Talking Tuesday: Death in the Forest

The mortal coil is once again on my mind today.   As we live in a society that is profoundly uncomfortable with death, and with dying, it is hard to know how to help people who are grieving, or even to comfort the dying.  It is a messy, intimate business, death, one that requires a lot of strength, determination, and sometimes, a strong stomach.  I think when death happened more often at home, when the family was responsible for preparing the body, when death was a more constant companion than now, in our age of advanced medicine (but not, curiously, the bio-ethics to go with it), people knew what to do.  There were rituals, Things To Be Done, and a certain gravity toward it all.  I'm nearing the end of Outlander once again, and I've had a few things stand out to me this read-through, and I'll probably be sharing some of them as time goes by, but this particular passage especially caught my attention.  It is hard to sit with the dying, to be quiet and still, without distraction, to simply Be, until the end.

The forest was very quiet.  No birds sang in the mist, and the men who waited patiently hunkered in the shadow of the trees, were silent as the trees themselves.  Dougal and I leaned close together over the struggling body, murmuring and comforting, sharing the messy, heartrending, and necessary task of help a man to die.  

The trip up the hill to the castle was silent.  I walked beside the dead man, borne on a makeshift litter of pine boughs.  Behind us, borne in precisely similar fashion, came the body of his foe [a boar].  Dougal walked ahead, alone.

As we entered the gate to the main courtyard, I caught sight of the tubby little figure of Father Bain, the village priest, hurrying belatedly to the air of his fallen parishioner.  Dougal paused, reaching out to stay me as I turned toward the stair leading to the surgery.  The bearers with Geordie's plaid-shrouded body on its litter passed on, heading toward the chapel, leaving us together in the deserted corridor.  Dougal held me by the wrist, looking me over intently.

"You've seen men die before," he said flatly.  "By violence."  Not a question, almost an accusation.

"Many of them," I said, just as flatly.  And pulling myself free, I left him standing there and went to tend my living patient.

~Diana Gabaldon, Outlander, NY: Delacorte Press, 1991, pp 142-143.