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

grass off concrete slabs, walked slightly to the right of the bench and suddenly stopped, threw up her arms andexclaimed, “Here he is!” I don’t know if we found him or he found us. It doesn’t matter. Between the three of us that day, our offerings included a handful of lily of the valley from Mom’s garden, an empty coffee cup to put them in, and a pencil that my sister tucked in the thin edge between the stone marker and the grass. “My brother,” she said, “never went anywhere without a pencil.” In a sea of green, our mother had sat down right in front of her son.
    At a recent writers’ festival on Galiano Island, one of the hundreds of islands and islets that form part of a larger archipelago in the southern part of the Salish Sea, the talk turned, as it often does with a group of writers, towards death. In the course of the conversation, in which I spoke about my brother, the novelist Audrey Thomas said that she had been at UBC in 1964 and had known Ian. They were both enrolled in an Anglo-Saxon seminar, and they met in Meredith Thompson’s small office to translate Beowulf. She recalled how he would arrive in class, often hungover, and lean back on his chair, balancing on its two rear legs, and how she would wait to see if he would tumble backwards.
    I like that; it seems accurate. I can see him precariously balanced. Between drink and study, recklessness and scholarship, between Angleterre and the New World. Between Here and There.
    In a recent email, Audrey asked me if my brother, dead, had had a profound influence on my life. No, I think to myself, it is not the fact of Ian dead that shaped me; rather, it was his death. The sudden absence, the depth of silence, the inexplicable disappearance.
    When Odysseus tries to embrace his mother in the underworld, she flutters out of his hands like a shadow and says to him,
    Sinews no longer bind the flesh and bones together—
    fire in all its fury burns the body to ashes
    and once life slips from the white bones, spirit,
    dreamlike, dissolves into the shadows.
    All over the world, every second of every day, the dead are fluttering, like shadows, out of our hands.
     
    Beliefs
    In our encounters with the dying, we each bring our own beliefs—beliefs based on our history with death, our culture, religion or lack of it; beliefs based on mythology and psychology and on our motives and expectations. Our beliefs are a kind of architecture of the mind, a way of creating meaning and interpreting the world. In Africa, a widow might run a zigzag course through the woods after her husband’s burial so that his ghost will not follow and haunt her. There are Japanese people who believe the dead arrive on the back of a horse on New Year’s Day; when the holiday is over, they return them to their world in small wood and paper boats bearing lighted candles.
    The Aztecs, Babylonians and Assyrians believed that all good people metamorphosed into birds, while ancient Egyptians believed that the soul, the ba, could leave the dead body in the form of a hawk. They built their graves and tombs with narrow shafts leading to the open air so that these birds could fly in and out, keeping watch over the body.
    We acquire our beliefs as we go along, influenced by the tangible as well as the intangible. The beliefs I held about death as a child were influenced by fairy tales and prayers; a single kiss had the power to undo spells and restore life. At night, I knelt down beside my bed and recited “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.” It had a nursery rhyme quality, four lyrical lines a child could easily memorize. Each night I prayed,
If I should die before I wake, I pray for God my soul to take.
Death winked at me before I knew what it was. Falling asleep felt a bit like coming unmoored—the frayed rope, holding the little boat, unravelling.
    I grew up in a house of superstitions. Paintings falling off the walls or robins flying into the house meant a death would surely follow. My mother