In the Slender Margin Read Online Free PDF Page B

glioblastoma, the sailor with throat cancer, the cyclist with bonecancer. The actress in a green velvet dressing gown with a tumour growing in the shadow of her heart.
    This morning I wake up wondering what the name
Ian
means. In an online reference I find it is the Gaelic form of
John.
I didn’t know he was named after his father. In Scottish, the name means— “Gift from God.”
    Only now does it occur to me that he made two train trips across the country: one when he arrived, as a boy, through fields of yellow; the other in a box the colour of the prairie sky.
    The world’s seven-billionth person, Danica May Camacho, was born in the Philippines on October 31, 2011—sixty-five years to the day after my mother arrived with her two children from England and my brother headed straight out into the goblin- and ghost-filled streets of his new home.
    Taming Death
    I recently read a description of a local creek that has changed the way I hear water.
Colquitz Creek
, named by the First Peoples of the area, translates roughly into “baby crying and crying until it is exhausted and no one is going to comfort it.” There is an inconsolable quality to water that I didn’t recognize until I heard it named.
    Prior to the 1969 publication of
On Death and Dying
bythanatologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a great silence prevailed in North America. Death was denied description because it was denied expression. As a society, we bury our dead and yet often refuse to let them die. There have been thousands of sightings of Elvis since his death. At the funeral, his father, Vernon, allegedly acknowledged that the corpse in the coffin did not look like his son. “He’s upstairs,” he told the crowd. One wonders how far upstairs he meant. In a death-denying culture, we vacillate between fear and fascination.
    When my brother died, it was as if snow were falling all over the world; there is no silence as perfect as that of the shell-shocked bereaved trying to be brave. Kübler-Ross gave death and dying a language. She developed a series of seminars using interviews with terminal patients in which she encouraged physicians and others not to shy away from the sick but to get closer to them.
    On the prairies, in winter, farmers have been known to tie a rope between the house and barn so they don’t get lost in a blinding snowstorm. Kübler-Ross’s model served as a kind of rope for the times when it seemed all landmarks were gone. She brought the subject out of the privacy of medical schools and delivered it to the streets. Death was out of the proverbial closet, so to speak. Her five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance—provided new ways to speak and think about loss, for the dying and for the bereaved. One of the misconceptions about this model is that one needs to reach acceptance in order to have a good death. In actual clinical practice, psychologist Therese Rando notes that true acceptance, as articulated by Kübler-Ross, is seldom witnessed. Rather, it appears that as patients get closer todeath, the realization of the inevitable often provides a sense that “one’s time has come” which, in some cases, allows the patient to make peace with the fact that there is nothing else to do. The line between acceptance and surrender is a very fine one. “I may not like this,” one patient told me, “but the boat’s leaving and I’m jumping on.”
    Not long ago, I met a family whose mother was dying of heart failure. Emotions were changing in the room like a spring day, with its hail one minute and sun the next. One daughter, at peace with her mother’s dying in the morning, was bargaining with her to eat, in order to regain her strength, by early afternoon. A son who refused to accept that death was imminent, who had been in denial since his mother was admitted to hospital as a palliative patient, was the only one who answered his mother directly when she asked if she was dying. “Yes, Mom,” he