Session Four: Speech/Finding the Language

Discussion

CHRISTINA GILLIS: I expect that people will think about these questions in relation to their own experience, and these questions will have different answers according to who you are or where you are, and the sorts of issues that you face. Who would like to begin?

FRANK GONZALEZ-CRUSSI: I want to answer one of the questions in my capacity as head of a department of pathology. Just to be controversial, I will posit that science and technology, which speak so loudly about having enhanced life and prolonged our lives, have done more to diminish than to enhance. If you think about how the primitive mind functioned before, I think that a logical conclusion is really that one could see the whole universe as primarily alive, you know. You look at the clouds: the clouds are changing shape, and flying in the sky, a bird, you know. Look at the trees in a forest: they are growing and they live, they are alive. Everything is alive.

Now comes science and technology, and they teach you the opposite. They say the clouds are vapor, the winds are a physical phenomenon, the stones are made of inorganic material. You, too, are made of inorganic material. The only difference is that, you know, by a strange combination of micro molecules, you get to come alive. But, actually, the scientific position that I've read in this context clearly says that life is an improbable phenomenon. When you consider that it is the equivalent of all these micro molecules, the enzymes and the energy that needs to be put into the system, life is a very improbable phenomenon.

We are really an exception in a universe that's mostly death.

Science and technology often create a gulf between our present and existential experience and the phenomenon that we confront. If a surgeon tells me I have an 80% or 20% chance of getting this complication, or suffering this disease or whatever, this will never help me plan anything. It's either I get it or I don't get it. If I get it, it's 100%, if I don't get it it's 0%. So there is always a gulf or a distance between the pronouncements of science and technology and the human vantage point in which we are placed.

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SANDRA GILBERT: I think everything you said is completely right. But it leads me to want to ask the questions that I have been talking about with several people over lunch, and that is, why have we completely ignored issues having to do with religion? After all, death is arguably the reason we have religion. I mean, religion exists because of death. And at the same time, religion constructs death in different ways cross-culturally.

I don't know what to do with that. As a group, probably most of us in some part of ourselves subscribe to what we have learned from technology. Yet at the same time, archaic parts of us subscribe also to various kinds of religious views that we haven't discussed at all here. And, in addition, we are a very, very small minority in a culture in which, as I read in a recent issue of The New York Times Magazine, something like 84% of Americans believe in an afterlife. And the ways in which we confront and experience death are surely inflected by either the belief in an afterlife or the disbelief in an afterlife, or by what I would say is probably my own view, which is some form of Pascal's Wager. And I'm sure most of you know what Pascal's Wager is: to live as though there might be an afterlife because what can you lose if there isn't; and if there is one, you're doing the right thing.

PARTICIPANT: That was a beautiful speech, by the way. Kind of a damning one, but a beautiful one. It seems that the role of religion is always very ambiguous to me, and a few examples come readily to mind. Jim's photograph of the watch, the clock, showing the hour of his fatherÕs death--indeed, the minute and probably the second--disturbed me because it seemed like there was an artificiality to it, that the process of death, as Beth was saying, has an extent in space and time, but this watch seems to be pinpointing it, or trying to. And it reminded me of Guy's discussion yesterday about the monitor that keeps beating and beating, when the person is perhaps for all social or familial, or practical, or emotional purposes dead, but because of this detectable electricity that technology enables us to represent, a body is said to be alive in some artificial, synthetic way. So that's a negative side of technology. But on the other hand, the apparatus that Jim used to make those amazing photographs is another example of technology, the apparatus that's recording what we're saying and so forth is yet another example.

Incidentally, I want to say, too, that if we are a tiny improbability of life on the outer parts of this speck of dust in the universe, that's a dark and lonely vision; but in some sense, I think, it also accentuates the wonderment of life, too.

MONICA WARLAND: I'm Monica Warland. I'm studying Organizational Psychology at the University of Michigan. I wanted to add something that I've been thinking about and ruminating about over two days, and that is that science and technology have made social wholes and groups and social relationships devoid of life as well. So we become atomized and individual, and don't acknowledge the power and the life that exists in social gatherings, and groups, and in individual interactions and relationships. And one thing that was remarkable to me this morning was that the life of connection was so readily juxtaposed with that scientific, philosophical view of remove and individuality.

