Reading, we leap away from monotonous daily events to explore the exceptional, those events that we know will come but don’t know when or how. Ten to fifteen hours of a reader’s attention is precious. Children are born in this span of time. Lives end in even less. There is much social and psychological responsibility associated with that. A novel can expand the threshold of knowledge in these hours.
Image above: Photo by Nacho Rochon on Unsplash
Cultures prepare us, and fail to prepare us fully, for these life events– birth and death. Buddhism folds death into daily practices. Christianity has similar rituals and a cosmology to explain it. Zen has its serious riddles. This poem by Leonard Cohen expresses a variation of Untanneh Tokef from Jewish liturgy.
And who by fire, who by water, who in the sunshine, who in the night time, who by high ordeal, who by common trial, who in your merry merry month of may, who by very slow decay, and who shall I say is calling?
Leonard Cohen
Rhiannon Giddons presents a lyric video about passing into the afterlife, Calling Me Home. Though it sounds like a funeral dirge, it was written and composed by Alice Gerrard, contemporary American bluegrass singer.
Whether into the body of the world, the worldly body, possible futures, or the mysteries in them, reaching keeps us moving forward in love and perplexity. Writers think that language will chart the way. My coming-of-age story includes these finer and on-going aspects of maturity. Poet and philosopher David Whyte writes on the courage it takes to have integrity.
To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world: to live up and into the necessities of relationships that often already exist, with things we already care deeply about: with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on. To be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made.
David Whyte, Consolations
The Compromise ends soon after the narrator takes a series of firm steps into adulthood. She faces abandonment and keeps going. She stands up to Scarlett, her rival for social belonging, and to her half-brother, Otis, who has taken an extremist path to abolitionism. She helps her sister deliver a healthy baby and find a good death. The last scene of Eliza’s perception should prove Mariah’s courage and progress towards adulthood.
Characters who break rules question the world around them rather than accepting it blindly; isn’t this part of why we read, to explore new perspectives and possible realities?
Addison Armstrong, Writer’s Digest
Eliza’s third person narration ends in her death, or just beyond it. I have tried to realize this transition in language. It uses poetry to keep the dream-like thread, but I hope it keeps the unembellished and uninterpreted style of contemporary prose. My job is to help my readers feel the unknown begging them on and prepare for the excruciating life and death decisions to come.
Eliza saw the curve of the earth and turned back. Another light on the face of the world, dim and pulsing, drew her down. She knew there would be pain.
Research on Birth, End of Life, and Altered States
“The key to winning this war [on cliche] is research, taking the time and effort to acquire knowledge. I suggest these three specific methods: research of memory, research of imagination, and research of fact.”
Robert McKee, Story
My research on childbirth comes from experience giving birth myself and reading on this topic. In fact, women go into labor after trauma and they also deliver babies while in a coma. I also researched the effects of wounds and physical trauma. I’m particularly grateful to medical student Farheen Abbasi, who advised on the details of gunshot wounds. Eliza dies of internal bleeding and she could have died a short-time later of sepsis, organ failure from harmful microorganisms in the blood.
Witnessing my mother’s end of life and all she did to prepare me for it accumulated and informs me still. I held her as close as I could through the days and weeks of her brain approaching its end. These memories exceed my conscious awareness and give urgency to the writing at hand.
I also remember when I was given the responsibility to care for a dying woman when I was too young for the job. Though nothing I did changed the outcome, it was distressing, inspiring 18-year-old reflections on youth and old age. “I who had never seen her dress red and wind-blown took off her hospital gown: a robe slipped off before the bath, the husk before the silk before the shining cob.” I had the humility to know what I did not know and the courage to leap forward and write.
Today and going forward, I learn from those willing to teach me about the end of lives they know. I am grateful to my friend, Jan McClain, relationship coach, for knowledge generously shared with me. My desire is great to help those who love me and are called by duty to be courageous.
Writing these scenes, I am also informed by the oral narratives of several female friends who have “seen” past the confines of their bodies in visionary dream states. I have added my own creative interpretation of a woman’s spiritual devotion to the life of her child. Some leverage the devotion of parenthood and marriage to realize devotion to the world.
“She was not giving birth, it was taking her.”
In the The Compromise, Mariah and Scarlett facilitate during Eliza’s unconscious labor. An old woman and two men in the background support them. They work for hours and must race against Eliza’s loss of blood and lowering pulse. This narrative is told in Mariah’s point of view.
Scarlett worked more earnestly than I thought she could, for a rich girl, and she took my direction as if her life depended on it. She cried between contractions, “I’m sorry, Strawberry. Breathe with me, breathe. Don’t die, please Lizzie!” Hearing Scarlett cry like that didn’t surprise me, but I had to stay focused on the signs coming and going under my hands.
