Midwifing Into Death

by Alison Hammer Winans

To me, these words of the Sufi mystic, Rumi, ring true: “Our death is our wedding with eternity. What is the secret? God is One.” Rumi makes death sound ecstatic, and yes, I know that Oneness is our home. But how do I reconcile the aliveness of the spirit with the decrepitude of the body? How do I make sense of the fact that one day someone I love is here, and then they are not? How do I put into ordered sequences of letters and spaces the totality that was my friend, her life, her love and spirit?

I’ll begin with the day when Ayesha came for her Jin Shin Jyutsu session looking radiant, and I wanted to capture that image of her, like an earth spirit dressed all in brown with red hair peeping out pixie-like from under her brown and gold crocheted hat, one of her own exotic creations, because I wondered how much longer I would see her looking so alive. To her I simply said, “You look lovely tonight. I’m going to take a photo of you.” My computer noted that this photo of Ayesha sitting on my bed was taken on October 1, 2006. My memory noted that those were the good days, when she felt well enough one week to give me a massage in exchange for her session, and when each session gave her more energy to carry on living—selling her hats, teaching Dances of Universal Peace, doing massage, singing in the choir and all the other ways she spread her love.

We didn’t see each other in December. I was busy, and as for Ayesha, I found out later that she had been at home, not feeling well and not asking for help, because to do so would mean admitting that she couldn’t take care of herself, that she was losing control, that her life as she knew it was ending.

Then there was the day in January, I think, when I sat on Ayesha’s right side with one hand under her back, the other holding her knee as she lay on the massage table in the middle of my bedroom, and her cell phone rang with a call from her oncologist. As she listened, spoke and cried, I too listened with my ears and also with my hands, continuing the Jin Shin Jyutsu session, gently seeking out the places in her body where she was holding on tight, placing my hands there as if to ground her fears and anguish into the earth. Tears ran out the corners of her eyes and down into her ears as she cried, “The chemo’s stopped working. He’s going to try taxotere but it makes my hands and feet numb. If that doesn’t work, there’s only two more chemo drugs left to try.” She mopped up her tears with a tissue. “But one’s new, and my insurance doesn’t cover it. I’m allergic to the other one. I’ll be at the end of the road.”

I had to offer hope as well as Kleenex. “Or the taxotere will work as well as the last chemo did, and when it stops, there will be a new drug.”

“Yes, that’s a positive way to see it.” But then a deep sob escaped, like a bubble surfacing from a boiling mud pool, and she wailed, “There’ll be more times when I feel less like myself and then,” grasping her breath, “Then there won’t even be a ‘me’ and I’ll be gone.” My eyes were moist as I hugged her until she became calm. She dropped the subject. I continued the session, praying that balance and harmony would come through my body and into hers.

Ayesha, being a Sufi herself, saw death as union with the Beloved, with God. My yogic beliefs were similar—death was liberation from the body into the Supreme Consciousness. And both of us had used our spiritual practices with intent to experience the ecstasy of that union while we still lived. But how were we to reconcile our mystical beliefs with our naturally strong desires to live in our bodies? When I was diagnosed with breast cancer four years previously, I knew how it had been when the pure animal instinct of preservation emerged, and I wanted to do everything I could to hang onto my body.

* * * * * *

It was over two years ago when Ayesha and I first met at the Spiritual Songs Symposium, but even before that I knew of her, heard of her medical condition and financial difficulties. That night she led a group of Sufis, Jews, yogis, Christians and new age mystics in an Aramaic version of The Lord’s Prayer, singing and playing one of her drums. Seeing her bohemian look, dressed in flowing scarves and clothes with exotic prints and embroidery, I felt we would become friends. During the break, I sank into the sofa next to her, introducing myself, “I went through breast cancer by using chemo and surgery as well as natural medicine, so I thought we might have a lot in common.”