One of my projects has been to try from a psychological point of view to reconceive what emotion might be as a social and relational thing, rather than as an individual thing. If emotions are of the social whole and they allow us to connect with the life of social entities, individualizing those emotions is another way of stripping that life away as well.

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PARTICIPANT: I wanted to say something that addresses the issue of religion, but from a position of belief and unbelief, perhaps, at the same time. I want to respond to something that Darcy said about suicide because the subject has come up but then has gone down again. There was a suicide in my life; my stepfather killed himself when I was eighteen. And I do think that when you're close to someone who commits suicide, you feel the conversation is broken off. And what that left me with was a feeling of tremendous guilt because I hadn't liked him. In fact, I had at one point in time actively hated him. So when he died, it did feel to me as though my wish had been enacted.

Now, fast-forward many years, I found myself in a church, which for me was an unusual place to be. I went in on a kind of tour of the church, and then I sat down for awhile afterwards. And I found myself in a kind of meditation about my life and the significant events in it, and that was one of them. And as I was sitting there I started to cry. Over time, as I sat there crying, because I didn't want to get up and walk out that way, I started talking to my stepfather in my imagination. I wasn't talking out loud, but I was in some way addressing him as "you." And I found myself saying, "I am sorry. I'm sorry that I didn't like you, didn't know how to like you when you were alive." And I began remembering things he had done for me that I really appreciated. So I spent a long time in this conversation with this dead person, this long-dead person. It wasn't as though I truly believed he could hear me, but it was also as if I did believe he could hear me. In some way, it was important to me to do this as a direct address, rather than analyzing my own feelings in a kind of third-person way.

So I'm wondering what it was about having what was, in my mind, a conversation with someone I knew to be dead and didn't actively believe could hear me, but on some level thought might be a kind of ghost presence who could receive this message that made a difference to me? Sometime after that, I found myself doing the same thing with my father, who had died when I was nine years old. It was not a suicide, but he died in a very sudden way, which had the same effect of breaking off the conversation. And then I thought, "Am I crazy? You know, is this a crazy thing to do?" This doesn't feel like me on one level, and on another level it really does. These conversations make a difference for me. I don't know that they make a difference for my father and my stepfather, but they certainly make a difference for me. And they changed my relation to the past, my memories of the past, what the meanings of my own history have for me. And those changes affect the way I'm behaving in the present.

PARTICIPANT: There's this notion that the dead are in some kind of different state. I mean, they still are able to come back after having gone to the other side.

And the same thing with near-death experiences, which has come up briefly a couple of times. There's an interesting book that's been out a while now, by Carol Zilesky, called Other World Journeys, and she looks at contemporary near-death experiences and medieval experiences of Christians who have an experience of death and come back to life. So she frames it in terms of religion, with this interesting concept of the religious imagination, in terms of trying not to explain these experiences, but to understand and interpret them and give them meaning. It's a very practical, theoretical perspective; it's pragmatic. And in a similar way, you were just talking about your own experience. In looking at near-death experiences, you can't explain them away and reduce them to physiological kinds of changes, and you can't necessarily take them literally as the truth about what happened. But there's this kind of middle ground in interpreting them and trying to make sense of them that relies on religion as an important kind of language, a very imaginative language, not like it's all fantasy, but that it has practical value in the life of the person who has had the near-death experience. It's life-changing, and she ties it to other kinds of Christian pilgrimage journeys, like conversion. She looks at the ways in which modern near-death experience has become a kind of narrative of conversion, even though the key part of the story is "My life changed."

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SANDRA GILBERT: There's an amazing book. It was published sometime in the early 60s, I believe, or maybe the 70s. It's called The Vestibule. It's a little paperback, and it's about near-death experiences. And one of them was a story that was recounted by a couple of doctors in the Canadian Journal of Medicine, or whatever. And these are two cardiologists, who are recording a near-death experience of a guy whose heart stopped--it's the usual story, we'll recognize it now because it's a cultural trope, like an urban myth or something, you know, the tunnel, the light, the floating. Well, you laugh, but, I mean, it's a very important, interesting phenomenon, and I don't know what to make of it. But, anyway, they say they felt it was very urgent to publish this in a medical journal because it would help other cardiologists to help people die, and to have people feel confidence and trust, and to help feel that dying was easy, dying was wonderful.

