A large part of life is having mentors, teachers, elders–all those who go before us and lead the way, looking back over their shoulders to either make sure we’re following, or simply going on within our sight, so that we can observe and absorb them, their lives, and thus learn for ourselves what’s to come. Ellen and I have had several of these figures, all of whom have redirected our lives, either intentionally or unintentionally: John Hubbell; Lawrence Durrell; James Hillman; Patricia Berry; Ellen’s father, Sidney Kaplan; my father, G.P. “Max” Maxfield; Phil Finklepearl; Andy Von Hendy–the list is long and what we’ve learned is longer. Now that we are older, many of our elders have died, and we’ve experienced the phenomenon we all do with aging: at some point we realize that there is no one ahead of us; we now are the elders we so long relied upon for guidance. Now it’s our turn to tell what we have learned and report back from that far country called Age.
Alan Raywid was one of our grand mentors, and we were lucky enough to be present at his death–at 61, an age that at the time (we were twenty years younger) seemed like a full life but now seems rather young. I say lucky because I wish this for all of you, that you get to experience the miracle of death–as miraculous and stunning as birth.
Hello, hello, hello, hello
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye;
That’s all there is, and the leaves that are green
Turn to brown.
–“Leaves that are Green,” Simon & Garfunkel
Ellen wrote the following first-person account of witnessing Alan’s death, and it’s such a, well, stunning piece of writing that I wanted to share it with you.
–T
(Note from ekm: I just wrote this for a class I’ve been taking on Ecopsychology; hence the reference at the very end. I apologize for the excessive length of this piece, but the experience I’ve written about was itself overlarge.)
In 1991 a close and dear friend of my husband Tom and me, Alan Raywid, died of AIDS. Alan, over twenty years older than us at the time, was a mentor larger than life, as a senior partner in a prominent Washington, DC law firm and debonair gentleman-about-town. A grand—without being flamboyant—personality strong on law and justice and projecting an introverted form of passion and drama, he was tall in character as well as in stature, with lively black bushy eyebrows set over clear green eyes that sparked, as if striking flint, when he was exercised, which was frequent. At first he lived above us in an old, crumbling townhouse of four floors, he in its “penthouse” whose muted “early Havana” furnishings provided the backdrop for his eccentricities. Finally he moved to a great house on Embassy Row known as Salamander House with a front door as if for a castle complete with wrought iron salamander handle. Inside he gave splendid dinner parties for his motley collection of friends, each person assigned a task in preparing dinner in an atmosphere of happily chaotic hubbub.
Alan was, unfortunately, part of the early wave of AIDS deaths, before medication was developed to dramatically prolong patients’ lives. So he was in and out of the hospital the last six months of his life, whose only grace note was that he always stayed in the VIP wing that served to soften the series of death blows. When the time came that would mark his last hospital stay, Tom and I flew down from Boston late one night, arriving in his enormous hospital room where he lay more or less unconscious with a breathing mask in a large bed surrounded by his closest friends, about seven of us altogether—or was it ten? We took our places at a long table on the far side of the double room from the hospital bed, the former set with a white table cloth, fine china, and weighted silver, the atmosphere subdued by dimmed lighting befitting the last supper of a dying man. Hospital staff doubling as waiters wheeled in carts of sustenance for gourmands as well as one or two laden with a large variety of bottles of alcohol, providing us wine and mixed drinks according to our preferences. Hours later as the long night wore on, after weaving pockets of conversational cameraderie and having imbibed our fill, our little group turned toward Alan and toasted our dying host with raw hearts: To Alan! we intoned in tender timbre, a hush starting to tiptoe about the room.
And sure as day the dawn like in a series of time-lapse photographs began to creep out of the crevices and lighten the load. Was it now too late to die? My face, without my looking in a mirror, was no doubt ashen by then. Alan overnight had turned from his lifetime avocation of host most bountiful to that of psychopomp guiding us through an unfamiliar underworld. “Can we take our shoes off here?” he was heard to mumble. Yes, indeed, the underworld was not no-thing but was a place that he was becoming familiar with, where shoes were perhaps too tight for a soul loosening altogether. And no, it wasn’t too late to die; the vigil in fact wore on.
Knowing that the dying wait till the room is cleared before slipping off the bonds of life, I postponed leaving to take a break even as others had begun to wander in and out. Tom and I moved over to the deathbed, he holding one of Alan’s feet as I held the other: Alan’s sister held one of his hands while his partner held the other. But then as if wafted by a little wind, I found myself momentarily outside the room, taking that break after all, or was it breaking that take of Alan on his deathbed, sans motion, sans emotion, sans the commotion upending his friends’ souls—? Though I stood just outside the door, my attention was bound still to the deathbed. How many heartbeats passed before I was back at the final scene? . . . as Tom telegraphed that Alan had just died, having just watched as the blood in his face rose purple as a band inexorably moving upward and beyond, leaving the grey death mask below taking over the face . . . as I looked at Alan and felt a tremendous swoosh as the bottom fell out and the sound that supersonic jets used to make as if reality had just downshifted riveted my attention to a stupefying force-field sucking up all the air and moving to the nearby bank of windows that in a rush swooshed like the updraft of a rocket taking off, further swooshed out the window as I looked out at the clouds as a volcanic wind dissipated like an unwinding tornado with an awesome counterforce. As my eyes had followed this trajectory out the window, I heard my voice calling out Good Luck to the super-abstracting spirit as it left the body, the sound waves dying down at the finish as if their tail were sweeping away the air. Simultaneously as if he too was watching the soul leave the body but, as he explained in retrospect, anticipating Alan in departing looking down at the final scene from high up near the ceiling, Tom fixed his attention on the upper regions as he waved to our departing friend’s soul high up in the air near the bank of windows.
Alan’s death was the first death I had witnessed, his face post-death the first dead face I had ever encountered. The difference between the living face—whether sickl’d over with the pale cast of thought or purpled as if engorged with the distillate of a lifetime’s emotion—and the rigor mortis of remains whose stony features are so shockingly distorted after the soul has left the body, although far more unnerving than grappling with the difference between night and day, once seen can no longer remain unseen in the face of the living. Alan’s death, shattering as it left me, served to prepare the way for the wrenching death, also witnessed, of my father two years later, which in turn took a full-scale ten years to absorb and integrate. The first death cracked my worldview, like cracking the egghead that was my brain. The second death broke down the egghead altogether, such that living on has entailed a radical reworlding leaving me, to put it mildly, richly receptive to this class.