Brentwood Bay writer Eve Joseph’s new book, In the Slender Margin: The Intimate Strangeness of Death and Dying, is essential reading for everyone. She recently took the time to talk to Coastal Spectator Editor Lynne Van Luven. Joseph’s first book of poetry, The Startled Heart, was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay poetry prize, as was The Secret Signature of Things. She is the recipient of the P.K. Page Founders Award for Poetry. Joseph will launch In the Slender Margin on Wednesday, June 11 at 7 p.m. at Munro’s Books.
Eve, I so admire this profound book of nonfiction, which reads like the exploration of a lifetime. Can you talk about how long ago you started this book “in your mind” and how the compilation of the essays came together for you?
The idea for the book started in the fall of 2005. One year before I left hospice. I was burning out – saturated with images and thoughts about death – and that wasn’t something we talked about in any organized way at hospice. I clearly remember calling one of my colleagues from a phone booth in the Mayfair Mall and saying I could not continue working with the dying if I couldn’t talk about the work. We both agreed this was badly needed and, over the period of a couple of days, we contacted three other friends we worked with and started a group. We decided we would meet once a month, talk about death and drink whiskey. The Women and Whiskey group as we called ourselves. It was from those meetings that the book began to take shape.
I first attempted to write about death in my first book . . . the poems – ghazals – really only touched the surface but the associative nature of the form allowed me to use imagery without narrative and that was a breakthrough for me. When it came to this book, I knew I didn’t want to write a traditional narrative; rather, I wanted to build a kind of thematic resonance. One of the most immediate challenges was how to write about death without sentimentality and writing “fragments” as opposed to continuous story helped me do that. It was also really important to me to avoid the kind of false wisdom and new- age language often found in books on death and dying. It helped to have works by Joan Didion and Annie Dillard close by. Didion for her clarity of thought and Dillard for her imagery and the marvelous way she weaves things together.
In The Slender Margin started as an essay that was later published in The Malahat. I returned repeatedly to that essay and “blew it up” from within. I kept going back in and expanding my thinking. The greatest pleasure of writing this book was the opportunity to think on the page and to follow thought as far as I could. Don McKay once said to me my poetry was spare – as if I was a bird hopping from branch to branch. Prose, he said, requires one to be more “doglike.” Nose down, rooting along the ground, getting muddy and lost in the exploration. I’m more dog in this book than bird.
Your brother’s sudden death in 1964, when you were 11 years old, appears to have been a touchstone-event for your whole life. Does writing a ruminative book like this assuage feelings of loss?
This question is interesting to me as it raises the topic of art versus therapy. In the book I tell a story about a friend of mine who teaches weaving on a reserve in North Vancouver. When she applied for a grant to teach local women, it was suggested she gear her classes for women with alcohol problems. She refused to run the classes as “therapy,” choosing instead to concentrate on creativity and tradition. As it happened, some of the women who came did have problems with alcohol and the course helped to turn their lives around. The intent was not to “heal” people but, interestingly, engaging deeply with the creative act was healing.
I did not set out to assuage an old grief, and I distrust that impulse. When people say “that must have been so healing” I feel grumpy and argumentative as if there is some unspoken belief that writing helps one to “let go” and provides some sort of “closure.” If anything, the opposite was true for me. Rather than letting go, I embraced my brother fully for the first time. I was immersed in thinking about him, in remembering and in learning new things. In the end, the act of writing and remembering – of giving voice to sorrow – was cathartic. But it was never the purpose of the book.
I find it amazing that you were able to work in palliative care for two decades when so many of us fall apart at the death of a parent or family member. Does glimpsing the Grim Reaper daily harden one’s spirit?
I think it tires one’s spirit more than hardens. There is just so much sadness. As strange as it sounds, on one level it was just a job. It’s what I did to make money and support a family. There was a kind of compartmentalization – I did not feel the immensity of grief that family members felt because I was essentially a stranger to them. It’s completely different to lose someone close, and all my years at hospice don’t soften the grief I feel with personal loss.
To harden one’s spirit implies a shutting down or turning away from something. I don’t think I did this. The problem for me was one of deep weariness. We don’t have an adequate language in the West for problems of the spirit. My mother-in-law, who was Coast Salish, worried that my spirit was walking with the dead, and she encouraged me to pay attention and to practice certain rituals – which I did, but not nearly as often as she would have liked. As much as I appreciated her concern and suggestions, I felt as if I was “borrowing” something that wasn’t mine. If anything, writing has been the thing that has helped me to enter places of darkness and to maintain an open spirit.
In the Slender Margin is laced with wry commentary and humour. Do you think you would have lasted 20 years in your hospice work without a sense of humour?
Humour was an essential part of hospice work. It helped us to laugh at ourselves and at death. It kept us from taking ourselves too seriously and, for many of us, humour made death smaller and less terrifying. Sometimes it allowed us to see beyond illness. One of the stories I tell in the book has to do with a well-respected First Nations man who was dying of leukemia at home and had been in pain all day. When the nurse and counselor arrived from hospice to attend to him, he asked his wife if she had shown them the smokehouse. When she said “no,” he asked her to take them out to see it. Bewildered, she did as he said and showed them the rows of salmon slowly smoking in the shed behind the house. When the three of them returned, he looked over and said to his wife “you didn’t leave them in long enough, they’re still white.” Everyone collapsed laughing and for a moment he was a man with a sense of humour and not a man dying of a catastrophic illness.
People we encountered often called us “angels.” Humour flies in the face of that. It mitigates against the work becoming precious. The saying attributed to Abe Lincoln “I laugh because I must not cry” has a ring of truth to it. We found humour in the absurd and could share things with each other in a way we couldn’t with friends or family. I think it just helped us cope.
I love the ending of your book, when the Egyptian God of Writing, Thoth, tells you “You’re on your own with death.” I’ve always thought that to be the case. Is our final task on this Earth to figure out how to accept that reality, preferably with some modicum of grace?
Yes, it is our final task. And, I’m not sure it is a task that one can prepare for completely in advance. There will be surprises and unforeseen circumstances and what we may have imagined in advance may or may not be possible. A friend recently asked me if I was less afraid of death having worked with it for years and my answer was mixed. On one hand, I’ve seen so much that I have way more ways to imagine what death could look like – the good and the nasty; on the other hand, at least with expected deaths, I saw that most people met their deaths without the struggle that one might fear or expect. In my experience, I saw that the dying most often enter into a kind of altered state in their last days. Maybe it’s that the body takes over. By the time things are shutting down people are often unconscious and so are spared the “bigger picture” in the way the living are not spared.
Of the few people I saw who fought right to their last breath, family often said that was true to their nature and couldn’t imagine it any other way. You have to remember, though, that I saw people dying in a hospice with excellent supports. The reality of dying in an under-staffed hospital might be quite different.
The analogy of birth makes sense to me. We labour to be born and we labour to die. Childbirth may be painful, but if it were intolerable no mother would have more than one child. The work of labour is so focused that other things disappear – I saw this exact thing with the dying. So, while I have no illusions about how we can die, I also know that most people do it with a modicum of grace.
When I first started working with the dying I didn’t believe in euthanasia. Over the years, I’ve changed my mind about that. I don’t think there’s “one” best way to die. For some people, probably myself included, I think the knowledge that there is a choice about the timing of our deaths could be a very good thing. We don’t have control but we can be active participants in our dying.
Who knows? I may well go out kicking and screaming. I have no wisdom to impart. The things I learned about embracing death and helping others turn toward it may be of absolutely no help to me with my own death.
It’s a funny business this death business. We just don’t know!