Eddie Richenbacker, who had a near-death experience, who talks about how, you know, "Éit's just so easy to die, it's so great. I had to fight to come back." I mean, again, you recognize the rhetoric.

And we haven't talked about that at all. I mean, it's a completely different take on dying. It fits in with the spiritualist movement that we were also talking about at lunch. I don't know where to put it in terms of the conversation we've been having here, but I wanted to bring it up.

PARTICIPANT: Having had what may be a representative near-death experience--I'm not sure I want to say that that's what it was--I have two reactions to it. One reaction is that it's reassuring to know that it didn't happen, and that's had consequences and has helped me think about it. It is also consequential that it might have happened. And that makes me think that there's something about the hypothetical power of death, which remains present, whether that's the hypothetical presence of someone--who is dead--whom we don't know is still alive, but we have to talk to anyway, or that case, "suppose if," in which you would be the one who died. Both of those forms of imagining seem very powerful to me.

Having been raised an Evangelical Protestant and then having lapsed from the Church, it is almost irresistible to me to say, "This [near-death experience] was meaningful and is clearly a turning point in my life." That particular story and form of that story is so available to me because of the religious tradition that I was raised in. The vocabulary comes from that tradition, the plot comes from that tradition, and I've rehearsed that plot in the work that I do on Protestants in the early seventeenth century.

So I want to acknowledge that religion may be the only vocabulary that many people have, certainly, one of the vocabularies that I have. But the experience of the conference has led me to believe that there are other vocabularies that share some of the qualities of philosophical reflection, but also are intuitive, affective, and I'm reluctant to say spiritual, or at least gesture in that direction.

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PARTICIPANT: My interest and my primary focus is of caring for children who are dying and grieving children. And children, if they have the opportunity to be natural, often have conversations with those who have died. It's when the adults around them think that's a little strange that they stop having these conversations.

That leads me to your comment. I haven't thought about it before, but when I first looked at the questions we have been given about what voices are given authority in discourses about death, it occurred to me that one group of voices that is not given any authority at all is children's voices. And I can't help but think after hearing this discussion that in today's world it's primarily the scientific and the rational that's given credence. Those are the voices we listen to. And maybe that's the reason we don't listen to the voices of children, because they really are very unscientific.

PARTICIPANT: I want to add that the Hindu tradition describes the five functions of the divine as being creation, maintenance, destruction, concealment--meaning our own sense that we are only our limited person--and then grace, meaning revelation that we actually are more than this limited ego or body. And I've been exploring that idea or playing with that in my own belief system. I believe in that moment of grace, that there is a conversation that can happen with people who have died. As a bereavement counselor, I really encourage people to have that conversation, that it's not crazy, it's actually very therapeutic to have that forgiveness experience, and that connection, and that reaffirmation of the love, and to feel the relationship move to a different level.

PARTICIPANT: I wanted to look more at the idea of passage of time, and note that in our society there's a certain amount of time during which it's okay to be grieving or going through some sort of ritual process. But, in fact, if we take that aspect of grieving as a liminal state in the process of separation or transitions, and if we look at liminality as part of that transitional period that people go through when they've lost somebody, then it means that the period can be any length of time at all. In fact, it really doesn't matter how long we're dealing with it.

I also wanted to bring up that in archaeology, the thing that we find incredibly difficult, in fact impossible to recreate, is time. How long it took, for example, the body to be prepared for burial, and what sort of ritual, how long that ritual took. We might presume several days in the way that we see it. It might have taken months, it might have taken years. There might have been secondary burial involved. I want to emphasize how differently time can be perceived.

CHRISTINA GILLIS: At the end of the day yesterday, Gary and several other people mentioned that maybe we weren't paying enough attention to other traditions that give us other vocabularies and lenses for looking at these issues.

