelist Niels Bohr once hung a horseshoe over his doorway. Appalled friends exclaimed that surely he didn’t put any trust in such pathetic superstition. “No, I don’t,” he replied with composure, “but apparently it works whether you believe in it or not.”
    I believe it would be a fine thing to leave the world in a small wood and paper boat holding a lighted candle.
     
    What belief—or perhaps instinct—compels the living to carry the dead out into the sun? Out of darkness into the light. A woman I met, whose premature baby had spent her short life in the intensive care unit, wanted her to feel the sun, wind, rain on her face. She wanted her to breathe air that didn’t come from a plastic tube and to see something other than a fluorescent sun. When it became evident that her baby was going to die, the doctor agreed to take her off life support and bag her—give her oxygen by hand—until she was out of the hospital.
    A strange cortège of nurses, family and friends walked in single file behind the doctor through the corridors. It was April. Winter and spring were doing their dance. When we came out the back door, it was raining. By the time we had walked across the parking lot and made our way to a nearby grassy hill, the sun was shining.
    The baby’s grandfather took up his drum and sang a song to her. She breathed on her own for a good five minutes. When she took her last breath, a single clap of thunder reverberated across the sky.
    Her grandfather believed the clap of thunder meant the Creator had opened the heavens, swooped down, picked the baby up in his arms and booted it right on back to heaven.
     
    My childhood world was filled with presences: