Letting Sanji die
Fox, Richard Wightman & Beverly, Elizabeth
LETTING SANJI DIE HOW CULTURES UNDERSTAND DEATH & LOSS ELIZABETH BEVERLY & RICHARD WIGHTMAN FOX Historians and anthropologists have had a lot to say to one another lately. Historians have learned...
...It was not just because all my relatives were on the East Coast...
...But exposed bone is a path into the body, and with that fall, a new kind of death entered our lives...
...That may be what has most intrigued me about death since the beginning...
...Even when I was there, at age seven, and my grandfather Fox died 200 miles away, I wasn't invited to the funeral...
...It is precisely because we are such thorough-going individualists that we periodically devour books like Robert Bel-lah' s Habits of the Heart‚ books that chastise us for forgetting about community...
...At night she lay on her father's body or mine, while thick mucous rasped her throat...
...To die in childhood was not to have lived...
...No one died in my house, my friends' houses, or in Ozzie and Harriett's house...
...It is wrong to erect heroic sacrifice as the norm of excellence in the art of dying, just as it is wrong to insist too strongly on the mature oak as the norm of fullness in human life...
...It is not a question of whose life is more valuable: a child's or an elder's...
...My grandmother was dying, and my mother was helping her...
...But I assumed most people would die slowly in sickness, not valiantly in self-sacrifice...
...They would suffer if I died, and I could not contemplate their suffering...
...When people got killed on "Dragnet," Sgt...
...I wanted us to mourn, when the time came, not simply my mother, but a woman born in 1906 who knows things that will go with her, things we may not remember without her...
...Although no longer capable of communication, the body is not "senseless...
...But my childhood family is scattered for the same reason that it's so hard for me to contemplate the death of a child: to be human is to grow up and go your own way...
...If the point of life were to mature to the standpoint from which one could freely choose good or evil, then it made no sense for someone to die before the age of decision...
...I thought my friend didn't understand how much I love my mother...
...A dying of social memory...
...An old lady's death is the passing of something no longer necessarily useful...
...I'd been hearing it for weeks...
...We can think of few things more horrible than a conscious mind trapped inside a dead body...
...I loved him and needed him and I don't understand," he confesses...
...Martin of Tours parish in West L.A., where Pat O'Brien, Dennis Day, and Richard Egan took up the collections, were always preaching about martyrs brutally murdered for the faith...
...God wanted them back, it was thought...
...Even after I had started to secularize the scheme in my twenties, it still made no sense...
...The simple act of living was hard...
...work of dying will always be the work of the living...
...Both have grasped that inquiry is not a quest to expose some reality "out there" in the bush or in the historical record, but a process by which reality is both probed and formed...
...Fulfillment comes as much from the fruition of communal bonds as it does from individual achievement...
...Liberal middle-class culture insists that adulthood means becoming a unique individual, staking out a claim beyond the confines of one's past...
...When I had kids of my own, I never thought of making out a will...
...The same courtesy of patient silence is due the dying who, even in company, labor alone...
...And an elder has been on this path for a longer time than anyone...
...Latent life is not what we consider death...
...It was natural for me to feel that way since I had never known a child to die...
...Wasn't I terrified about Kai...
...For most of us in America the death of a child represents a loss of potential, and such a loss horrifies us...
...At least some of the mystery concerns the almost-conscious state of the newly dead...
...But recently I remembered the book and found it in the local library...
...Shouldn't we as a people mourn the loss of old women, so easy in the company of mysteries we fear...
...But I knew even then that Sanji's father felt different about death...
...It is not just a time of struggle against death...
...It wrecked the whole scheme...
...Life may be finished (abanta), but the dead one keeps on dying...
...The rich brown, carved wooden crucifix hung on the wall behind the altar, and if you went to confession at the right time on Saturday afternoon, sunlight would stream through the red stained glass window and splash blood all over Jesus' protruding ribs...
...He joked with his doctor, asked his nurse to help him up, then lay back on his pillow and died...