Quickly overcoming her shock at a stranger knowing her affairs, she warmed to me and confided, “Many of my friends think I shouldn’t be doing chemo. They think I’m avoiding the underlying issues that caused the cancer. They keep telling me about techniques and products that would heal instead of poisoning me, but…you know how it is, don’t you?”

I knew how difficult ovarian cancer was to treat successfully and that the chemo was almost certainly adding months to her life. “They don’t understand, because they haven’t been there looking at their own mortality, but I have, and I’m sure that you are making the choices that are right for you.” I flashed on my own diagnosis, when I was afraid that I would die soon, and remembering that, I built the foundation of our relationship on support and acceptance.

* * * * * *

As February moved into March, I saw Ayesha struggling, and I said, “Let’s schedule a session each week, and don’t worry any more about paying me back. You need a regular boost of energy.” The latest chemo had stopped working, and her belly was bloated like a seven-month pregnancy. When I ate my meals at home, I visualized Ayesha receiving the nourishment. But, she got weaker as daily nausea, vomiting and inability to eat created a downward spiral. Still, we both had genuine hope that she would recover from this setback.

On April 2nd she went into the hospital with a bowel obstruction. Although I knew her situation was critical, I still expected her to return to some form of life as she knew it. I said, “I’ll come and see you every day. You need help to get through this crisis.” But she never got back on her feet. Over the next two and a half months as she went from hospital to nursing home to hospice, I saw her almost every day and held the hand of this world traveler on her final journey while she lay surrounded with flowers, well-wishing cards and bright watercolor pictures painted by visiting friends.

How ironic that our friendship should develop as she was dying. One day I came in early as she was still sleeping and gently laid my hand on hers. A few minutes passed before she said, “That feels like a friend.” Unlike the often intrusive, depersonalizing touch of harried medical staff, the healing energy of my touch reached through her body tissues into her spirit and gave her back to herself. As I held her fingers and toes, Ayesha exhaled, flashing me one of her smiles like the morning sun rising in a clear sky, “I love this flow. I can feel all the fragmented parts coming back and all my energy lining up around my center.”

Seeing her every day, I became familiar with the realities of a dying body—sudden dry retching that brought no relief from nausea, pain that made her claw at the pillows, legs that were bloated like whales and then became bones with saggy skin, tubes that hung from orifices—but amidst all this, a downy fuzz started to grow from her bald scalp. During the forty-five days that she had a tube from her nose to her stomach, Ayesha had to suppress her tears because crying made her throat hurt. Day after day, I saw her suffering so much from the insults of a body falling into chaos, and I asked, “How did you get through it?”

“My commitment was to be present to each moment. That’s what I did, and I prayed.” She had told me that Sufis use a string of beads, like a rosary but with ninety-nine beads and a different prayer for each bead, so I knew that was what she was doing. I was in awe. Would I have the spiritual courage to be able to do that? That was before increasing amounts of morphine and the process of dying itself took her in and out of different worlds, away from being present with her body.

One verdant day in May as I visited her in the nursing home, Ayesha’s beauty struck me like a blazing star. She had given up hiding her baldness with a wig or hat. Her head was broad, smooth and very pale, and over the last six weeks I’d become used to seeing her bald. I said to her, “You look so elegant, almost like a monk with your brown shirt and prayer beads.” She scrunched up her face.

“I don’t like it. I always loved hair, especially my hair. I used to braid a long piece down here and twirl it with my fingers,” indicating her left shoulder and down her chest. “It comforted me.” Pointing to the back of her neck she said, “Sometimes I still touch myself here for reassurance. I’m glad I still have my eyebrows and eyelashes.” I remembered how she had concealed her illness from her students and clients until everything fell apart. But she hid nothing from me. We held hands, and as I looked into her large grey eyes flecked with green, we cried together.

