Excerpt from the book, PAPER POPPIES by Marianna Vekhova
We think it is wrong to talk to children about death. We think it is necessary to protect their psyches. As if children haven't witnessed wars and crimes from ancient times! As if they've never been taken captive and made to be slaves. As if all they've ever done was to play, sing and be merry.
My seven-year-old daughter and I stand by my grandmother's coffin, reading the funeral prayer. The child looks at the face of the dead woman without fear and says with a sigh as we finish the prayer, "It's good we didn't let her be taken to a hospital. It's good that she died at home with her family close. Look, she's smiling!"
My daughter knows how much I feared that Granny would die in a hospital-- an alien and strange place-- alone and feeling forsaken by the ones she loved. Never in her life had she been in a hospital....
Death stood by my side even from my birth. Before my first birthday I'd undergone my first serious operation, trephination of the skull, because of neglected ear infections. Years of balancing between life and death followed. Something was dragging me into the darkness of non-existence. At the same time, something else was pushing me out of pain, oblivion and weakness into the colorful moving world full of joy.
There was no one to protect me from hard circumstances in my childhood. I could ponder death as much as I liked. I puzzled over its mystery.
At the age of five I first saw death close up. I was lying in a hospital in Sverdlovsk, Siberia. It was wartime. All hospitals and nursing homes were overcrowded, so the dying were no longer taken away to a separate ward as before, not even shielded with a folding screen from the others in the ward.
It sometimes happened that a dead woman would lie the whole night in her bed in the same ward with the living. Her body and head would simply be covered. Everyone would talk in a low hush. The ones who were allowed to get out of bed would walk noiselessly and would creep into the ward. Sometimes an especially brave one would come up to the dead, lift the sheet from her face and say, "Such a calm face, and peaceful. Must have been a good life she lived," meaning that she must have lived a praiseworthy and blameless life.
Others would turn away in fear. They were afraid of the spirit of the dead in that very room, complaining that now for sure she would haunt them at night. It was with great awe and wonder that I witnessed both fear and respect of death.
I wondered whether it was frightening to die. How would it be to see nothing at all, to hear nothing, to feel nothing? Why are a dead person's eyes often half open, as if they are peeping through their eyelashes? Why must one talk in whispers as if the dead can eavesdrop? Why are they treated differently from the living? The living are sworn at, shoved aside, and threatened. No one is afraid of hurting them but the dead are always approached with a look of utmost respect.
An old woman, speaking in a low voice, told me that the soul left the body like a butterfly leaves a matchbox. Flapping its wings, the soul soars up and lands on the Lord's palm if the person was good. The soul of a villain drops like a stone into hell, straight into the devil's black apron. With a horrible laughter, the devil stirs his hot fire with a poker, and there he will throw evil souls like pieces of black coal.
I imagined God sitting motionless on top of fluffy clouds, surrounded by blue, yellow, and patterned butterflies that danced over him as if he were an apple tree in blossom.
I didn't avoid thinking of death. Children don't have that cowardice of mind. They don't seek salvation in evasion. Instead, they feel on the verge of guessing a secret. Well-educated patients laughed at the old woman's imaginings of the immortal soul and said that to die meant simply to be no more. To them, that said it all. But I failed to imagine what it was like "to be no more," and listened with trepidation to the uneducated, old women's and nurses' talk of ghosts, dead people, and adventures at cemeteries.
I listened to these conversations all through the endless winter evenings in a hospital in a Siberian city in the middle of the war. Even now they remain engraved on my memory.
I would lie quietly like a mouse, trying not to breathe loudly, not to squeak the bed, fearing they would remember my presence and stop talking half-audibly in the darkness. Because electricity was rationed, the lamps in the hospital burned but dimly or the lights went out completely. Once in a while someone would light a candle on a bedside table, and then the knitters and embroiderers would move close to the little flame. Their shadows would quietly move against the walls and ceiling; peaceful, kind, not at all frightening. Someone's face would emerge out of the darkness and vanish again. The candle would be flickering about with its sharp tongue and a gray tail of smoke. Behind the group of stooped figures, the windows shone with a thick coat of frost. The moon lit the frost, making luminescent blue and green spangles.
When the lights went out at night and the windows were uncovered, we could watch the moonlit night through those dark rectangles and wonder if ghosts in their long white shrouds were really freezing in the snow and wind while we were talking of them. Or perhaps they only tramped the Earth in old times, and now there's no such thing. I desperately tried to keep awake to catch a glimpse of a ghost peeping into our window. As much as I watched, I never caught one. I resisted slumber as long as I could. But I always fell asleep without having heard the end of the latest horror story.
In the daytime though, during the rest hour-- called the "dead hour"-- I could ponder whether I would become a ghost after my death, or a butterfly, or a black stone. The idea of frightening people at night didn't appeal to me, nor did I want to drop into the oil-cloth apron of the devil, who had horns, a beard like a horse's tail, and a scorching fire. I wanted to swing up into the sky, racing with the wisps of smoke and clouds.
© 2005, CLADACH Publishing