Sensing I want to stay here awhile, Mom says she’ll meet me at the Madonna statue near the choir screen. I drop a few francs into the offering box, light a votive candle, and set it in the stand in front of the statue. I look at Joan’s face and entreat her silently: Help me listen to my own voice. Help me find what I’m born to do. Help me find the courage to do it.
The yellow flame of my candle burns in a steady flicker. My prayer is reflexive. I do not pause to wonder if I deserve an answer, but I do ask, which is progress, I suppose. I don’t know what will come from something as simple as asking. Prayer and faith are enigmas—but I feel alive, like the girl on the horse. Maybe this is hope.
Outside the cathedral, our eyes adjust to the daylight. On our trek back to the hotel, we stop in a patisserie and I buy a chocolate éclair. I walk, and eat, and think. I hear that poem in my head. My St. Michael “voice.”
Give up all the other worlds / except the one to which you belong.
Sue
Island of Gavrinis
On a ferry in the Gulf of Morbihan, along the coast of Brittany, I begin to think morbidly about my blood pressure. I took it last night and again this morning with the battery-operated machine I brought from home, and it was alarmingly high, stirring up the familiar panic I’ve felt lately about my hypertension. It started out mildly a few years ago—as something to watch. In the months leading up to the trip, however, it erupted into uncontrolled episodes like this one, so many that my doctor looked uneasily at me, ordered an electrocardiogram, and upped the dosage of my medication. One minute I had a little pile of leaves burning in a corner of my backyard, and the next, a wildfire was whipping across the grass. I did not see it coming.
I have responded with yoga, aerobics, diet, acupuncture—a sort of holistic bucket brigade—but so far without effect. I’m probably working too hard at them, turning them into hypertense activities, but I don’t know how to relax about something referred to as a “silent killer.” The words are emblazoned across a big poster about hypertension in my doctor’s exam room. During my last visit, while waiting for the nurse to take my blood pressure, I refused to look at it, but my body reacted anyway and I was soused with adrenaline by the time she got there. My blood pressure soared off into the stratosphere like the starship Enterprise, going where no reading of mine had ever gone before.
I don’t like to talk about my hypertension. As if it has a stigma attached to it. As if it reveals too much about me, some glimpse into myself I cannot allow, cannot bear. It feels ridiculously like a failure, a revelation of my inability to rest, a reflection on the paucity of my stillness, serenity, and centeredness—all those contemplative graces I value. The whole matter leaves me embarrassed, helpless, afraid, and amplifies my already touchy thoughts about my mortality.
By the time we board the small, white ferry, the panic I felt earlier this morning about the readings has blunted into a dull percussion along my breastbone, enough to send me outside to the rail, wanting to be alone. It doesn’t help that we are on our way to the tiny island of Gavrinis to see a five-thousand-year-old burial chamber, known as a “tumulus.”
Not discovered until 1865, it is thought by many to be the finest tumulus in the world. In the tourist pamphlet, it’s described as “the Sistine Chapel of Prehistory,” though it’s hard to imagine what could lead to such hyperbole. A tumulus is a piece of stone-age architecture, after all, earth and stones and that’s about it. What intrigues me most is that archaeological evidence suggests the tumulus was not just a grave site, but that it had a ceremonial purpose. What that purpose may have been, however, has turned into one of those Stonehenge-like mysteries.
When we decided to visit Gavrinis, I wondered if my time at the tumulus could become a private ceremony for me as well, a way to have an overdue conversation with myself about the fact that for the first time in my life I think about death. It always comes unbidden, suddenly there in front of me like someone unsavory stepping out from an alley into my path, startling me and taking my breath, and then a tiny burst of anguish occurs in my chest—yes, it will end, it will all end. For several moments, the feeling will ricochet inside, then it’s gone.
The intimations have come more and more frequently and at times bring on a slightly frantic litany—I am fifty-one, so young. Dying is far in the future. Cross that bridge when you come to it. Focus on today. Don’t be morose.