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GARY LADERMAN: Well, I think that's changing. I just received something from a medical institution in San Francisco. It's a handbook, a kind of multicultural, multi-religious handbook on how different religious communities understand death and dying. It's published for hospitals. So I'm wondering whether within medical communities, not just in San Francisco but maybe even in Mississippi, there's a kind of sea change where, just as in so many other areas of society, there's a kind of interesting pluralism, religious pluralism coming into play as an educational tool.

PARTICIPANT: I'm a post-doc here at Berkeley. And I am thinking a little bit more about this issue of time that Christine brought up. I did research in Hospice settings, and in these settings I've talked to a couple people about the representation of death--how it's brought into language, what it looks like--and I think its temporal structuring is central. The Hospice setting isn't a space of sudden death, but of anticipated death, and it's about, primarily, the experience of waiting and the shaping of that experience.

So I find myself thinking about how Hospice is a kind of critique of modern death ways, of certain notions of progress and technique. The paradigmatic gesture of draping a blanket or holding hands, or whatever, kind of reenacts an imagined time in the past when dying was different or better. And at the same time, for patients, dying is in large part a movement back into the past, this unlearning of basic bodily functions.

Sandra Gilbert mentioned the embarrassment or difficulty of talking about some of the issues around death, even in these sympathetic settings. And I was trying to think to myself last night, why would that be? And it seems to be that it's untimely talk. For the one who is grieving the past is interfering in the present in a very significant way, and, for others who aren't affected by that, the introduction of this kind of interruption into our linear sense of time is unsettling. It perhaps forces us, or makes us acknowledge, something that normally we don't have to.

The final thing I would say is that for me the breakdown in the conference is maybe less between clinical talk versus human passage talk, caregivers versus patients. In Hospice settings it always seemed to me that there were two endings that were being conceived of. For patients, it is the end of the life or end of a certain experience in time, and for caregivers it is often the ending of the body and the possibilities for reaching beyond that.

JOHN GILLIS: I just want to throw out something that arises out of one of Sandra's first remarks, and that is to get back to this question of what people in this society actually believe, and how most of the people in America find our conversation today a little out of whack, not perhaps totally repugnant, but it's this question of afterlife. Most Americans believe that people don't actually die, but rather are living somewhere else. It's not a place that is accessible to us physically. But they are living remarkable lives, remarkably like those which they've left behind. Which poses, I think, a most interesting sort of thought question. Why can't we imagine dead people being truly dead? To do that one needs only to go back, I think, about a hundred years in Christian-Judaic thought, where the dead really weren't alive, but existed in a kind of spectral state, or they existed as souls, and so on.

One of the things that I think really poses a terrific problem for modern society is our lack of imagination about the state of the dead. We seem to be incapable of imagining any other life except our own. This is a completely ego-centered discourse that is beyond this room. Of course, we're all exempt, you know, we are acute, we are insightful, we are etc. But there is a larger cultural problem, I think, out there, that I just put it on the table to be aware of.

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GARY LADERMAN: I want to echo those sentiments and step back and think about how we use the notion of "we," or how we think, and try to generalize that. There's someone in philosophy at Emory, who is working on religion and science, and he looks at the cognitive angles, at the relationship between religion and science. He's going to come out with a book that basically talks about how, in terms of how we're wired. We're more wired to think religiously than to think scientifically. It's more natural in human cognition to think in terms of religion than to think about science or to think scientifically about reality.

So I think your controversial statement is provocative, but I think it's not how people think. People don't think that it's unknowable. It depends on what criterion you use to talk about how you know, and how to separate out what's just a claim of knowledge and what we know as fact. I think people generally tend to think more religiously about that. It's not the end; it is continuation. It is a passage.

A great book was written a few years ago called Heaven, A History. The author looks at the way the history of heaven changes in Western tradition, and how in the contemporary period, it's become very domesticated. Especially in the twentieth century, the kind of theologies of heaven disappear, and they're not as forceful or as out there, as strong as they were one hundred years ago, or two centuries ago. Like some other people here, I'm very hesitant to bring up spirituality; I don't feel comfortable talking about spirituality as a descriptive term of American religious life, but spirituality kind of fills the gap. And so we have films like Ghost;we have these notions of individual spirits that can penetrate the veil and come back into this life and affect us. And we've lost the kind of theological structures--and believe me, I'm not saying that we need them or that we should go back to them or that I'm nostalgic for them--but in our society, they've been lost, so in a way anything goes in terms of how we imagine the dead.

