Walking the Wall

…this matter of Life and Death.

I’m having a difficult time reading Moby Dick at the speed that I need to for this class, he just really is that good with words and phrases and serious issues and sarcastic comments and funny little things–it needs more savoring. I love this quote though, it comes after the narrator (who asks us to call him Ishmael) has been sitting in a little church with black marble plaques all around dedicated to this man who drowned over board, and these others "towed out of sight by a Whale" and another killed in the bow of his boat, and so forth. He is also surrounded by stern people in black, nobody looking at each other, each "purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable…these silent islands of men and women" (43). It’s no wonder that he started to feel a bit down in the mouth, he was, after all, heading out to sea himself, the next day, and as he acknowledged, "Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine." But…but, he grew merry again because he realized something:

Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees (dregs, last vestiges) of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. (45) 

 I love that idea of our shadows being our true substance, neat little twist, and the oysters looking through the water at the sun…sortof like shadows on Plato’s cave wall. Great passage. Death has come to be symbolized as a door for me. I remember having a dream that has stuck with me very vividly, I had been dreaming of a man, he looked like a wanderer, that is the feel I got from him, strong, peaceful, my guardian. We visited together in my dreamed, he gave me a warning, and we talked of amazing things, neither of which I can remember, and then when he went to leave–we stood in a doorway, hanging mid-air. On one side was clearly this world, the life that I was living, and on the other side was clearly the next step in the journey. I stood in a door hanging suspended between the two and was at perfect peace. I hugged the man good bye, I can still feel that hug, and then I woke up.

The other night I had a dream, someone that we knew had died and we were at a funeral; my son stood up and began talking about death. He said that death was not something to be afraid of, that he understood that now, that death was simply a doorway, one step from here to there. He talked about people who had family and friends waiting on the other side of the door and how that what was really sad, were those people who didn’t have someone waiting on the other side of the door. He said that when he died, he wanted to be a doorkeeper, to take the hands of those who didn’t have anyone waiting, so that they wouldn’t be alone.

My son and daughter and I have had many conversations about death, because of his illness, it is an issue that has weighed on his mind from time to time. We talk about how our culture seems to struggle so hard against death, to be so afraid of it that we wrap it up in dark scary cloaks and an atmosphere of "it was a dark and stormy night". No one wants to die painfully, and most of us want to live a long and healthy life, but it seems that not only are we oysters looking through distorting water, but it is water made murky with fear, further distorting it. The sadness is for the people left behind, not for the people walking forward. It’s just another step, "take my body who will, it is not me".