Moving Into Winter

Moving into winter is a process of completing the biological year. The growth-spurts of Spring and Autumn are over, and the searing, deadly heat of Summer that browns grass and stunts growth, too.

Moving into winter is marked in my Pagan practice by Samhain. Life is thinning, death and potential death is drawing near. This is a time of farewells, of remembering the past and the ancestors, of thinking things through, of sitting by the fire (or the laptop) and analysing the past, both by self-reflection and by the passing on of our tales to the young: tales of their childhood, tales of our own personal history, tales of grandparents, uncles and family friends, and the tales of our society's inner wisdom that we encode into "fairy stories" and dismiss.

After taking part in a few Samhain rites in the eighties, I went solitary for many years, and for many years my Samhain rituals were also solitary, marked more by contemplation than by the props of circles and magical tools.

This year for the first time ever I attended three separate Samhain rituals, all of them run by different people, within the space of around ten days. It was very pleasant and relaxing not to have to run any of them myself, but to follow someone else's cues.

In one of them, I was asked to gather up and farewell people I may have lost. In one of them I was asked to contemplate the end of my own life, and how my life will have been of value, and who I look forward to joining after death and/or what I need to do before death. And in the third I was asked to invite the spirit of someone dead to join us (I noticed there was little emphasis on dismissal).

I invited Gladney Oakley, someone I'd been very friendly indeed with in the 1990s, an elderly bearded man with a quiet and gentle wisdom that I had very much valued. I had always regretted that after he lost his vision and before he died I had not spent enough time with him, allowing the bustle of my life at that stage to get in the way of even thinking very much about him. And he, for his part, was far too reticent and gentlemanly to remind me that he was unwell and might need the company.

I always regretted that. I wanted to apologise to him silently during the rite, but I never felt his spirit.  I few faces from my past that came and went, but nobody really stuck around.

For several days after that rite, living in my disappointment with myself regarding Gladney, a dead person did, in fact, come to me, whom I had had high hopes of early in our association and who became more and more hostile, clinically insane and violent as time went by. I remembered all the different ways that I had fantasised about killing her. I remembered the many different ways she actually tried to kill me. Death hung in the air for days, old death. Violent, passionate death, real and imagined.

And her face hung in the air, too, reproachful. I tolerated it for days, knowing that it was just a part of the whole Samhain thing, and thinking I'd probably overdosed on Samhain energy by attending not one or even two but three whole rituals. Mental note: in future years, limit it to one or two!

Today I attended Pagans in the Park, a regular monthly social get-together I enjoy attending and try to get to as often as possible, and the group's resident rock-hound was there. He knows about my affinity with minerals and always tries to give me some, and today was no exception. Last time it was fossils of sea-creatures and assorted non-fossil minerals, this time it was petrified (ossified or fossilised) wood of different kinds: different species, and fossilised in different ways (agate, silica).

He also gave me a small bag of Apache Tears, tiny translucent obsidian gems, black and precious. Wikipedia is only very sketchy on the subject, but interestingly, it was Gladney in the early 1990s who had talked earnestly in Kibble Park with me whilst our companions chatted elsewhere, about Apache Tears.

He had talked with me at length not only about the history that they grew out of, but also what they were said to do for those who carried them close to their heart. Apache tears, as the hardened and preserved tears of that intense grief, stand in the stead of the tears of those who can no longer cry.

Now, but much more so in the past, our society encourages girls to cry (to some extent), and actively discourages boys to cry. Discouraged long enough and hard enough, their tears eventually die. My tears died differently: between the years 2000 and somewhere in 2003, I cried so much that I appeared (and still appear) to have simply exhausted my lifetime supply of tears. I just cannot cry any more.

It could be said that perhaps I don't cry any more because nothing is as bad as those years, but that avoids the obvious, which is that the period between 2003 and 2005 was actually far worse. I had more reason to cry, not less. No, I had simply biologically run out of tears.

I remember crying, both as a child and (occasionally) as a younger adult. I got snotty. I got hot and blotchy-red. I developed pulsing headaches. And the act of crying was very, very physical, so physical that it exhausted me. People talk about crying as "emotionally cleansing" or as an "emotional release", but in retrospect, being able to view the physiological process of crying with some distance and objectivity, I feel that it is more draining, it is so exhausting that it leaves you (or me) without sufficient energy to maintain the intensity of emotion that brought it on, and because you cannot sustain that intensity, it buys a period of relief in which to sleep, or review the situation, or escape, or turn your attention elsewhere.