...Death at any instant is the death of a self, a full human personality...
...so do many Americans, such as Jeff Irish and Elizabeth's mother...
...I didn't think she would, I said...
...Not simply because the disease produced intense suffering, but also because with "proper medical care," no little boy should have to die of gangrene...
...Thirteen-year-old Lee contracted acute meningitis and died in less than a day...
...They" just can't feel what we feel...
...At night I held Kai and felt her body struggle to breathe...
...My husband and I knew that then, and had no intention of letting Sanji die...
...When they were younger I didn't want to think about it at all...
...Instead of trying to figure death out he writes of Lee's full life...
...we felt confident and relieved...
...Why wasn't anybody doing anything...
...We enumerate our individualist sins, even if after saying our penance we go back to our inherited middle-class vision: community is something to transcend, not just fit into...
...This insight can lead us toward a new understanding of death‚ even the death of children...
...Kai worked hard those days and nights...
...Not that "they" don't love them, she told me...
...Unable to speak, the newly dead have no way to reassure the living that all is well...
...It is almost as if an individual is a container, a fine clay jug, which starts off nearly empty, fills to a peak, then cracks or erodes from within and slowly begins to leak, until, at the end, all that remains is an empty shell of a former self, a reminder of fullness, not fullness itself...
...The priests at St...
...Ivan could not accept a world in which children were made to suffer and die simply because adults used their God-given freedom and chose to abuse them...
...It is a time for affirming the communal bonds that make even dying an act of living...
...In this way Sanji's father and my mother are no different from each other...
...As she got out of her car, the woman looked surprised, then pleased...
...Friends and relatives have called on her for years...
...They both were using this "dying time'' the best way they could...
...Of course we need to struggle to save life whenever we can...
...No wonder dying is so infrequently a communal or familial experience in middle-class America, no wonder it is so often no longer a part of living...
...If they get sick, we feel responsible for finding the right doctor, the right treatment...
...A child is already a full person...
...I was furious that any child should die, for any reason...
...Our English word for death derives from the Indo-European root dheu, which is also a verb: to become senseless...
...Too far...
...The sisters told us to be ready to die anytime, and to be sure that we were in a state of grace when the moment came...
...About dying...
...But she's old, my friend said...
...The words themselves were oily and rich, just like the exotic oils I imagined being rubbed into the pale wrinkled flesh of a dying person...
...The passing of elders...
...It never seemed a normal part of life...
...Off they went across the river in search of competent care...
...In this way the fact of death seems to concern the act of dying...
...There I found Sanji conscious, lying in the soft dusty grove by the river, a bone protruding so neatly from his wrist that, at first sight, the bone appeared to be a polished wooden peg, an ingenious device to staunch a bleeding wound...
...Death is not something you meet, dying is something you do...
...It is simply beyond our touch...
...Together they recited a favorite German poem, and he wept at the knowledge he would never say it again...
...My mother had suffered a recurrence of cancer...
...Death didn't strike...
...He'd come to tell us that things were fine...
...I don't think my failure to compose a will when they really needed one was a product of my own fear of death...
...Waving happily to my mother, and smiling breathlessly, she said, "Katherine, how wonderful to see you...
...It is reseen, revised...
...During our years with the Mandinko, I saw many more deaths...
...Since it is the essence of middle-class adulthood to believe that one is in firm control, we carry the great weight of responsibility for our children's very lives...
...My friend's reaction was not particularly startling...
...My wife and I only recently decided to write one-now that they're seventeen and sixteen, are almost ready to leave home, and really don't need us to indicate whom they would live with if we died...
...He was the second of the Irishes' sons to die: in 1969 five-year-old Mark had died of a heart condition...
...we set in motion an effort requiring two A.I.D...
...Crowing up a Catholic boy in middle-class California in the 1950s, I was strangely divided on the subject of death...
...Some of my mother's knowledge concerns dying: how to love the dying as you let them die...
...Historians have learned that deep cultural realities defy decade-by-decade chronology...