PARTICIPANT: I think Charles Taylor makes a really strong claim that our spiritualism has moved into science. Our spiritual imagination is one of freedom and liberation through disengaged reasoning and through standing over against the world in this particularly scientistic way. In this view, what appears to be very irreligious is spirit-filled and a spiritual quest for freedom and for liberation.

GARY LADERMAN: I'm interested in this medical model, the medicalization of death. Implicit in that is the secularization thesis, and religion is no longer a part of that. I'm wondering for people who are in the medical setting, does religion make an appearance? I mean, how does religion come back? I think medical professionals can't talk about this stuff with each other. I think probably it's more comfortable when you're in this kind of setting with people in the humanities, who are accustomed to hearing a lot personal opinion, personal experiences. But as far as I know, what little I know, that can't be part of the medical discourse. It would undercut the scientific, explanatory, reductionistic models that are so essential.

PARTICIPANT: Personally, I find that I have to be very careful with whom I share certain things. Some nurses and physicians, yes; others, definitely not. We've just written a paper on spirituality and pediatric palliative care, with the idea being that spirituality is an element of what Patricia was calling earlier "relationship." It's part of getting to know people and finding out what's important to them, so that you can help them with what they need at that particular time. So I think much of what you say fits with my experience.

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SHAI LAVI: On the same topic. I'm very skeptical about the possibilities that we have to die different deaths. I think that we're struggling here to come up with alternatives in the name of religion, in the name of spirituality, in the name of the Hospice, in the name of some personal experiences. But it's not clear to me that these are really options that are available. Not that the only possible death is death in the hospital, but that death in the hospital, the medicalized death, can really affect in a profound way, a very strong way, the other alternatives of dying.

The Hospice is not an alternative to the hospital. The Hospice and the hospital belong together in the way we die. Right? The Hospice will accept you only if you have six months to live. What does that mean? Who determines that? This is a medical determination. The Hospice offers no medical technologies for coping with death, but it offers us five stages in the process we need to go through when we die. And it's not that it doesn't have spirituality in it, but it's really a kind of universalized spirituality.

I'm wondering whether, instead of trying to fight technology and science in looking for an alternative, we need to have a better understanding and a deeper understanding of what technology and medicine allow, and see that they're not limited to the body as opposed to the spirit, they're not limited to rationality as opposed to emotionality. But rather, then, we need to look at what kinds of emotionality are involved in technology, what kind of spirituality is inherent to technology. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to imagine other possibilities, it's just that we should come to terms more with the fact that we don't have them present at the moment.

GUY MICCO: The first thing that occurs to me, Shai, is that what's behind our medical technology is the desire to bring immortality. We want to live forever, and that's what keeps driving the technological imperative, to continue life. There's some people who say they don't want to live forever. I personally have doubts about that. I think we want to continue a good life, barring disability and strange things happening to little gray cells. We want to continue at whatever age we felt good at. I feel good right now; I'd like to continue like this for a really long time. Technology has that pseudo-promise that someday stem cells will make it possible.

SHAI LAVI: I think technology isn't about prolonging life forever; technology is about determining the manner and time in which we die. So it could be the prolongation of life forever, but it could also be physician-assisted suicide, terminal sedation, and other ways of accepting our death. Technology is really about having more control over death.

GUY MICCO: I agree. Right now, technology is about control. As I said, yesterday, a large study in San Francisco, in the Intensive Care Units at UC San Francisco and San Francisco General Hospital, showed that 90% of deaths were preceded by a decision. So there's a decision to stop the technology that is prolonging life.

