Passings by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

July 2024

 I swim in the sea practically daily – yes, even in winter – and I get to watch the rhythm of the waves, the surge, the fluctuations of swell, in preparation for entering the water. After all I don’t want to get rolled over by entering in the middle of crashing waves. I watch and wait, and then enter. There are good moments, and not so good ones.

 Everything is in process, nothing happens in any other way. We live, we die and although we can look back at our life and decide to discern stages, while we are living everything is in process. Such a realization is quite liberating.

 Over my lifetime, quite a number of friends, and family have died. These are people I have cherished. These are those I have learned much from; learned how to be empathic, generous, loving, as they were to me. Some I was pre-warned of their coming death, through dreams and careful observation of skin tone, lightness of being, and the like. A cello teacher and friend had stomach cancer and was dying from it, but on the last day of me seeing him alive, he sat down and played the cello finally free of his old desire for correctness. He played like a glorious angel and in that moment I saw love in all its playful joy.

 When my cellist friend died, I remembered (and remember still) his liberated and liberating music making. There was no grief, per se, just a profound sense that death is not dark and miserable; it can be joyful.

 I used to volunteer at a palliative care unit here in Perth in the late 90s and there I witnessed several passings. One woman called me in to be with her. She wanted me to give her reiki. Now it turned out that I didn’t know what reiki actually was but I knew it was a healing. I knew I didn’t have a choice, I had to conjure up something or other healingwise, and so I did. In this process, I laid my hands not on her body itself, but hovering above. I could feel a strong energetic pull and “saw” a golden light emanating from this woman, and that’s what I entered into. That night she died, peacefully.

 Life is process. Like wave over wave of lives, intermingling, coming apart, we meet and depart. Death can come after a long life, like my father who died nearly 101, and suddenly, in a crib. It comes in utero, it comes at birth, it comes crossing the road, it comes after a long protracted illness,  it comes in war, in murder, in suicide, it comes …. It’s inevitable.

 Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the psychiatrist,  was instrumental in changing how much of the world viewed death and introduced to us how the grieving process might proceed. Most of us are familiar with the stage theory of this process, but few realize that Kubler-Ross didn’t originally develop these stages to explain what people go through when they lose a loved one. She actually developed them to describe what patients go through as they come to terms with their terminal illness. The stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance were only later applied to grieving friends and families who seemed to go through a similar process after the loss of their loved ones.

 It's unfortunate that the stage theory of grief has so much traction, because – in some quarters – not adhering to these stages is seen as pathological.

 Grief at the loss of a loved one can follow any course. Life, with all its richness of emotions, is process. A thanatologist friend and counselling colleague of mine uses the sign of infinite to illustrate this process. We can feel sad, happy, depressed, whatever, whenever. We are not bound to any stage theory at all. Feelings of loss, and I feel them sometimes very strongly, can take us up and surge through us, to another place, and that’s alright. Feelings of stuckness are more problematic, but that too can pass. This is when  talking about it with a trusted person is all that is required.

 

 

Ghost Catching with a Dress

Nov 2013.

     I'd watched a video of a very beautiful conversation among therapists and others talking on the death of mothers. The phrase ‘ghost catching with a dress’ came up in relation to finding clothing, letters, and treasured objects belonging to mothers who had died. I was very moved by the image, for I have such items from my own mother. Indeed, most of the crockery and utensils I use on a daily basis were from the cupboards of my mother. Hanging in my wardrobe is a red coat my mother made herself of the lining of officer’s coats during the war, there are gloves she made,  and there is a dress she fashioned from silk that I only very vaguely remember her wearing to a party once or twice. She was an extraordinary seamstress; a skill I entirely lack.

     Ghost catching with a dress is, for me, the catching of glimpses of my mother’s life and story and those others I have known and loved. Glimpses sewn into the gossamer of memory – sometimes poignant and painful, sometimes sweet and tender. 

     Life, death. What are these? When people talk of death, premature or after a long rich life, like my mother’s, I wonder yet again, what it all means.

     The taking of one’s own life, throws another angle into the mix. There are many therapists who express deep concern for those who contemplate their own death, and while I too am disturbed by this, I am brought yet again to the existential place that I face on a daily basis: What of life, what of death?  I cannot see those who contemplate taking their own life as a sign of mental illness. I cannot, for the same reason that I acknowledge death as intrinsic to life and life intrinsic to death. What gets thrown up into the air like wind in fallen leaves, is the integral mystery of existence itself. I cannot sweep this knowledge, this subtle awareness I have, into a neat pile to be put discretely into the rubbish bin. This is the greatest mystery I know of. Death is not a medical problem and suicide is not a medical condition. Death is, as life is, and relationships are.