Not being able to cry, I am no longer able to drain myself so completely and so immediately, either of the energy to feel things intensely, or of the toxic body-chemicals voided in tears and snot. Feelings hang around in my body for longer, even though my mind mercifully lets go of them fairly easily.

I offered some of my Apache Tears to a friend of mine who also doesn't seem to cry and he politely refused, saying he didn't want to cry. I think he missed the point. I certainly don't expect that carrying these subtly beautiful little objects with me will make me - or him - cry at all. We are your basic non-crying people and probably will remain non-crying people for life, which is not wholly a bad thing and is certainly less embarrassing that finding yourself crying in public.

No, what I suspect these stones may do for me is take their darkness into my own energy, ferret out the stuff I never cried about in the past that I probably needed to cry about (even things that are totally resolved), and without my conscious knowledge, reduce the amount of tension that I might or might not carry in my body. Who knows, perhaps some of that vague mystery-pain that comes and goes in my body might be the after-effects of unwept tears, and who knows, using these stones mindfully might help with that.

And so I conclude by thanking Gladney, who belatedly came to me today whilst I was thinking through all this stuff, rather than when I wanted and expected him to. You were a wonderful man, and although I never told you, I feel certain you knew all along how much I loved you. I'm sorry the months of your final illness passed without my making any effort to see you at all. Go in peace, old man, knowing that from now on I am freed, and will remember you infrequently and with only pleasure.

Death as a Part of Life

Recently in a forum I take part in, someone raised the question of death, asking why we so "value" human life is highly. I personally value my own life because it is a blessing. Even when I'm in pain, even when I'm miserable, there is always something to look forward to.

They mentioned that we "spend inordinate amounts of time, money, training etc on keeping people alive who would not have lived so long in normal circumstances yet we put animals to sleep." Most of those people have never been consulted, those in deep dementia or people who have been in a coma or speechless since a violent accident.

They added that we send soldiers off to war to kill in the name of the social freedoms, or for political or religious freedom. I have to add to that, that they are also ordered to die, too, not just to kill. And all without asking their permission.

They also said that we cannot agree about the killing of a tiny handful of prisoners who are such dangerous people that they cannot be released again because of the reasonable expectation that they will once again destroy or end other people's lives. I replied by saying:

"I have a stepson who has spent time inside. He took a hammer to the brainstem of a person who will never walk or talk again, and who is fed through tubes. He got one year in a low security prison, working with native animals, making art, and taking trade-courses. He not only had TV and better meals that I could afford to feed him before and after the sentence, but he had air conditioning and pay-TV as well! All at the taxpayer's expense." For my stepson, his life inside gaol was significantly better and more pleasant than it was outside gaol, either before or afterwards. He talked about viewing it as a reward, as a holiday.

It was pointed out that suicide is also frowned upon by our Western society and regarded as a symptom of mental illness, whilst other societies regard it differently. I see it as an honourable reaction to impossible circumstances. I am a Westerner.

If there is an afterlife, why are we so scared of death? Why do we not regard it as a natural and logical conclusion to life? Death is a part of life. It is a graduation, an acknowledgement that you have learnt what you needed to learn, that you have finished what you needed to do. It is a pat on the back, a congratulations card in the mail, the ultimate accolade.

I think we started demonising death in Euro-based society when we came up with the <sarcasm toggled on> brilliant idea <sarcasm toggled off> of separating the generations. Old people are ugly - we cannot sear our children's eyeballs with them. Take them out of the home and out of the community generally, Put them in retirement villages first, where they mix with "their own kind", then in nursing homes. When they die, don't let the family even see the body until it is made up to look "alive" (I've never seen a corpse that ever looked alive), must less, allow people who loved the dead wash down the body and dig the hole themselves as a final act of love. Cultures that still do those things don't have a problem with psychological problems due to death and extended grieving to anywhere near our death-sanitised society's extent.

