Read Online In the Slender Margin by Eve Joseph - Free Book Online Page A

hospital bed on the other side of the window. His wife, who had not slept for days, was beside herself. While the nurse drew up a syringe of Haldol, I spoke gently with the man.
    “You can rest now,” I said. “You can rest.”
    He looked at me and lay very still. His wife, overjoyed, couldn’t thank me enough. I felt good, even a bit smug, until he motioned his wife over.
    “Call our lawyer,” he said.
    “Why?” she wondered.
    “Because,” he said, pointing directly at me, “that woman just arrested me.”
    Whatever works, I thought to myself, whatever works.
     
    Morphine sometimes causes delusions. One woman saw spiders hanging from the ceiling of her room at hospice. Some of them dropped down on her bed and crawled over her face when she was sleeping. She was terrified to close her eyes. People talked to her, telling her there were no spiders, the doctors changed her medication, but she didn’t believe anyone. In the end, the only thing that helped was to pack up her belongings and move her to a different room, where she settled in and never saw the imaginary spiders on their imaginary webs ever again. When Muhammad called the mountain to him, it didn’t budge. “Well then,” he said, “if the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain.” There are times you just have to act. Simple as that.
    To the Western mind, waking hallucinations about the dead are considered delusional projections of the living—dismissed as indicative of wishful thinking or as evidence of denial or craziness. The one exception to this line of thought is found in studies on widowhood, which reveal that human attachment bonds often persist beyond death. It is not uncommon for widows to have a sense of continued contact with their spouses, including a sense of presence and touch. The dying, too, often talk about sensing the presence of the dead. Sometimes it’s a smell, a certain perfume or cologne; sometimes they hear them speaking. One woman asked me to pull up a chair beside her bed so that her late mother could have a seat; another stared at the left-hand corner of her room for days, waiting for her late husband to return for her; others came, she told us, but she didn’t know themand refused to go. On the morning of her death, she said her husband had come. He’d tipped his hat in the slightly mocking way he’d always done, and she smiled. A wide, radiant smile.
     
    I DID NOT SET OUT TO RETRIEVE MY BROTHER OR ASSUAGE AN OLD grief when I began writing about death, and yet it seems he keeps serendipitously finding me.
    When I first visited his grave, with my mother and sister, thirty years after his death, the unmistakable smell of cigarette smoke flooded the car when I parked. None of us smoked, and when I got out of the car and looked around, there were no discarded butts to be seen. I asked my sister if Ian smoked. “Like a chimney,” she said. I have no way of knowing if he was there, no way to discern between wishful thinking and a spiritual encounter, but as we started down the hill, I thought I could see him, clear as day, sitting on the rock wall, swinging his feet. Saying, “It’s damned well about time.”
    My mother, sister and I arrived at the cemetery only to find it had just been mowed; all the flat headstones were covered in grass and impossible to read. My mother, who had attended the burial in a state of profound grief, had no idea where to start looking and began slowly walking amongst the graves. My sister, Carol, and I took off down the hill to see if there was any logic to how the plots were arranged, only to find there were no clues: old graves and new graves were side by side. Unable to go any further, my mother half collapsed on a red bench streaked with the evidence of recent bird strikes. “None of my deaths have markers,” she told me when I went to sit with her and put my arm around her shoulders.
    A few minutes later, Carol, who had been futilely kicking the