"they will see us waving from such great heights, "come down now,"
they'll say but everything looks perfect from far away,
"come down now," but we'll stay..."
Unless you deal with death in your job or live in an urban area with street violence, or live with a loved one dying at home, death is not always familiar and present.
if you have some time, follow me...
I have a layman's experience of death. Family members, some friends, pets; I've seen death in several stages - sometimes as it enters and at the moment it closes the door on a soul. I've seen death hover in the room, quiet and present and waiting.
Years ago, I went under hypnosis to stop a nasty habit and in the final session, a very physical dark presence leaned over my right shoulder. I couldn't rise to consciousness enough to acknowledge it, and it pressed me heavily into the chair with a massless weight. As I was counted out of my mesmerized state by the hypnotist, the figure disappeared. I knew it was Death.
I saw my father in an open casket at his funeral when I was eleven. At fourteen, I stood next to death in the bedroom where my oldest sister lay dying after an unsuccessful cancer surgery. Death came to visit nine years later, but didn't stay over, as my mother became a successful lung cancer survivor after surgery.
I became the instrument of death the day I ran over my new dog. Unaware that day that my new dog had escaped from the backyard, I backed out of my driveway with one of my daughters in a car seat, intent on dashing to the store for more diapers. As I moved down the drive, I could hear my neighbors yelling across the street, not an uncommon sound, and I had no idea they were yelling at me.
I heard a thud and realized I had rolled over something. Thinking it was a toy, I pulled forward, shut off the car and set the parking brake. There, behind the left rear wheel of my Ford Taurus station wagon, was Winston - just three months old, a miniature pinscher/beagle mix. He was on the ground and he was twisted, his head canted at a horrible angle and the front of his little, robust body broken and bleeding.
I can't fully tell of the way my heart hurt, and still hurts as I write this. I picked him up and realized that he was still alive and in such pain and that there was no way that rushing to the emergency vet was going to make a difference. I've had some tough decisions in life over the years, but I still tag the decision I made at that moment as the most difficult - in some ways more difficult than a later in life decision involving death.
I wrapped my hand, the hand that put the car in reverse, the careful hand that strapped my child into the car seat, the nurturing hand that lovingly fed my children, and at that time in my life, the wifely hand that stroked my husband's face in love, I took that hand and placed it around Winston's neck and squeezed the breath from his body. It was mercy, to relieve his pain. Death again and I had called him over. It was almost twenty years ago and I can still feel my gut as it roils up to clench my heart.
Four years ago, I welcomed Death again. My mother was a fighter of immense strength and if she was terrified of anything, it was Death she feared the most. I don't know why; she met and lived with Death far more than I have. She buried two children, a grandchild, and a beloved husband well before time. She fought off death before, as I mentioned, one of the few good statistics of lung cancer patients in the early 80's, when the lung cancer mortality rate was around 95%. I, and my kids, arrived at the hospital in Oregon City where she was in CCU, driving from Seattle in a record time (for me) of two hours and ten minutes. Death rode in the backseat on the way south, but kindly ignored my reckless speeding.
My brother and I spent the afternoon, the night, and into the early morning of the next day together with my mother as she lay in a coma, induced by congestive heart failure and pulmonary edema. My deeply responsible and caring brother is an eye doctor and his way of dealing with his intense grief, the previous months and years of stress and frustration and fatigue of responsibility for a failing parent, was to periodically check her vitals and the state of her eyes. An eye doctor knows when the eyes have no functioning brain behind them.
If you are familiar with final stage congestive heart failure and pulmonary edema, you know that a patient dies from drowning and progressive organ failure. The heart muscle flops inside the chest with each sloppy, ponderous beat, now like weakening gelatin and not the strong muscle that once was there. The breathing is not breathing, but hard labor that draws the strength out of a body with each breath, until there is no structure to support the in and out of air. The rattle, the gurgle, the deathly white color of the skin that has no oxygen in the blood, the gaping and wounded mouth that is so dry and cracked as it tries to pull in air.
The sounds are the worst of all, so much worse when set against the hum of machines that are attached to the body of the one woman to whom such indignity and struggle should never have been rendered.
We requested the removal of the saline, morphine and the oxygen tubes. The blood pressure was 60/40, then 50/32, then 48/30 and then it stalled and Mother struggled on. No brain function, but the will to survive can be stronger than death's impatience, can't it? I saw my brother's torn heart and hollow eyes and thought, "do I look the same?" Everyone always calls me a younger, female version of my brother who is Clark Gable handsome. Which leaves me as a woman...well, I'm not certain where that leaves me. I took my hand (that hand) and held my mother's face and started whispering to her. Go ahead, mother. It's time to go. Daddy is waiting. Go ahead. Let go. You don't have to work this hard. We love you, Mom. It's time to go.
It's a phenomenon of Death that a white room will fade dimly to gray, even when the lights are still on. I sat with my mother for quite awhile. There is no other texture or feel like the cold of the skin on a body in which there is no beating heart.
Other family and other people over the years.
I've taken awhile to think through to my original point of departure. Haditha, Ishaqi, and numerous events in Fallujah - the pictures and images and reports bubble into my consciousness now, several times a day. Throughout the course of war on any continent and from any side, East or West, Axis or Allies, there have been documented occurrences of war crime behavior. In WWII, there was the oft-mentioned Malmedy massacre - a soldier to soldier atrocity. During the terrible Battle of Okinawa there were reports of civilians shot randomly by American troops. The intense and close combat between Japanese and American forces and the never-ending surge of civilian refugees attempting to escape the battle fields, the confined and relentless nature of the fighting and the inability to distinguish soldier from civilian, this is reminiscent in tone, if not geography to the Iraqi conflict today.
My Lai and the horrors investigated should not be mentioned without calling out the helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson who was able to spare at least a few lives from the psychotic gunfire.
Why does there seem to be such an element of shock that this happens? We put our young in a situation, proudly say that we have trained them correctly and then give them weapons of death. The simple fact is that we did not train them for this urban, village to village fighting, in a hot and sandy country where everything is alien to anything back home. We train them to kill an enemy.
Speculate with me. One of these Marines is a kid who had never seen death in any form except on television before he shipped off to Iraq. One of these Marines comes from a home where violence is rampant; father drinks and beats up mom, mom is a crack head, brother is a dealer. The Marines have given these men pride, discipline and camaraderie, a brotherhood with peers who will watch his back. But the Marines have really succeeded in focusing and muting a rage so effective during missions and always trained on the target. That rage works for them and they are good Marines. Today, they are stuck in a wasteland of a place. No clean socks, variable utilities, bad food, a necessary and constant vigilance for IEDs, a leader who's told them that "'the Iraqis were using inhabitants to kill marines, that 'soldiers were being disguised as civilians, and that ambulances were perpetrating terrorist attacks.'" A buddy died that morning. Time to rock and roll.
One of these kids is your son and my son.
Adrenaline, rage, fear, power. This breakdown isn't one of discipline or lack of moral training. This is an atrocity of lack of support and subsequent disenfranchisement of the men in the field. The fault goes to the top, where men, yes, men, have had the luxury of time with Death, as I have had. Their Death is known through numbers and "incidents".
Marines have no such luxury there. They aren't allowed the years where Death is an acquaintance and occasionally and necessarily tolerated. They bunk with a Death that is an end and a means. This Death is not the anecdotal death that I know. When I see my Marine son-in-law in two weeks, I want to talk with him and tell him I love him. I'm not certain what I will ask.
There is no other texture or feel like the cold of the skin on a body in which there is no beating heart.
Cry havoc! and let slip the dogs of war