I first read Eavan Boland’s poem “Ceres Looks at the Morning” after I returned home from Greece. Sometimes, like now, entire lines of it come back:Already / my body is a twilight: Solid. Gold / At the edge of a larger darkness.
The words offer some kind of latitude-longitude reading of my soul, positioning me in interior time and place—at the edge of a larger darkness. At the strange, uncompromising border with my finitude. Deep down, those bearings seem right to me. The growing recognition of my mortality seems part of the threshold I’m crossing, and I know my soul is asking me to come to terms with it, to develop the ability to look at death, to find my way into its secrecy and wisdom, its stunning ordinariness.
Over the preceding summer, Sandy and I vacationed in Bermuda at a place called Ariel Sands, so named for the water sprite Ariel in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The hotel desk clerk handed me a copy of the play when we checked in. Having never read it before, I opened it one afternoon sitting beside the waves and found a story about a man, Prospero, making a rite of passage into his older years, though I’m sure I was reading it through the lens of my own life. At the end of the play, Prospero announces that every third thought he has from then on will be of his death. Oh, great. I closed the book with a sinking feeling.
Back home, I searched for spiritual commentary on the play and discovered Helen M. Luke’s essay “The Tempest.” By allowing death to come often into his thoughts, Prospero is preparing himself for it, she wrote. The conscious and meditative attention to death becomes a spiritual task during the last part of life, she insists, and contrary to what we might suppose, it creates the opposite of despair; it creates release and meaning.
But now, on the ferry, with this intensifying blood pressure crisis, knowing there’s something physically wrong with me that neither I nor medication has been able to fix, the subject of death seems too visceral, too lacerating. I’m not sure if I have the stomach for a meditation on it.
I glance at my watch—only 2:00 P.M. but it looks like early evening. I watch the city of Larmor-Baden recede into the distance and shiver inside my raincoat despite the red shawl I’ve draped over it and the floppy wool hat pulled low on my forehead. Yesterday, when we left Mont-St.-Michel and arrived in Brittany, the weather was spectacular. We roamed the fields and woods, exploring prehistoric stone alignments around the village of Carnac, the sun glazing the megaliths. But today is bitterly cold. Grayness lacquers the sky and weighs down the air.
The water along the bow churns the same slate color as the sky, and I think fleetingly of the River Styx, the mythological river between life and death over which souls are ferried to the other side. It is a ludicrously grim association, but then I am crossing a body of water, on a ferry, to what the pamphlet calls “a sanctuary of dying.” Ann taps on the glass window from inside. Turning, I smile at her, ignoring her querulous expression—what are you doing out there in the cold?
Really, what was I doing?
She had listened this morning to the whir of the blood pressure cuff inflating on my arm and then the steady beep, beep, beep.
“Is it high?” she said.
She’s aware of my recent hypertension, but I’ve said nothing about the elevated readings I’m getting here in France.
“Just a bit,” I told her, as if it’s no big deal. I didn’t want to lie to her, but neither did I want to fill her with a lot of unnecessary anxiety. I tried to pick something in the middle.
My body is a twilight . . . I turn the fragment of poetry over in my mind, considering that the first tint of it has come to my body. I can only share so much of that
with Ann. She is a young woman; how much of my truth should she take on? I struggle for intimacy with her, and then I struggle with the reality of boundaries, that there are places between us that intimacy cannot, perhaps should not, happen: the twilight, the larger darkness. I can barely handle them myself.
Since being in the Louvre, I’ve returned often to the idea that pivotal events in Mary’s life reveal windows into our own. I’ve sorted through the annunciation paintings—all those angels summoning all those Marys to bring forth new life—and wondered if there’s an “annunciation” embedded in my hypertension.
While in the thick of doctor visits before the trip, I dreamed about a strange woman who shows up to tell me my “true problem.” She diagnoses it as “Excel-eration and Acceleration.” She is annoying in the way all-knowing people usually are. I treat her like a quack and belittle the way she has apparently repeated my so-called true problem twice. Unfazed, she sits me down and speaks to me like I’m in kindergarten: “The words sound alike, but they’re spelled differently,” she explains, then writes the pair of words in big block letters on a school chalkboard. My true problem.