But I wanted to skip over to this question of spirituality and medicine, which I find, and many physicians find, strange bedfellows. Yet it's coming. Spiritual history will be part of medical history in the not-too-distant future, if it isn't already in your medical school right now. And it's doing more than just asking what religion are you, it's actually looking into meaning, life's meaning, and the meaning of spirituality to the patient, and considering that with the patient. So medical students are starting to learn those things. And it's an uneasy alliance. I think people feel a little bit uncomfortable; physicians feel somewhat uncomfortable. Just as physicians feel uncomfortable with this notion of the near-death experience that we have been discussing this afternoon. Medicine did with the near-death experience what it does well with other things. It studied it. I only know of one study; itÕs in the American Cardiology Journal, the last time I looked, which was a few years ago. In that study, many people were asked after they were resuscitated what their experience was. And, not surprisingly, the experience was no experience, zero, nothing, no memory, nothing. No light. So that was medicine's dismissal. That's all I've ever seen. Dr. Gonzalez-Crussi discussed in his book wonderful stories about feeling good at the end of life. But as far as near-death experiences with tunnels of light and whatnot, that's not the experience that's been reported in the medical literature. And the rest, I'm afraid, is merely anecdotal.

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GWEN ANDERSON: I'd like to bring up something else, and that is the whole aging population around the world which is going to continue to grow. And the whole idea of a technological fix to aging is still a long way off, and yet at the same time we've got technology that is impacting aging, such as, we have people who have gone through a whole generation of chemotherapy, and now they're living with chronic conditions, for example. They are people who are experiencing some degree of social death, in a way, because their life is limited. So they are not necessarily fully living a life, nor are they dead, and nor are they necessarily in the process of dying. But the way of living that they had has changed. So I wanted us to think a little bit more about how we are going to accommodate all of these processes of dying, or these preparations of dying which are not necessarily included in the language of a total death.

I raise this because for a number of years I have lived with one elderly person who has now died and now I'm living with a new elderly person. And I think one of the responsibilities we have, because we are so attuned to living and dying and death, is to bring the new generation that's coming up behind us into our conversations about dying, to help them realize that they also have a responsibility. For instance, I feel a responsibility to help elderly people with their dying. My notion of what dying is has really changed as a result of living with these people. For instance, with one individual, who went through two strokes and was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, his dying probably started at least eight months before he actually died. I was there and living with that, and coordinating really extensive services coming into the house. Now I'm working with this new person who lives on a twenty-six-foot cord of oxygen, and I have to beware of something as simple as the house-cleaning person plugging into the wrong cord, and all of a sudden the power is gone and there's no oxygen. The oxygen is this person's lifeline, and she could die in a matter of minutes without it.

I would like us to think as we leave here about really creative ways of accommodating these changes. If we've got more and more people in society who are getting older and who are living with chronic illness, how are we going to help them?

ERNEST LANDAUER: Entailed by this comment and by all of the other comments, centering, focusing on the question of what voices are given authority in the discourse of death, I note that we've been using the passive voice. So there's a question: Who gives the authority and what is the authority? Authoritativeness is being informed; authority is having power. And the two may not go together very often; we often are led by leaders who are very lacking in authoritativeness, while having a monopoly on authority. And that happens in our personal lives as well.

There was a comment earlier by the participant behind me about social relations. I think many things that we attribute to each other are really the product of relations and the ongoing interpretations of those relations. Dr. Benner used the phrase "common humanity." It's the only time that there was a mention of common humanity. And that, in a way--whether we think of it transcendentally or locally--that is what gives us authority, and we can at a given moment consentually validate that by checking it out with whomever we happen to be with. I won't go into a long personal reference, but I've had several experiences spending a long time with older people, who practically to a person always say at some point, "Why does everything take so long?" That is, there is no implication there of immortality or with the desire for immortality. There is, however, a desire for continuity, and that is the identity we have with old people, middle-aged people, young people with whom we have a common humanity, which includes all those things that we think of as inhuman. That is, it is only human beings who can be inhuman.

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DEBORAH BARRETT: I'm Deborah Barrett, and I'm an independent artist. Much of my work has to do with the dead, or with death, in the sense that I use mid- to late-nineteenth century portraits as references for drawings that I do. So, in fact, in some ways, I'm really relieved and gladdened to be in a group that has concern with issues of death. Because as I do these drawings, they really are kind of a meditation on life and death.

