Amanda Torrey #35
Death and Its Beyond
REL 257
After reading Laurence Sullivan’s Introduction to Death, Afterlife, and the Soul, I thought about him writing that:
Poking through the breakpoint of death into the otherworld is an act that orients the human being in this world, brings into full power the imagination of the living, and enables human labor to take new account of material existence. [i]
I think sharing our interactions about an “otherworld” becomes complicated since each of us approaches death so differently that our experiences are naturally going to be unique. It hasn’t been the actual bout with death that I found nearly as interesting as what happened afterwards. My question is how to chalk all brushes with this “other” existence up to being an overactive imagination when at some point we have to believe in our own senses and in fact ourselves, no matter what anyone else says.
My mother told me I almost died of Nephritis when I was 3. I have no idea what Nephritis is other than having something to do with blood passing into my stools. I don’t remember almost dying exactly, but have snapshot-like images of peeking through the bars of a crib in my hospital room as friendly grownups came through my door to make me laugh. At one point I was taken to a nursery where other kids my age were playing with toys. The memory I have is of a large room and the fun everyone around me was having. My memories are spotty yet joyous, but my mother was so profoundly affected by the illness that for at least 10 years, she would not let me flush a toilet without first checking for blood in my stools.
Shortly after I got better, my family went to a Mother Goose amusement park where a little playhouse built like an 18th century peasant’s boot was surrounded by a small white picket fence. Inside was unfurnished and dull, but the walls were papered with a staircase print going up to a second floor. As I started to leave this empty room, I heard, “Pssst Amanda!” I looked over to the open door where I entered, but the person calling my name was a little girl a few years older than me with two friends playing on the bottom of the stairs and laughing at the funny look on my face. They pushed each other up the printed wallpaper stairs, leaned over the colorful banister printed overhead waving enthusiastically saying “Hi Amanda.” Giggling playfully, they turned to run out the side of the wall. I may have been young, but I wasn’t stupid and this wasn’t normal. As I left the Shoe, my mother stood outside fence and pointed her Brownie camera to take the picture of me as I ran to her. As strange as this may have been, I am not the only person experiencing weird things around death.
My half-sister is 21 years older than I am. She married well and moved to a pretty 3 bedroom home 20 miles west of Chicago with her new husband and his two boys and little girl. Johnny was the oldest and the sweetest person I’ve ever met. He had Muscular Dystrophy so was confined to a wheelchair. Every year that passed, Johnny faded farther from us, his muscles slowly atrophying until one day, when I was 14, he died in my sister’s arms while she took him from his chair to put him to bed.
He loved science fiction and dreamt of someday being carried away by an alien ship. The family was sitting on their patio the night after the funeral. The air was warm, the night cloudless when a large silver sphere appeared hovering over their backyard pool. Neither my 40 year old sister nor her 60 year old husband, were particularly fanciful, but no matter what anyone else believes, for them their son said good-bye.
The way I understand Death, we pass from a temporary here to some “other” there. Tell me I have frontal lobe dementia, am delusional, it doesn’t matter. This is my story, I’m sticking to it and my imagination be damned
[i] Sullivan, L. E. (1989). Death, Afterlife, and the Soul (V 2 pp. x-xii) New York: Religion, History, and Culture.
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