     What is caught in suicide are ghost catchers of clothes, of toys, bric a brac, books and letters; of the tears in memories, of  hearts broken, of anger, resentment, bewilderment, lots of questions unanswered. These are perhaps more poignant than even the caught ghosts of those who died a normal death.

     I have had friends who have died by their own hand and know something of the strangeness of this. One man, I had shared a meal with only a fortnight before he gassed himself.  Was I partly to blame? I could not think so, for as the ghosts in cloth unravelled after the funeral, the threads emerged of a life of disconnect, of  feelings of alienation and lostness.  This poor friend could not speak of what he suffered and it is here that my feelings are stirred, and it is now here that I offer myself as a therapist to hear and share the burden of pain.

     Death, and life, are touched by the living in a fluid process and grief and loss are felt as those we’ve loved move into another dimension. It is not so much the death bit that shakes me, but the threads of life that are not always seen and understood; threads that need, somehow, to be shaped into a dress to catch the ghosts of real flesh and blood people in our stories, recollections, and a need for some kind of farewell. We living need to let go and yet to remember and to let go and yet to recollect. Our grief is not to be discarded mindlessly, but to be brought into the fabric of our life to enrich us and also, mysteriously, give us the courage to let go, let be that majesty that is  life.

Not This, Not That

February 2017

Not This, Not That   by  Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M.Couns., PhD

     Some years ago I was at a dance party when the night became increasingly wild and the dancers all around me were going crazy, faster and faster. I stopped. And then I began gently swaying picking the shape of phrases, not the hammer of notes.

     In recent times, with the lunacy of American politics and our own, with the growing nuttiness of conspiracy theories, with the frantic anxieties of every day living, I stop and start to reflect, apophatically, on the silences, the absences, the cracks in the pavement.

     So what is this this? Death, perhaps, perhaps not.

     I am drawn to the spaces between, to the bardos of life and death, and to a creative presence that is being present in neither this, nor that.

     I am trying to approach something that by its nature cannot be finally approached, at least, perhaps, not yet. It is an intangible something. The 13^th century mystic, Meister Eckhart was intrigued by this “not this, not that” something. He saw it as a problem of encountering the intangibility of God, for as he said, “…therefore let us pray to God that we may be free of God”. In other words, he wanted to strip away from an encounter with the divine that was without preconception, without idolatry. In some ways, he wanted to dance to the essence, or suchness, of God, without giving way to some definition that obscures the nature of the divine, including the very idea of a divinity.

     Hinduism has a similar idea. In Sanskrit, the “not this, not that” is netti netti. There is a Vedic meditation around this and it is an analytical one that is meant to set aside, and set aside, and set aside ideas of Brahman, by beginning to understand what is not Brahman. Such an approach is like Eckhart’s apophatic theology.

     It is interesting that the via negativa (the negative way) is an approach sometimes employed in research in the sciences and humanities. When we intuit the presence of something that is, as yet, intangible; something we feel the existence of, it is useful to examine what is going on around the general area of that presence. Astronomers use the technique often. They’ll theorize a presence, even an absence, like a black hole, from the behaviour of heavenly bodies around it.

     I am aware of my inner conversations regarding what seems to be a sort of madness going around in our days. I seek the way of knowledge, logic and rationality because this is how I have been trained as a thinker. I am, however, intuiting some community shift, some groundswell that isn’t identified. I hold at arms length short circuited explanations for things. I do not buy into Nostradamus’ predictions, nor that of Mayan thought, nor new world orders, nor anything that smacks of lizard minds. I am a skeptic and anyway I rather like the tension of not knowing, for herein lies my creative spirit.

     Interspersed with these thoughts is what is arising in my psychotherapeutic work. A dominant theme is coming up among my various clients and that is the subject of death: death as a vector for change.

     As I’m listening to what my clients tell me of their experiences with death, I am reminded of that 1999 movie, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. It’s about an assassin who studies in depth a book called Hagakure, or The Book of the Samurai. He seeks to live as though he is already dead, for the way of the warrior is death. What comes with this is fearlessness and detachment, but not a lack of compassion. And thus the way of netti netti, as I see it, is standing in the spaces of not this, not that, staying present with what is. This situated presence is what my job requires of me. Psychotherapy is a therapy of the apophatic (not this, not that); it is the holding of the space between and such a holding gives rise to deep and fundamental change.

“… all things are provided for by nothingness is the meaning of the phrase, “Emptiness is form.” One should not think that these are two separate things.” From Hagakure.