Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me.
I was not present at Ruth May's birth, but I have seen it now because I saw each step of it played out in reverse at the end of her life—the closing parenthesis at the end of the palindrome that was Ruth May.
Her final gulp of air as hungry as a baby's first breath. That last howling scream exactly like the first. And then, at the end, a fixed, steadfast moving backward out of this world.
After the howl, white-eyed silence without breath, her bluish face creased with a pressure closing in. The near proximity of the "other than life" that crowds down along the edges of living. Her eyes closed up tightly, and her swollen lips clamped shut. Her spine curved, and her limbs drew in more and more tightly until she seemed impossibly small.
While we watched without comprehension, she moved away to where none of us wanted to follow. Ruth May shrank back through the narrow passage between this brief fabric of light and all the rest of what there is for us: the long waiting. Now, she will wait the rest of the time. It will be exactly as long as the time that passed before she was born.
Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me. Or paused, at least, to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed.
A lightning that cannot strike twice; our lesson learned in the hateful speed of light. A bite at light, at Ruth. A truth, a sky blue presentiment, and oh how dear we are to ourselves when it comes.
It comes, that long, long shadow in the grass.
—Barbara Kingsolver; The Poisonwood Bible
Holly Margl is the award-winning author of Witnessing Grief; Inviting Trauma and Loss to Our Coaching Conversations, An Enneagram Perspective, coach, coach mentor, and trainer specializing in grief, trauma, and the Enneagram.