Does the dream suggest that my drive to excel and the hurried-ness it breeds—these old, implacable daemons of mine—are at the root of my hypertension? It does take me back to the need I’ve uncovered to cultivate being and find the contemplative writer in myself. I decide the woman in the dream is a “knowing” part of myself and that she has sent me back to repeat grades, to relearn basic truths I supposedly already know.
After disembarking the ferry, we follow a path to an igloo-shaped mound of earth, one hundred and sixty feet in diameter and twenty feet high. The tumulus. I hadn’t expected anything so mammoth. It looks like a vast pregnant belly. One side is covered with small stones laid on top of each other like fish scales. In the middle of them, a low doorway.
I pause at the tumulus opening and peer into the feeble light, feeling the slightest hesitation. The tunnel is straight and narrow, leading forty-five feet into an interior chamber. It’s lined with twenty-three massive stones, joined together to form what our thickly accented French guide earlier called “Pel-VEEC wallzzz.”
“Did he say pelvic walls?” I whispered to Ann.
“I do believe he did,” she replied.
I watch the other women threading into the tight space. The stones tower over them in colors of russet brown and bleached gray. While the birth canal design is unmistakable, what registers in me is bones—earth bones, Old Woman bones, that bone I dug up in my dream last year in Greece. I get a fanciful, if not eerie, picture of the group strolling along a column of vertebrae.
Stepping inside, I feel a lurch of dread that starts tiny, then fans through my chest and arms before fading. As my sight adjusts to the gloom, lavish carvings appear on the stones. Their surfaces are covered with finely balanced designs associated with the ancient Goddess: spirals, chevrons, crescents, egg-shaped ovals, and serpentine lines.
The most prolific motif by far is clusters of concentric arches nested one inside the other. They mushroom out in every direction, creating a complex and magnificent unity. Stepping close and studying the pattern, I notice a small navel protrusion on top of each set of arches and realize I am looking at birth canals. Not only am I standing in what is apparently a replica of a birth canal, they are all over the walls.
As I move deeper into the passage, the birth images repeat on the stones in new, unexpected ways, inducing the odd feeling in me of moving inward, traveling to what matters, down to the marrow. They possess a free and primitive beauty, the power to make me cry. I want to take back every condescending thought I had about this being the “Sistine Chapel of Prehistory.”
My only personal encounters with death have been with those of my grandparents, who were ripe with old age and the fullness of their lives, and with that of my father-in-law, who died abruptly of a heart attack at sixty. When his death occurred, I was nine months pregnant with my son. I sat on the church pew during the funeral, so great with child I was down to my one last pathetic maternity dress. Somewhere during the service, it hit me how sharply birth and death were intersecting in my family’s life. The words womb and tomb began to reiterate in my thoughts. I don’t know now if the minister uttered them and I picked them up like a refrain, or if they just materialized from a place in my own head.
Now here I am, in a burial chamber awash in the metaphor of feminine birth, when whack!—my foot strikes against something hard on the stone floor and I trip. I feel myself going down and reach out for one of the stone masterpieces, which we are, of course, forbidden to touch. I catch myself, but my bag lands with a thud and the French guide scurries over, more worried about the Pel-VEEC wallzzz, I suspect, than about me. He is kind and very gallant, however, taking my elbow and guiding me over the hurdle, which turns out to be an oblong rock stretched across the corridor like a door sill.
“Do not worry, you are not the first to trip here,” he says in his rich accent, trying to make me feel less clumsy. “It is possible the rock was even placed here deliberately—as a stumbling block. Such things were done, you know, in initiation ceremonies . . . to make people think about the obstacles.”
He points to an even larger sill stone ahead. “See, there is another one. You do see it, Madame?”
“Yes,” I assure him, aware that I’ve literally tripped over a piece of the ceremony that may have gone on here.
