Bamboo traps are used for catching fish. When you get the fish, you can forget the trap. Snares are used for catching hares. When you get the hare, you can forget the snare. Words are used for catching meanings. When you get the meaning, you can forget the words. How can I find someone to talk to who has forgotten the words? — Zhuangzi
Elee sat up in bed. It was just before dawn, our third day in the hospice. Outside, the sky was washed with grey. I had been awake for a while, sitting in the chair next to the bed, reading my book. Hearing Elee stir, I looked up. “Are you okay?” I asked, keeping my voice down, so as not to disturb the other people on the ward. “Do you want anything?”
“I want a purple mango,” Elee said, her voice made faint by swollen lymph nodes.
“A purple mango?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “A purple mango.”
“Okay,” I said. I put my book down and nodded as if I understood, although I hadn’t understood anything.
Elee wasn’t fooled. She repeated the sentence, stopping after every word for emphasis. “I. Want. A. Purple. Mango.”
I looked at the table at the foot of the bed. There were some raspberries brought by a friend the day before. I reached for the plastic container.
“No,” Elee said, a hint of sharpness in her voice. “Not raspberries. A purple mango.”
__________
It was terrifying how quickly it happened. Less than a week ago, Elee was at home. By then, we had adjusted to the terminal cancer diagnosis, and we were trying our best to find a way forward. The illness was taking its toll, but the doctors told us Elee might still have months to live.
It was an early summer evening, a Sunday, when I took Elee in her wheelchair for a walk down to the Meadows. It was a place that she had always loved, a strip of green that followed the line of the canal and the river, a truce between the city and the countryside, haunted by foxes and herons, crayfish lurking in the shadows under the bridges. But this evening, Elee seemed distracted, bored even. “Let’s go back,” she said. So I wheeled her home. I put the kettle on while she lay on the sofa. “I feel strange,” she said. “Maybe I’m just dehydrated.”
An hour later, she was feeling worse, and we called the cancer helpline. They said we should get to the hospital. That night, the hospital kept her in. Then they said they would extend her stay a second night, just in case. But after two days, things had gotten worse still, and the hospital found a place for Elee in the hospice.
It was then we knew she was never coming home.
__________
The discharge from the hospital took a while. We waited several hours for the paperwork to be signed off, and then for several more hours for an ambulance that never came. Eventually, in the late afternoon, I drove Elee to the hospice myself. We arrived feeling ragged, but the hospice staff were kind and welcoming. They made Elee comfortable and got her settled in. I went home that night, and when I visited the following day, the hospice staff said to me, “You can stay as well if you like. You’ll have to sleep in a chair, and it won’t be that comfortable, but you are very welcome.”
I went back home to make some phone calls, fill up the cat’s food bowl, and stuff the things I needed into a small bag: changes of clothes, a few snacks, toothpaste and toothbrush, a blanket, a copy of the Zhuangzi I was picking my way through in classical Chinese. I didn’t know how long I would be there in the hospice, waiting for the end. Already, time itself was starting to become strange, as if life was holding its breath. What do you pack, when you know the time is so unthinkably brief, and so unthinkably long?
In the hospice, I adjusted to the new rhythm of our shared life. Visitors came and went. When Elee slept, tired out through the illness and the drugs, I read Zhuangzi, or walked in the gardens where the apples were ripening on the branches of the apple trees, or sat in the hospice café and drank cups of tea I neither wanted nor needed, just because it was something to do. And when Elee was awake, and we had time to ourselves, we talked. Because talking is what we had always done, for all our thirteen years together.
At first, our hospice conversations were practical. We discussed who was looking after the cat. I gave updates on the carpet-layers, who were putting down the new stair carpet. We talked about relatives and friends who were coming to visit. But as Elee’s liver broke down, her blood chemistry in disarray, our conversations became increasingly disjointed and strange. Things became tangled. Elee’s voice was fading. When she spoke at all, it was in whispers. In riddles, like an oracle. I found myself thinking of Zhuangzi, of how words are snares and traps for meaning. And I wondered: how do you trap meaning when you find yourself snarled up in the tangled intricacies of language?
“A purple mango?” I asked.
Elee checked herself. “No,” she said. “Not a purple mango.”
“Not a purple mango?”
Elee frowned and shook her head. There was a pause, an awkwardness. This failure to communicate felt so unfamiliar.
Then Elee spoke. “This is all very perplexing,” she said. The sentence seemed funny in its understatement. Perhaps this was why she started to giggle. She leaned into me, and I felt her shake with laughter. I hugged her back and I laughed too. Because what could be more ridiculous than this vertiginous slide of our conversations into confusion, this absurdity of our efforts to make ourselves understood when we had always understood each other so well? Who wouldn’t laugh?
After a while, Elee was still again. “So what do you want?”, I asked her.
Suddenly, Elee was serious. “I just want people to stop asking so many questions,” she said. Then she started to cry.
__________
Only six weeks before, I had sat at the front of a packed university auditorium, listening to Elee give a public lecture. She had recently finished a PhD in museum studies, carrying out research at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. For her research, she gave digital cameras to four and five-year-old children, and sent them zooming around the museum, snapping pictures. Then she interviewed the children about their photographs. For Elee, each photo was a tiny snapshot of a child’s world, a glimpse into their experiences, their enthusiasms, and their individual relationships with the world. Children, Elee always insisted, were not merely adults in training. They were persons, full and complete, in that very moment. Elee’s research was simple, it was beautiful, and it was profound. And whenever she spoke about it, she did so with the kind of passion that makes you interested in things you didn’t know you were interested in.