I wanted to make a couple of observations. You know, I am of such an age that I actually remember funeral processions. And I get kind of cranky about what's happening to this culture, in the sense of denial. I really do believe that this culture is becoming something of a Disney park. I am often reminded of the scene in Pinocchio where the children are lured into this Coney Island-type environment. I think that we live in a similar environment as it pertains to death. When was the last time any of us saw a funeral procession? I remember when I was growing up that the rule was--I thought it was a law--that you never went in front of a funeral procession. So if it were a two-lane highway, the whole fleet of cars behind this funeral procession would, in fact, become part of the funeral procession. When was the last time you passed by a cemetery? One of the things I love about going into New York City is that if you look very closely and if you take the Carey Bus instead of a cab, you're up very high and you get to see the enormity of the cemetery. It goes on and on and on and on and on.

I think that we lack these cues, these visual reminders that we're just passing through. The whole talk about technology and the notion of prolonging life or suspending death is part of the aversion to death.

Four years ago, my stepson died suddenly, and he was twenty-three years old. The suddenness with which that happened, it was physically as if I had been smashed in the chest. And what that force was, was the realization that, in fact, death is that close, death is a phone call away, death is a step off the curb, you know, death is six inches on a highway; it's here, it's all around us.

My brother died in January, and his death, too, was unexpected, although it was not quite so sudden. He was taken off a ventilator. I was very grateful for what you had to say yesterday, about what happens to the body because I wasn't given any information, nor was my other brother given any information as to what would happen to him, except that he would die, and he was supposed to die within an hour. And, in fact, he lived for a week. What I realized--and we were talking about this at the break with some other people--was that I had been waiting for this. And I realized I was participating, and could be a participant in this. I bought two books of poetry, one by Rumi and another by Mary Oliver. And I had been talking with my brother earlier that week, going back over our life together and when we were children together. But the realization mid-week was that I was like this midwife; I was a coach. And it allowed it not to be death; it allowed it to be this thing that I was going through with my brother, that he needed me there. He wasn't conscious; he couldn't respond. I read him the poetry; I talked about fishing, how he loved to fish as a child. And he didn't die until the following Saturday.

I felt the day that he died that we had done very good work together. You know, I felt that it was a labor. And when I walked out of that hospital, after spending time with him, after he had died, and my other brother joined, and we spent time with him together, my whole notion of death was this big thing. In some ways the talk today, or over the last couple of days, is of the enormity of death, that it's other. And I don't think until we really experience it from whatever point of view, only then does it become part of us.

The real tragedy is that we go out into a culture and it's not reflected back; it's not made real for us, so that we're isolated and alone with it until the time that it happens, whether it happens suddenly, or over an extended period of time. This is one of the reasons that I love going to Mexico, where it is part of life. And traveling through small villages and seeing funeral processions--I know that sounds really trivial, but it makes one feel not quite so crazy, and that death is not a failure. Whatever it is for anybody, whether you're spiritual or not spiritual, or religious or a scientist, you know that death is a mystery, but it's not a failure.

And finally I just want to say that I am grateful to have been here--to all of you. It has been a rich, rich experience.

CHRISTINA GILLIS: I think my own response to that is that my own first image for thinking about the conference, about a year ago, was the photograph in the New York Times at the time of the Nova Scotia plane crash at a place called PeggyÕs Cove. John and I lost a child in a plane crash, and we're very sensitive to happenings like this. In the image in the Times, which was on the front page, we saw a rocky shore with the sea beyond. But it's all rather misty, and it's hard to see anything there. This photograph seems to be about what is not known. Officials are apparently still looking for the black box, which will presumably tell us why this plane went down. The image shows people whom we assume to be the family of the crash victims--we don't really know of course; maybe they are only visiting there, tourists, but the story tells us that family members are gathering in the hotel in Halifax. We are also told that everyone is waiting for the message of that black box, and they are waiting for body parts, and they are waiting for news. I have a hard time even getting my imagination around that particular thing. But certainly, the image was important to me for what it says about the human condition, and the relationship between the living and the dead, the known and the unknown.

Finally, I would like to thank all of you for coming, and particularly, those speakers and participants who came long distances to be here. Do come back and see us, all of you.

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