I notice Ann making her way back to see what the commotion is about, and I wave her on. “It’s nothing,” I call and walk along more alert, but thinking about the symbolic stumbling blocks. Mine, perhaps, being the reflex to look away from death, to shield myself. What am I afraid of? Oblivion? Of losing self and identity? Of the grief it would cause those who love me? Of my own despair at leaving them? Of physical suffering? Of regrets?
The passage ends in a room eight feet square—a small mausoleum lined with six more of the huge, sumptuously carved stones. Approaching it, I have the feeling of peeling away insulation, coming to an exposed wire. I halt at the entrance and stare up at the stone lintel over the door, noting the labyrinthine carvings. As I step inside, I take one of those long yoga breaths I’ve learned.
The inner chamber seems intended as a symbolic womb and carries the aura of a Holy of Holies. The layout suggests that one’s dying is a return to the womb and conjures up an astonishing image of birth waiting in death, of the dead buried like seeds in a Great Mother’s womb. I circle the chamber, inspecting the stones. The feast of sensuous lines appears as watery as fingerpaint on canvas, though each has been painstakingly etched with tiny quartz pebbles.
The memory of the rite of death and rebirth called the Eleusinian Mysteries that Ann and I had learned about in Greece fourteen months ago flits through my mind. But the context was different then, wasn’t it? I was focused on the death of my womb, the death of a former self, not death itself. My God, how much easier was it to think about death as letting go of some part of life: leaving behind a job, a relationship, a self, a pattern, a way of being, a hundred different things? Now I realize: they are all practice. Each a rehearsal for death, challenging my clinging and resistance, developing my soul’s facility to turn loose and open to what is new and unknown.
I stand in a corner of the inner chamber. Close my eyes and try to let the Larger Darkness in. Acknowledge that it will come and take me and then I will not exist. Disappearing like an exhaled breath, like that breath I let out a minute ago.
I don’t know if the meditation lasts a full minute. The truth grieves me and, opening my eyes, I feel quietly split, like the shell on the blue crab when the time comes for the creature to slough it off and grow. I’ve seen the shells lying broken on the creek bottom and the crabs scurrying, as raw and unprotected as newborns.
One day I will have to forgive life for ending, I tell myself. I will have to learn how to let life be life with its unbearable finality . . . just be what it is.
Already / my body is a tw
ilight: Solid. Gold / At the edge of a larger darkness.
I cannot remember the next few lines of the poem, only that they contain a radiant assertion about death flowing into life. When I am back home, I will look them up. . . .
But outside / my window / a summer day is beginning. Apple trees / appear, one by one. Light is pouring / into the promise of fruit.
As I leave the chamber and move back through the tunnel of stones, I start to think about a winter visit I made to Thomas Merton’s monastery in Kentucky, the Abbey of Gethsemani, when I was in my thirties. A wife, mother, and writer caught in a profusion of busyness, I was full of excel-erating and accelerating, but still hopelessly drawn to Merton’s writings and the contemplative life. Merton had introduced me to what he called the True Self, referring to the God spark or divine nature in the human soul that’s described by practically every mystical tradition in the world. If we could glimpse it, he wrote, “we would see these billions of points of light coming together . . .” At the time, I had no idea what he was talking about.
During that visit, I walked for miles in the cold woods, considering the notion that beneath my ordinary self dwells a deep transcendent Self, a timeless and eternal part of me. Then, standing idly beside a woodpile, having given up on figuring it out, something at the core of me flared up. I recognized the truth of that eternal Self, as if I were remembering what had always existed in me, though that hardly seems to make sense. I was left with a new feeling about myself, about life: neither were quite what I thought. There was something immense going on.
My problem, as I would soon find out—and really the problem, as Merton pointed out—is that I was deeply attached to my “external self,” to my beloved and tenacious I. Even now, as I revisit all this, I want to retreat into an internal argument about what a necessary thing the ego is, how I need a well-developed sense of myself to bring forth my work in the world. And all that’s true, but why do I belabor the point to myself? Is it because I hate to think of the ways my I has grown entitled, selfish, and wounded, how sometimes it runs my personality like it’s the CEO of Everything, how prone I am to imagining that this external self is who I really am and all that I am?