Free In the Slender Margin by Eve Joseph Page B

fairies in the garden, water-babies beneath the lily pads in sunken barrels, birds that portended disaster the way the black clouds rolling in off the North Shore Mountains signalled rain. I was predisposed to believe in spirits; when you spend timearound the dying, it is almost impossible not to believe in something. For most people I met, it was not Jesus or Allah who appeared in the days and hours before death; rather, it was a husband or lover, a long-lost mother, a wife, a child. Sometimes they appeared in dreams; other times the dying would just point at something nobody else could see. Quite often the dead would appear days before death and set up camp in the room.
    I don’t see spirits. But once, years ago, when I was eight months pregnant, I heard singing and drumming coming from the site of a Shaker church that had burnt to the ground years before. My mother-in-law said spirits were singing to welcome the baby, but I was never sure what I’d heard or whether I had really heard anything at all.
    Since the 1960s, there has been a shift from “dwelling” to “seeking.” We spend less time contemplating God than we do pursuing self-enlightenment, identifying ourselves as “spiritual” more than “religious.” Many hospices have spiritual care coordinators responsible for “matters of the spirit.” Inner experience has come to take precedence over creeds and congregations; we are encouraged to look within to find our spiritual selves as opposed to searching the starry heavens for evidence of our maker. If religion serves to calm our fears about the void and to explain where we go when we disappear, contemporary spirituality is defined by possibility over certainty. For most of the people I met, the afterlife was an unanswered question. Before 1971, less than 1 percent of Canadians ticked the “no religion” box on national surveys. Two generations later, writes Michael Valpy in the
Globe and Mail,
23 percent, or nearly a quarter of the population,say they aren’t religious. Overall, we now die with less certainty about where we’re going than we did in the past; and it seems more of us are dying certain in our belief that there is nothing.
    From the beginning of time, we have looked to mythology, philosophy, religion and science to explain to ourselves what happens after death. As narratives, they deal with the known, the unknown and the unknowable. It is the unknowable that sometimes gives me pause, that makes me wonder.
    In the mid-1990s, I met a woman in her late thirties who was dying of lung cancer. She and her partner of ten years married on a West Coast beach a few months before her death. When asked if she wanted her ashes scattered on the same beach, she shot back, “I never double-book.” She was funny and brilliant, and after she died, her husband appeared to go into a grief-induced psychosis. In the oldest story in the world, Gilgamesh cries out when his beloved friend Enkidu dies,
    May the bear, the hyena, the panther mourn you,
    may the leopard, stag, lion—all creatures
    of the plains mourn you.
    As long as I have breath I will cry out
    like one who has lost her beloved.
    After the woman’s body was removed from their home, her husband called to her from where he was lying on the couch. He asked her what she wanted for dinner and if she thought he needed a haircut. He didn’t hear his children talking to him or his dad trying to tell him that she was gone.A few days later, he didn’t see me when I sat with him at the kitchen table as he began to write the eulogy that he was to deliver later that afternoon in the university chapel. He picked up a pen and began to write on a white sheet, pausing every so often to tilt his head as if listening intently. “What’s that?” he’d say. “Of course I included that.” And later, laughing as he erased a word he had just written, “Okay, okay, you were always the best speller.” He would pause and then go on. “Thanks,” he said at one