...Harry Emerson Fosdick recalled in his memoirs that as a boy in late-nineteenth-century New York he watched day after day as an uncle, propped up in bed and surrounded by relatives, passed away...
...Death slides into conversation as a verb: someone is dying, someone had died...
...There is much a child has not understood, much a child has never done, but we're all, whatever our age, on that same continuum...
...But everyone is not called to die in heroic opposition to an oppressive authority...
...Elizabeth encountered a lot more death than Richard did, but she too turned away from it-by scurrying to save life...
...At twelve, looking back on his brother, Jeff had begun a new vocation of suffering...
...If the acorn did not become an oak it had not fulfilled its destiny...
...Crossed over...
...Today is dying day," he said to his wife Hannah...
...Alarmed by Kai's illness, she had little to say about my mother's...
...I thought of her discomfort and dignity, of her brothers and sister, her loneliness and patience...
...Implicit in this root, and in our changing medical definition of death, is the idea of "consciousness...
...And what they know, we need to know...
...an elder knows ways of being that all of us should remember...
...my daughter was not yet three...
...The Mandinko understand that dying time is part of life time...
...She waits with them: she knows how it's done...
...But he never mourned...
...Vie wanted me to cradle his head in my lap...
...We coordinated a medical evacuation to the regional capital...
...I scarcely slept for six weeks...
...Of course, the longer one lives the more familiar one grows with the Mandinka way...
...Why, I thought you'd already crossed over...
...Because of that awareness, one must not grieve too loudly in the presence of a corpse...
...Paul Tillich, who relished all forms of human experience, grasped this about his own death...
...There was another reason to view the death of children as incompatible with the idea of a good God...
...In Mandinkakangho I can find no word for death, no big sturdy noun to embody both an instant and a permanent condition...
...We each thought a good deal about death, but neither of us knew how to see the life in death, how to live with the dying...
...the meaning packed into such a word defies time...
...I was told a lot about death in church, but shielded from it in fact...
...We would be losing an elder...
...Two summers ago both my daughter and my mother were very sick...
...Father O'Reilly added a deeper dimension when I was older: the point was not just to avoid sin, but to know what was worth dying for...
...When the book came out I couldn't pick it up...
...For us, living time is a process of becoming...
...A friend called from another state, just to "catch up," and I heard myself relating the news about my daughter and my mother...
...I streamed through days keeping Kai aloft, worrying about my mother, and had time for little else...
...Not long ago my mother told me about seeing a church acquaintance in a grocery parking lot...
...The last Mandinka child I held unto death was probably dying of meningitis...
...Eighteen years ago in the Mandinka village of Marsassoum, a little boy named Sanji fell from the top of a mango tree...
...Sitting in the hut, I could not doubt the father's love...
...One must try to heal, but one must also hold...
...Friday would lift the sheet and wince at the lifeless face...
...At the same time I thought of Kai's namesake, my mother, miles away...
...When the whooping started, she couldn't breathe...
...Now twelve-year-old Jeff was an only child...
...The point of life was to reach maturity, to grow in understanding of the world and of oneself...
...Most of us are called to die in community...
...Church was all about death...
...So capable of speech in the face of the unspeakable...
...This is the reason that I wanted my friend to feel the full weight of my mother's living as well as of my daughter's...
...Like Dr...
...My mother knows this, has known the mercies and courtesies for longer than I've known her...
...I wanted Sanji's father to fight Sanji's death...
...Anthropolo-gists have learned that deep cultural realities are historically rooted and forever evolving...
...But he had also reached a wisdom about death and life that I'm still groping for...
...there was no trouble...
...To die at any age is to complete the shape of living: to be finished...
...It was his responsibility...
...For while social orders do delimit the range of possible experiences of life and death, each person's experience is always distinctive...
...Every person, even a child who will not be an adult, has lived in fullness if the life has been among family and friends...
...the interpretations of culture produced by writers and scholars are themselves part of the building...
...While 1 struggled against death, they held the dying...