I realized that I, along with all her other friends, was midwifing Ayesha into death, helping her to let go of her body, but this was no one-sided act of charity on my part. Twice, our talks turned into spontaneous sessions in which she counseled me on expanding my practice and improving the relationship with my husband, offering advice and prayers. Being with her was like being in a holy shrine where the beauty of the soul trumped the outer appearances, and the constant flow of friends and family was love in action. To the end, Ayesha performed her interfaith ministry bringing people together with music and healing and art. I benefited by being in the flow of so much love.

I remember the day; it was May 19th when, after using Jin Shin Jyutsu to relieve her daily headache, I sat next to her bed. I had an intuition that the doctor would not give any more chemo. Her eyes filling, she looked at me and said, “The doctors are giving up on me. They say I only have six weeks to three months.” We both cried. We held hands, reaching over the bars at the side of the bed.

Then there was the day when Ayesha floated in and out of dreams, and I sat with another friend beside her. Suddenly she opened her eyes and exclaimed, “Shemaya, shemaya, the light of the universe!” She waved her arms as if blessing us with the joy that radiated from her wasted body.

A week later, on June 18th, she left her body.

THE BAKST DRAWING

by Anne Kaier

“That’s fabulous,” murmured Alexandra, uncoiling her thin legs from the cast iron chair in my city garden. “Oh that’s wonderful. That’s just wonderful.” Oddly enough, she meant it. A good literary journal had just called to accept my new cycle of poems. Alex somehow escaped the schadenfreude that afflicts so many writers, including me. She stumbled a little around the terracotta pots, came over to my side of the table, and hugged me. Perhaps it was because she started out as my teacher, that she could look on another’s poet’s success with nothing but pride. Anyway, I knew I’d be grateful later that evening when I drank some wine and thought back on her praise.

It was mid-July. Marigolds filled the pots. Honeysuckle climbed the crumbling stucco walls. Back in her chair, Alex changed topics as quickly as a thunder shower changes the weather. “My niece, the one I don’t talk to, left a note under my door yesterday.”

“Oh?” Here we go again, I thought. Here’s Alex sick as the devil and she doesn’t talk with half her family.

“Yeah. Something about her boyfriend’s in Philly, so she came by.”

“That’s nice.”

“Oh it’s a ploy.” She leaned over to offer the cat some tofu.

“A ploy?”

“Yeah, to get back in touch with me.”

Great, I thought. Here you are sick with cancer and leaning on your friends, and why in hell wouldn’t you want to see your niece? I looked up and rested my eye on the neighbor’s mauve crepe myrtle which swayed over everything.

“So what happened with your family?” I asked. It was a risk. Alex didn’t like to be asked directly about her New York relatives - her father, Anatol, an artist who came to New York from France in about 1920, or her beloved mother, Blanche, the concert pianist. But I was willing to force her to talk, if necessary. Maybe my notions of family were different. You didn’t always agree with them obviously. But if you were dying, you tried to take the hand that was offered.

She cut into her tofu chicken with long, pointed fingers. “When Mother died, my sister – that’s Nancy - accused me of taking some of Mother’s things. Of course it was lies. All lies.”

“Your sister Nancy’s the one you don’t talk to?"

“Yeah. She’s this kid’s mother. The kid who left me the note.”

“So the kid wants to see you?” I scratched the back of my neck.

“Yeah. When she comes back to Philly to see her so-called boyfriend.”

“What’s her name?”

“Antonia. She’s supposed to be Tony Kushner’s assistant.”

I decided on a slightly oblique approach. “If I had a niece and I was sick, I’d want to see her. Especially if that niece worked for one of the best playwrights around.”

“Wouldn’t it make a great story? The note under the door step?”

I gave up. And yet, if Alex could think of writing a story about her niece instead of calling her, maybe she’d at least start thinking about her. Strange are the ways of writer’s minds. One thing might lead to another. The story might reveal a different niece to her, or a different sister, one whom she could call, one, I selfishly thought, who might come down from New York and help look after Alex when she got bedridden.