Then it alternates. Eliza had already left her body, but made a choice to return because she had unfinished work to do concerning the life of her child. She hallucinates and sees through an altered state.
Eliza was right about the pain of being in a body. But this time she knew what it was, the way it came in waves and clenched her down. She was not giving birth, it was taking her. No angels or demons surrounded her. There were no stories about who she was. But she knew things, having seen the earth as she did. She knew that frogs sang to the underground magnetic fields in the earth, how geese knew where to go in the dark, and how to rest on the wing. Like them, she knew the spinning white poles of the gelatinous earth inside the absolute shell of the sky.
“But she knew things, having seen the earth as she did.”
Playing with the perspective of migrating geese, I could shape a spherical yolk-like earth and a sky, the firmament, like a shell. It became a metaphor that I find both traditional and surprising, the egg seen from inside and the earth as seen from the troposphere are visual metaphors of the womb when inside and outside exchange.
It is common knowledge that people who recover from a coma have memories that remain, and this could include near-death experiences. I have used this to show how embodied and disembodied events draw Eliza’s attention. At first reading, the underlying structure of this scene may be illusive. You may need to read slowly.
Beating Heart
“It was luminous hot-red work.“
Transitioning into heavy labor on May 23, 1980, our midwife said that my body knew what to do. I could trust that. Any intellectual understanding had temporarily departed along with the blood from my brain. It was my job to let the body’s wisdom prevail. I gave that wisdom to my characters. Mariah tells her sister to trust her own blood and her beating heart. I give Eliza the image of pulsing water. This movement of tides, this luminous hot-red work of the body, is learned by women over years of practice.
She wanted to leave. It would be easy to die, but Mariah told her to keep her heart beating. It was luminous hot-red work. Her sister said that her blood was good and knew what to do. It pulled her like a tide, each time lower and deeper in, like waves sifting sand on the edge of a lake at sunset.
Breathing
Nature draws its own within itself.
In each section, the direction of the image is to move conscious effort to conscious effortlessness. A person might work to breathe and then discover that in-breathe and out-breath are like a single wingbeat. Breathing is an exchange without distinction between self and other. Nature draws its own within itself.
She also had to breathe. Scarlett demanded it of her, and that was the work of holding the inside and the outside together, making them exchange and balance the trade. The heavy wingbeat of a bird of prey held her aloft among the dark strokes of wheeling birds. Three siblings walked along the bluff while she hovered near, a prairie falcon. Mother and Daddy were beside her, ready to lift and disappear into the sun.
Birds hovering was established as a metaphor early in the novel. It should be heard as an echo here. When she was a child on the bluff beside Mariah and Otis, Eliza was frightened by the river valley, the great depth of the air below her. By the time of her death, she is master of it, naturally drawn into the air like a prairie falcon.
Singing Inside the Tree of Life
“Under her, the last branch fell, sacrificed to the tree.“
The falcon lands inside a tree’s endless complexity of branches. It is like being inside of a brain’s complexity of neurons. I keep this metaphor with fractilating branches, the tree’s crown, running sap, and the eyes of severed wood. The brain beholds its version of reality including itself and the immediate environment. This is close to the definition of consciousness.
The last long breath lowered her where loose pink bark peeled back on the body of the river birch. And above that was her sister’s towering sycamore. Mariah was there to lift her inside a sphere of fractilating branches, twigs, and catkins, minute and fragil.
As death approaches, an unseen force like the wind dismantles the tree, branch by branch. The container of the senses, consciousness edges forward as the sky is revealed and humanity lets go.
A fierce wind swept away the crown, branch by branch. Sap ran to seal off the wounds. The severed wood had eyes that opened and closed on the stricken sky. Under her, the last branch fell, sacrificed to the tree. Her sister’s hand let go. Sound slowed to a drone, low and constant.
Singing to Another
“She sang with love already given.”
Her body was a blue-eyed doll rocking in her arms. She sang with love already given. The breath it took was no longer hers at all.
Culture and nature agree that love transcends the body. When the body is inert substance, as inert as a doll in one’s arms, then one does not breathe any more than one is breathed in the deep and holy exchange. Past the transition, the exchange is balanced and might be realized in song given as innocently as a child for her doll. This is not transcendentalism, I think, in which the spiritual is held separate from nature and superior to it.
“Forgive me. I couldn’t save her.”
“You did all you could,” he said. “Now give her to the place God made for her.”
I leave Eliza holding a doll, not her newborn. Is she a child herself left in make-believe? She worked and sacrificed but does not hold the precious other even for a moment. Her hands are folded and the child sleeps beside her cooling body. Her breast is already ivory, and the fire of grief does not change that. Nature continues in its chemical and alchemical exchanges. She is there if she is anywhere at all.