The nights are long
And the wind is howling down
Into the hollows
Somewhere deep inside
I can hear you calling out
Across this great divide
- From “The Great Divide” (Joe Cocker Version)
One morning in the early 1980s a friend called from the hospital, because the night before he had been in a terrible accident. He gave me a short list of things he needed, for what turned out to be an extended stay in bed. Mary and I quickly got the items he asked for and went to see him.
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| Today's Photos Taken Several Days Ago in Tanzania By My Friend Gordon |
He told us that the previous night he had driven past a notorious highway intersection and had been hit broadside. He was thrown from his tiny car deep into a ditch. It was pitch black and raining. He couldn’t move, and could hear people searching, but in the storm his weak voice didn’t carry. He knew he was bleeding out, and he started to feel a sense of peaceful belonging, that he had joined a subset of humanity from everywhere in the world and through the ages, who were at the moment when they realized their lives were ending.
He said he felt greatly humbled, realizing he had arrived at a distinct place where all variations of time, space, race, class and belief disappeared – the exclusive and universal club of the dying. As he sank into unconsciousness, this sense of connection filled him with peace and gratitude.
The rescuers located him and airlifted him to the hospital. He had lost more blood than was thought possible for a person who lived. My own theory about this miracle is that my friend spent every night of his first twelve years as a goat herder, sleeping on the ground, because his people were nomads in the Congo. I suspect this start in life contributed a lot to my friend’s extraordinary disposition – and to his hardiness. Even so, it took him about a year to recuperate.
I believe most people come across these bright, uncrossable lines, when everything changes. They have seemed to come up in my life – as they did for my friend – around dying and death, although there are other circumstances, as I’ll mention below.
I remember so clearly my early morning dog walks along the salt marsh where I’m writing right now, during Mary’s last year of illness. Watching the sun come up, I’d study the light and the silhouetted eastern trees and know I would be standing at just that place, with that dog, at the same moment of sunrise – but Mary would be dead. I’d peer across the great divide, trying to see past her death, trying to know what it would be like, to feel it. But I may as well have been trying to see into the Congo or my spleen, for all the utter impossibility of projecting my inner vision into that remote emotional location.
I first saw this divide of life and death a couple of years before those salt marsh walks, when I went to several sessions of a group of spouses and partners of people with ALS. As it turned out, the shimmering line extended through the group, demarcating those whose person had died, and those who hadn’t, yet. I felt the wide-open stare of the people who had already lost their loved ones. They seemed to be on the other side of very thick panes of glass, and I thought they moved a lot slower than the rest of us. These wives and husbands felt more alien to me than people I had met wearing yak skins in Ladakh or small naked boys running in the African forest.
There are other kinds of lines that create those great divides of experience and feeling. I was raised by demi-assimilated Jews, and as has been described quite sufficiently by many others, I was from first consciousness aware of being an outsider. Not just an outsider, a vulnerable outsider living in a dangerous world. Part of that came from my mom, who drilled into her kids the dangers of “them.” She refused to answer certain kinds of questions, especially around her political and religious beliefs, with the same catch phrase: “What you don’t know, they can’t get out of you.”
I was first beaten up for being a Jew in the schoolyard in first grade – this would have been six years after the liberation of the concentration camps in Europe. I knew the reason for the beating, since the kicking and punching was always accompanied by the same chant, “Dirty Jew! Dirty Jew!” A few years later, in a suburb closer to my dad’s job, I’d walk past a house several doors away and the three kids who lived there would grasp the top of their picket fence and scream the same phrase in my face as I walked past. I tried to not speed up my walking and reveal fear.
What I want to talk about is not some version of, “oh poor me, I had it so hard.” Rather, I’d like to mention two particular qualities of these great divides that I’ve thought about a lot in recent years. These ideas don't make the great divides disappear, but they help to place them in the normal course of human life.
That will be the subject of tomorrow’s second and final posting on this topic.