I doubted that she could get a new story actually written. Breast cancer was eating her chest. All fall she got weaker. By December she was in bed in the old wooden house that she shared with her partner, Liz, in working class Roxborough. When Liz was at work, Alex’s friends took turns cooking for her or sitting with her. I was one of the sitters because, somehow, I could. I could sit in the room with the dying woman, who by now barely spoke. Even when she was dying, I was glad to be with her. She was the first poet I really knew, the first to encourage me. She was heart and soul an artist. I’d do anything just to be around her. I just sat there in the wicker chair, next to the window overlooking Manayunk Avenue where busses racketed by. On the dresser sat a picture of Alex as a young woman in a Mexican blouse leaning over a child of about 10, her niece, Antonia. The picture stood in a 12 x14” silver frame next to an ivy plant.

I was fascinated by what I had heard about Alex’s artistic relatives. They seemed so different from my family full of lawyers and golfers, people who talked about the US Open and Republican politics, people who never read poetry and didn’t understand it when they tried. They inhabited my poems but after years of writing, I would never show my work to them. Alexandra’s family was different. Her mother was a poet, her brother a famous film producer, her sister a painter. To me this was a background of great riches, a place where an artist fit in, where children were expected to be creative. She hinted darkly that there was abuse in her family, but nevertheless she told me how excited she’d been when her first poem was published in a literary journal, how she’d brought the magazine to her father in triumph. She kept a framed copy of one of her earliest poems on the tangerine wall in her dining room in Roxborough. It had never occurred to me to hang my poems on the wall. “Yes, yes,” she said one day, “you should hang up the covers of all your books on your wall.” The smile on her face matched the gold in her spiky yellow hair.

Sooner or later, she did call her niece. Something moved her to. Maybe it was Liz. Maybe she knew how to influence Alex. They had been together for more than 20 years, years in which Alex had not been entirely faithful, but they stuck it out. A chiropractor who had trained as a nurse, Liz was direct, practical and a strange mate for Alexandra, or so I thought. Oh well, you never know what really goes on between two people. Maybe Liz got her to call Antonia. Somehow, Alex reconciled with her niece and her sister Nancy and they came down from New York for the funeral.

People deal with grief in different ways. After Alex’s death, Liz cleaned like a woman possessed. Then she started to throw things out. One night she called me gleefully to say she’d begun in the basement and carted out boxes of Alex’s stuff. I started to get worried. I knew that Alex had left her books, her papers, and possibly drafts of poems and stories up in her workroom at the top of their house. Alex had said that I could take my pick of her books after she died, so I called Liz back and arranged to go over.

A tiny, winding staircase led from Alex’s bedroom up to the stifling third floor study. This was the first time I’d been in to Alex’s secret writing place. Floor to ceiling steel bookshelves crowded even the middle of the small room. An old table by a small window held her computer, covered with yellow stickies. Layers of drafts and papers covered the table and lay abandoned on the floor. In one corner, a box overflowed with Alex’s journals. One dusty plant trailed over the edge of a bookcase. It must have been the remnant of one of Alex’s fung-shui experiments. I started to pull down handfuls of books and pack them into boxes from the liquor store. I jammed copies of Anais Nin, Adrienne Rich and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood next to Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal. I took a copy of The Partisan Review for Summer, 1967. Officially, I was only entitled to books, but I also took papers and some tapes Alex had made during the women’s radio show she hosted in the 70’s. I wanted to save her interviews with Rich and other feminists. I thought it all surely belonged in a women’s history archive somewhere.

