Reading Aloud to Ruth

When I was fifteen my Grandmother Joss died. She died with all her family standing around, singing the hymns my sister plinked out on the upright. The cancer took her quickly at the end. She was bedridden for just a few days, and we sat vigil only the last night. At least, this is the way I remember it, if memories from half a life away can be trusted. These days I am reminded of my Grandma Joss because my friend Ruth, with whom my grandma shared a birthday, is seemingly nearing her end after more than 100 years of living. In the past few weeks, Ruth has lost her limited mobility and taken irretrievably to her bed. She is visited now by visions of her parents and her siblings, all of whom have passed on. She reaches for things only she can see. Tonight, while I sat with her, she stretched out her arm and motioned toward something in the air. "Has anyone fed John and Fred?" she asked. I leaned closer to her. "Who's that?" I asked. "They weren't taken," Ruth added and, though she said it weakly, whatever she could see seemed to give her some satisfaction.

While Ruth slept, I perused the literature the hospice agency had left on her kitchen table. "Vision-like experiences are real to your loved one and are common in the transition from life to death. Most often these visions are comforting." I do not remember Grandma Joss reaching for unseeable things, but watching Ruth do so is stirring and not, as I would have expected, unsettling. Something seems very close, very real, to her. She reaches toward it, grasping. Perhaps she is seeing through a crack in that final door.

Before leaving Ruth this evening, I sang her a lullaby, sitting on her bed and patting her head as I do my boys' at night when they cannot sleep. When I had slipped from her house, the screen door swinging behind me, I cycled home, grateful for the feel of my legs pumping the pedals, loving the smell of the river as I took the bridge across, aware suddenly of the life I have in my body, the gift of it. When I returned home I hied to my bookshelf and traced my finger through the poetry section looking for a very dog-eared copy of Jane Kenyon's Otherwise. I riffled through the pages looking for her poem Reading Aloud to My Father, knowing there was something in it I needed to read. Finding it, I read as follows:

I chose the book haphazard
from the shelf, but with Nabokov's first
sentence I knew it wasn't the thing
to read to a dying man:
The cradle rocks above an abyss, it began,
and common sense tells us that our existence
is but a brief crack of light
between two eternities of darkness.

The words disturbed both of us immediately,
and I stopped. With music it was the same --
Chopin's Piano Concerto -- he asked me
to turn it off. He ceased eating, and drank
little, while the tumors briskly appropriated
what was left of him.

But to return to the cradle rocking. I think
Nabokov had it wrong. This is the abyss.
That's why babies howl at birth,
and why the dying so often reach
for something only they can apprehend.

At the end they don't want their hands
to be under the covers, and if you should put
your hand on theirs in a tentative gesture
of solidarity, they'll pull the hand free;
and you must honor that desire,
and let them pull it free.

Ruth is pulling free, just as all those years ago, I witnessed my grandma do while we stood around her bed singing "It is Well with My Soul." When my grandma finally passed, I went out to her drive and lay down to watch the bright and silent procession of stars overhead. Something I had seen that night, words could not reach and the house seemed too small and crowded to contain. I needed the limitless Above at that moment. Now, being with Ruth as she sits upon the threshold and catches glimpses from that great elsewhere, I feel I am again bearing witness to that uncontainable and limitless something that happens at the outside limit, the flush margin, of this precious and passing life.