...I don't believe that I needed to live among the Mandinko in order to learn such literal patience...
...I was ready to read it...
...For the next three days, Sanji died...
...She's old...
...At first I felt impatience...
...For me, living fully has always meant becoming the mature oak, being fulfilled by life...
...We can never do enough...
...One day we were talking about conceptions of death in America and Senegal, where Elizabeth spent five years in two Mandinka villages...
...The suffering of children...
...project trucks, a fleet of local dugout canoes, as well as the services of a Dutch doctor waiting in the regional capital miles away...
...My mother was seventy-nine...
...Tillich had the grace to make of his own dying a communal act of caring...
...In earlier years, neither of us was able to look straight at death, straight at dying...
...But we also need to know how to recognize dying time...
...I never went to a funeral...
...Staked to the floor of his father's hut, Sanji lay semi-conscious as his arm swelled and the stench swelled and the flies harried him...
...All dying embodies communal loss...
...Among the Mandinko, the act of dying engages the body even after the apparent "death" of the body...
...Now they were back...
...The historic contribution of liberalism has been to liberate people from the grasp of arbitrary authorities‚ political, religious, cultural...
...Each individual is the literal agent of his or her demise...
...For the Mandinko, the ni, an essence we might equate with soul, is aware of physical sensations and purely human emotions even if the body appears to be unaware...
...Perhaps it is because my own children are now almost out of high school, almost ready for their ritual departure‚ "going away" to college‚ that I'm able to reexamine my feelings about all this...
...We slept well that night, and were awakened the following morning by the rice specialist's voice at the door...
...Neither of us knew how to experience the life that still animates the dying, to allow them to live fully as they die, to grant even to the dead child a full life...
...I didn't know...
...Perhaps it takes a younger brother to understand how full even the life of a child can be: the older sibling is crafty, intrepid, experienced in the ways of the world...
...When we came to call, the father chatted with us, as his hand swept the swarming flies back and forth in the sour air...
...My life with the Mandinko taught me something else...
...In middle-class America we still act out this historic quest: we prepare our children to leave home at age eighteen, to go beyond the authority of the family itself...
...He had bought a camera," Jeff writes, "A single-lens reflex/ He had a lot of new things going on...
...This high purpose would carry me through darkened huts, right past mothers and fathers and husbands and wives who were spending time in a different way: sitting in the company of the dying, swishing flies, bathing faces, giving drink...
...I remember that in the early days, again and again when death seemed imminent, I would be swept up in a flurry of planning to save "life...
...I heard the shouts of the other children, and was the first adult to arrive at the scene...
...Each living is full, and finished itself...
...Middle-class American parents bear a terrible burden of guilt for what may happen to their children...
...When, a couple of hours after the fall, we saw Sanji nestled in the beamy canoe, entrusted to the care of a local rice specialist (a man who had trained in the U.S...
...Loud grief is not courteous because it reminds the corpse of the sorrow it has caused the community...
...Culture is not just passed on...
...What if she died...
...Thus, the dying of an elder represents a dying of memory...
...What follows is a conversation in two voices, a tale of two histories moving toward a fuller view of death and dying...
...One day I made an odd discovery...
...It was rather that I felt I was indispensable to their growth toward maturity, to their own life...
...Death by gangrene is horrible...
...Lying on his hospital bed in 1965, he felt his life ebbing...
...I thought about death all the time when I was at Mass, or at the Wednesday afternoon catechism class for public school kids...
...I didn't want to confront, in a cold legal document, the possibility that their movement to adulthood would be diverted by my death...
...Jeff had been eight when his younger brother Mark died, and had learned then about dying...
...In 1973, when my children were two and three, I was a Stanford history graduate student...
...Religion professor Jerry Irish and his family, at Stanford's campus in Germany for the year, suffered a horrible loss...
...But that wasn't the problem...
...Was the love he felt "different" from that an American father would feel...
...It was an idea that intrigued me, not a real presence...
...Jerry Irish wrote a book about his family's experience, A Boy Thirteen: Reflections on Death, published in 1975...