I have picked out the music I want played at my ceremony (my body is to be scavenged for any reuseable living tissues, so hopefully there won't be much to bury). It is a negro spiritual performed by a defunct Australian a-capella girl group called Blindman's Holiday, the song is "dig my grave". It's a boppy, upbeat, rejoicing type of song. The lyrics are something like

Dig my grave, so deep and so narrow,
Make my coffin so neat and so strong.
Lord, if I do-do, and I do my head
And I do-do, and I do my feet
And I do-do, do it all, whenever I die.
Oh, my little soul's gonna shine like a star
Upon Mount Calvary.

- with lots of repeats. My funeral/cremation/ceremony? A bloody big, happy party! Absolutely!

As to suicide, I am pro-life. We deserve a life. We deserve a good life. And we deserve to be in control of our lives, and the time, place and manner of our death.

About two years ago now, I had a neurological incident. I recovered quickly, although I am still damaged or mentally incapacitated by it, and I've recently seen a slight deterioration. There was, however, a slab of time on that evening when I couldn't speak, couldn't move, couldn't even hear. I couldn't so much as move my eyeballs in their sockets or blink my eyes. If I hadn't spontaneously recovered, I could have spent the rest of my life in that state, locked in a body, thinking like me, but utterly unable to respond to anything.

Now, prior to that incident, I had believed I'd never want to live like that. I believed I'd want the plug pulled. But when it actually happened, if only for a short time, an unholy joy crept over me. I could see and I could think, but no one knew. I'd never be expected to cook or clean or earn money or pay a bill ever again. I wouldn't even have to wipe my own arse ever again! And at that moment, being "locked in my body" suddenly seemed like the greatest freedom that could possibly happen to anyone.

But then my hearing came back, and after it, movement. Immediately afterwards, I thought about that revelation, the ultimate freedom of being locked in an unresponsive body. Yeah, I would love it. Total abdication of responsibility, coupled with time to think - bliss! But what happens after a few weeks or months or even years, when I get bored? How can I then indicate to someone that I've changed my mind, I want the ventilator switched off? Answer: I can't. Which is why I'm a not-for-rescusitation patient, every time. And now that I don't have any economically dependent children, I really don't have to live for anybody else's benefit.

Death is not an issue for me at all. That nasty bit before it, where I could be horribly sick or in agony, definitely is. So yup, bring on the pain relief, bring on the drugs. And the last person out of the room gets to turn off the ventilator, thanks.

The Dream

Last night I went travelling, and when I looked around, I found myself in some sort of dormitory-type homeless shelter: a huge room with steel-blue synthetic carpet of the easy-clean variety, single beds everywhere in rows with a small three-drawer cabinet next to them, and a kitchenette at the very end of the hall furthest from the entrance. In one of the beds that were closer to the kitchenette (and thus, more sheltered from the world) was a person who in the dream was a friend of mine, but looked like an older, thinner, sicker, more bearded version of the New Zealand actor Roger Oakley.

In the dream I knew he was dying of liver cancer, and in fact his skin had that same deep orange-brown colour that my father's skin had when he was dying of liver cancer many, many years ago, a colour that still makes me cringe when I see outdoor advertisements on TV or billboards done by pretty young models who have been spray-tanned with exactly that shade in an effort to look "healthy", which has only resulted in them looking as if they are close to death from liver failure.

And I knew he was dying. I have seen the image of energy of impending death occasionally: it looks nothing like a ferryman or a hooded guy with a scythe, but it is irremediably what it is. And death was with him. It was only a matter of time. He was bedridden, drifting in and out of consciousness, and muttering occasionally. I had a great deal of concern and compassion for him (after all, in the dream he was a friend), so I took off my shoes and, fully-clothed, slipped into the narrow bed beside him. He was lying up in a foetal position, and I curled up around him, resting my arm lightly on his hip. Through his many layers of clothes I could feel the pointy ends of his bones, and I could feel the coldness of his flesh despite a lot of clothes and bedclothes. I was happy to share my healthy warmth.

I passed the time by dozing, waking every so often to check on him. Over a very long time he drifted further and further away from life, rousing and muttering less often, weeping for painkillers less often, even moving slightly in the bed less often. He became colder, but I knew he felt my warmth and was grateful for it. I was the only person who was prepared to give him the closeness he needed on this last, most important journey of his life.

And when it was over and I woke up out of the dream, I knew what I must do. I've been getting hint after hint for decades, but the pressure is really piling on, now.