February 11, 2008
Monday

But there is the matter of the soul. The soul leaves the body at the moment of death. But from which part of the body does it leave? The best guess seems to be that it emerges with the last breath, having been hidden somewhere in the chest, around the place of the heart and lungs. Though Walter had heard a joke they used to tell about an old fellow in the Ettrick, to the effect that he was so dirty that when he died his soul came out his arsehole, and was heard to do so with a mighty explosion.
               —Alice Munro, b.1931, Canadian writer of short stories
                   from the story “The View from Castle Rock”

I read Alice Munro’s story this morning and, thinking of my reference yesterday to Kathleen Deveny’s attempt to explain soul-leaving as a burp, laughed out loud at this part. Walter is a young man en route with his family from Scotland to Canada on a ship in the summer of 1818. He has just watched as a child who has died is heaved overboard. He thinks about what might become of the small body, carried on the waves to the Sargasso Sea or torn apart by scavenger fish, and then considers the fate of the child’s soul, waiting he knows not where nor how for the Day of Judgment when it is supposed to reunite with the body that has surely met a terrible end.

Comments to the online version of Deveny’s article have devolved into a discussion of the wisdom of believing in evolution and where to get bible-based answers to life’s questions. I was trying to make a broader point: that Deveny seems too hazy about her own belief system to be an effective guide or model for her child. She’s wrong about her church’s teaching on evolution, she admits to knowing only eight of the ten commandments (one wonders which two she’s ignorant of, and what that might mean regarding her behavior), and she had to Google the tradition of the imposing of ashes at the beginning of Lent so that she could explain to her daughter why they were doing it. In other recent pieces about Christmas gift buying and the problem of the Spears sisters, she has related experiences with her daughter that suggest she could bring more seriousness and more effective preparation to the most important role anyone can undertake, that of raising children.

Perhaps I am being too hard on Deveny, and I did think comparing the soul’s leaving the body to a burp was a good analogy, given the sudden nature of her daughter’s question.

Lynn was twelve when her grandfather died. He had been in a nursing home for two years, the robust and energetic man we knew altered from Parkinson’s disease and the effects of numerous small strokes. His room looked out on a courtyard with a flower garden and a gazebo, but he saw a golf course with foursomes passing though, and he would comment from time to time on a player’s swing or his selection of clubs. Early in 1998 he began to decline rapidly and was admitted to a hospital. In less than a week, the call came at about two in the morning that he had passed away.

Ron went out then to be with his mother and to begin attending to the myriad details that such an event triggers. When Lynn woke up at the regular time I told her what had happened and offered her some options: she could go to school, she could come with me since I would be going to school at least for the morning to make arrangements for an extended absence, she could stay home alone. She elected to go to school and went about her usual morning business.

She was dressed and ready when she came into my study. “Mommy,” she said. “When a person dies and goes to heaven, are they cured of all their sicknesses?”

I am the master of the academic answer. Ask me what a word means and you’ll likely get a short lecture on its etymological history, its importance in the work of some poet you never heard of, and four sentences illustrating its nuances. But that morning, as my daughter stood in the doorway with her purple backpack hanging from one shoulder, I knew it was not the right time to begin, “Well, Lynn, theologians differ about what happens to our spiritual essences. For example . . . ”

“Yes,” I said to her, not only because it was the right answer for that moment, but because it was what I believed in that moment. My best guess was that she wanted reassurance that Grandpa was no longer confused or in pain. I would never feed her sentimental but completely false scenarios (“Grandpa is having a drink with Uncle Flash right now and they’re talking about the Yankees”). But “Grandpa is perfect now” seemed to cover what she wanted to know and what I believed. Time enough for her to grow in wisdom, age, and grace, to begin to understand that we have only the tools of human language to express the inexpressible, concrete images to explain the ineffable.

Munro’s story lands Walter and his family in Quebec and then flashes forward to a summary of what happened to them all, describing the stones that mark their burial places. The markings on the stones give the only information that can be had about them, because what we can ever know goes to that point and no farther.

Lynn is a scientist now, able to talk to you about your DNA and why overuse of antibiotics can cause more problems than it solves. Since that morning in 1998 she’s coped with the deaths of her best friend’s older sister, her favorite teacher, and finally her grandmother. I don’t know precisely what she believes now about death and the afterlife, because we haven’t had occasion to talk about it. My best guess, and my highest hope, is that I gave her a foundation that has served her.

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