...Not all were as shocking as Sanji's, although many were equally unexpected...
...For the next three days Sanji's father sat by the boy and watched, patiently swishing the flies away from the hot putrefaction...
...Where is Sanji?, we asked...
...But in public school, and at home, death never came up...
...I was captivated by the words "extreme unction...
...Antigone, Socrates, Jesus, Thomas More: heroic, principled death as the act of standing beyond actual community, as loyalty to ideal community...
...I bent down to offer Sanji a wet rag to suck, but even as I comforted him, I wondered why we were letting him die...
...That act is always a mystery for those of us who have not yet "done" it...
...I missed her...
...Jeff is able to see all that Lee did do, how big he was, and even--with flawless twelve-year-old perception-how much he could eat.' 'He had a lot of new things going on...
...My mother knows things that my friend and my daughter and I simply don't know...
...It was my mother I was worried about...
...The person I looked up to, the boy that/played baseball with me, the guy with a/new camera, my brother who I could talk to, the/one who could eat as no one else, my brother that/was five feet and nine inches tall...
...Culture is always under construction...
...In his poem about Lee he does not dwell on the fact of Lee's death, does not try to make sense of it...
...Even an embryo is a se//with will and spirit and knowing...
...The dead, the truly dead, are no longer "sensible.'' They have somehow departed from the body...
...No one he cared about ever died...
...my daughter had pertussis, better known as whooping cough, a disease I had first seen in West Africa...
...I live in Portland, my father in Los Angeles, my mother in Tampa, and my brother in Washington, D.C.: an ail-American, four-corner distribution...
...Ivan was so right, I thought...
...They'd gone to a healer who could set the bone...
...In this way, he allowed his dying to live in the memory of a larger community...
...It was taboo...
...over the years, this is what I have learned about dying...
...She held her mother's hands and tended them, cooked soft meals for her father, read and dreamed with my father...
...The book takes its title from the remarkable poem that twelve-year-old Jeff wrote about Lee a few days after Lee's death...
...I wanted her to recognize that my mother's death would be a loss for all of us...
...In colonial America, parents watched many of their children die...
...In his father's hut, Demba answered...
...How her mother smiled at her pleasure, and in pain...
...No good God would permit children to be tortured just because he wanted adults to be free to choose good or evil and settle their eternal fates...
...I was not ready to encounter words about such loss, such pain...
...All day long Kai would whoop and play, whoop and eat, whoop and talk, whoop and vomit...
...As I supported him so, and rubbed his silky back, I thought of my mother and the story she had told me of her mother's long illness...
...As the day continued, I realized that I wanted my friend to feel her own grief over my mother's possible death...
...The more we talked about the two societies' views of death, the more we realized we had to confront our own personal histories...
...They hadn't gone to the regional capital after all...
...How my mother filed her dying mother's fingernails, trimmed the cuticles just so, buffed the nails to a high sheen...
...All were sad...
...We have each inherited certain assumptions about death and dying, but we have also cultivated a new understanding...
...The two of us-one an anthropologist, the other a historian-have conversed a good deal recently about how to study culture...
...I was told by one friend that the word for corpse (mofuringh) is related to the word for bud (firingh...
...I wanted her to be wrong...
...But so many children die...
...Reading Habits is like going to confession...
...Once an American nurse working for Catholic Relief Services had told me that "the people" felt "different" about their children from the way "we" feel about ours...
...There is no perfect location on a time line for death...
...When I was eighteen, I read The Brothers Karamazov, and Ivan's tirade to Alyosha about the suffering of children chilled me...
...But Fosdick was writing in the 1950s, and went on to remark at how odd it now seemed that a boy of ten had ever been permitted to witness such things...
...Paneloux in Camus's The Plague, I couldn't get over the injustice of it...
...The ways of the Mandinko are his or her ways...
...Always a mystery for the living...
...He reminds us that the work of dying will always be the work of the living...
Vol. 115 • May 1988 • No. 10