Standing on the stage of the auditorium, in front of her audience, Elee was entirely at home, her confidence the result of years of working as a science communicator in museums. She told stories about her research. She made jokes. The crowd laughed as she described how one child referred to a tuna skeleton as “swimming dinosaur bones,” and how another talked about a taxidermy moose “trying to headbutt the light.” And I sat there astonished by how relaxed and at ease she seemed, even though she knew she was dying, and she knew that time was so very short.
At the end of the lecture, Elee chatted with the crowd. She took cards from people who invited her to come and speak elsewhere. Back home later that evening, she was exhausted. Nevertheless, the following day, she followed up assiduously, sending emails, putting people in her address book. She still hoped there would be a chance to do more.
__________
On her first full day in the hospice, Elee was lucid and curious. She sat up in bed and interrogated the doctor, taking a scientist’s interest in what was happening to her body. The doctor explained how chemical changes as her liver broke down would affect her mind. There was a significant possibility of hallucinations. She would lose cognitive functions, one by one. In this great unravelling of life, words would become unstuck from meanings, and everything would become unstuck from everything else. And as the doctor explained all this, Elee and I listened carefully.
But although we knew what to expect, the speed of it surprised us. Hour by hour, our conversations became more broken and fragmented. Meaning seemed increasingly inaccessible. It was frustrating and hard to witness, this feeling that sentence by sentence, there was something Elee wanted to tell us, if only we could prise open the snare of language, and see what was inside.
For those of us who came to sit with Elee — to spend time with her so close to the end — we often tried to fill the gaps by asking endless questions. How are you doing? Are you feeling okay? Can I do anything to help? We asked out of our concern for her welfare. We asked out of our own powerlessness. We asked to keep our fear at bay. And even when Elee told us to stop, we found it hard to hold back. By the evening, when the kitchen porter came to ask what Elee wanted to eat, she had given up on questions. The porter asked if she would like soup. Elee nodded. Fish? Another nod. Beef? Macaroni cheese? Dessert? Nod, nod, nod, her lips mouthing, “Yes.”
The porter laughed. “So want everything?” he said. Elee nodded again, frowning a little.
When the food came—they brought macaroni cheese and a dessert. She didn’t eat anything but left the food to go cold on the table beside her bed.
__________
“The body decays, the mind follows it,” Zhuangzi said. “Can you deny this is a great sorrow? This is how human life is: is it always this bewildering?”
The word Zhuangzi uses for “bewildering” is máng. The character — 芒 — represents the awn of a head of grass. It is the hazy bristle, the beard you find on a stalk of barley. I think of a field of barley shimmering in the breeze, the air becomes indistinct. I think of how you can’t see the precise boundaries where the barley stops and the air begins. There is fuzz, confusion, softness.
Life is máng, and death, too, is máng. Both stages of life are profusion and complexity, entanglement and mess; both bewilderment and blur, like the awn at the end of a stalk of barley. How can you tell where the joins are?
And if, as Zhuangzi says, there is great sorrow here, the sorrow is not that of despair. It is closer to uncertainty, a puzzlement in the face of the fact that life and death are so damned hard to pin down. Zhuangzi, contemplating life and death, asks: “How is it only me who is bewildered?” Then he pushes his perplexity further still, asking, “Are there any others who are not bewildered?”
__________
One night close to the end, I woke around six to find Elee restless. I had slept surprisingly well, and it took a few moments to shake off the night’s sleep, to see Elee sitting up in bed, a look of urgency on her face. “Morning,” I said.
Elee looked at me, and there was a challenge, a lucidity, that I found unsettling. “I want to go outside,” she said.
“Now?”
“Now.”
“I’ll get a wheelchair,” I told her.
“Okay,” Elee said.
I stood up and started to fold up my blanket. “Go!” Elee said, impatient with my slowness.
I went out of the ward and found a wheelchair, wheeling it back in. Then I helped Elee off the bed and into the chair. I put some blankets around her because although it was summer, the morning was cold, the grass damp with dew. Then I pushed her out of the ward and through the hospice café, where the serving hatches were still down, out through the door into the garden. I walked her down the path that led around the pond, and we stopped under the apple trees. We breathed in the early morning air.
For a while, we were both silent. Then Elee tipped back her head and looked up at the grey morning sky. Paused for a few seconds. And when she spoke, her voice was stronger, more powerful than it had been for days, as if she had been saving everything for this moment.
“I am washed and bathed in my own sky,” she said.
I felt winded, a tightness in my chest: a visceral bodily response to the weight of things, even if we do not know what they mean. For reassurance, I touched Elee’s shoulder. She shifted softly, just enough to acknowledge my touch. Then I closed my eyes, feeling the cool morning air, hearing the rambling conversations of the morning birds.
The words made no sense. They made perfect sense. Beyond traps and snares, I stood on the brink of something that was not quite meaning, nor was it meaning’s absence. The quiver and pulse of life and death, half in shadow and half in light, the shapes we cannot fully make out, the unrepeatable pattern of a moment, the bewildering, beautiful blur of things.
I opened my eyes again. And I stood there in silence under the apple trees, listening to the coming and going of Elee’s breath, feeling the warmth of her shoulder under my touch, looking up into the grey dawn.