Where it didn’t belong was the trash. Liz had already thrown out most of Alex’s diaries, probably because she was angry at the nasty things Alex had written about her. As the afternoon wore on, I clambered down the steep stairs carrying boxes. My back was killing me as I loaded them into my little Ford Escort. Passing through Alex’s bedroom, I noticed that the photo of her in the Mexican blouse leaning over the impudent child had gone. Meanwhile, Liz and a sturdy friend emerged from the basement with arms full of canvasses on their way to the dump. I couldn’t worry about the canvasses; they were probably Alex’s student work from the 50’s. I had to save what I could of her writing. Upstairs in the workroom, I just began to push anything that looked important into my boxes. By about five o’clock on this humid spring afternoon, I came across an Oxford file of old papers including musical programs from Paris at the turn of the 20th century. These must have been Alex’s father’s things, I thought. In the thin light by the gabled window, I sifted through the file, turning over charcoal sketches and letters. At the bottom, I uncovered a splendid drawing cut out of a Paris fashion magazine in about 1912. It was a design for a woman’s ballet costume, drawn by the great Russian designer Leon Bakst who designed costumes for his fellow countryman Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, the most influential dance company of the early 20th century. The dancer would have been swathed in Art Nouveau swirls in bold patterns, colored indigo and blood red. It was beautiful, exotic, real. Alex’s father had brought it with his own hand, surely, from Paris. It would have been something that reminded him of Europe during all the days he labored over his commercial engravings in a dusty office in New York.

I wanted to frame the Bakst drawing and hang it on my wall. Its elegance, its finely drawn lines, the spidery red, the sheer exoticism of the thing entranced me. When I got everything home and had stored the boxes in my cellar, I took the drawing out at night and stared at it, propping it up on my crossed legs. I envisioned how it would look with a matte and a blue frame. But I was a good girl and knew my duty. These were Alex’s father’s things and as such belonged to her sister, Nancy.

Nancy came down from New York with Antonia on a bleak winter afternoon. We had arranged to have lunch in my place and then to go to the Barnes Museum, one of the few artistic treasure houses in Philadelphia. Nancy, a painter herself, had never been there. I was eager to show her the Matisses, the African sculptures, the Cezannes. Although I had met her at the funeral, I’d never really studied at Nancy’s face. When she came in to my yellow living room with Antonia, I saw how Nancy’s jaw was the same as her sister’s, the lines were etched around her mouth in the same way. I hugged her and shook hands with Antonia and invited them to sit on my well-worn green sofa. Antonia, now a young woman in her twenties, sat upright against the orange pillow from Uzbekistan and told me casually that she had been the child in the photo in Alex’s room. She said she’s taken the picture of her aunt in the Mexican blouse home with her to New York. Needless to say, I didn’t ask Nancy about Alex’s quarrel with her family or who did or didn’t take her mother’s things so long ago. But before she sat too long, I went down to the cellar and brought up the file of her father’s papers. I knew what she had really come for.

“Here they are. These must be your father’s.”

She took them eagerly and sifted through his letters and sketches and the musical programs from Paris, showing each to Antonia, who pushed her shiny brown hair behind her ear, entranced. Finally, we came to the costume design.

“Look at this,” I said. “It’s so lovely. It must be by Leon Bakst, don’t you think?”

“Dad must have got it in Paris, when Nijinsky was dancing. Long before he knew my mother,” Nancy murmured, half to herself.

I kept imagining the young, handsome Russian artist Anatol Grilikhes, sauntering down the boulevards of Paris in the age of Proust. Perhaps he cheered at the opening night of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring when the ballet’s intensely rhythmic score and erotic dance steps caused a riot in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Later that summer maybe he ducked out of the rain into a café like the Deux-Magots or the Brasserie Lipp across the street. It would have been one on the Left Bank, surely, for he was an artist and would normally have moved among artists. Perhaps he drank a beer or a small absinthe as he read his magazine. When did he decide to cut out the Bakst drawing, to keep it and bring it with him across the Atlantic? How did it survive in that sheath of papers? One never knows these things. I can’t say I was glad that Nancy had it. I didn’t want to give it up, but when she left with it that afternoon, I shook her strong, bony hand and it was Alex’s hand in mine once again.