These near-death experiences are well documented and the similarities are striking. No one has ever reported fear or horror associated with a near-death experience, and the absence of such reports is strong evidence that the beatific claims are valid.
Biochemists tell us that the feelings of well-being are due to endomorphs, a morphine-like substance secreted by the body in time of need. Areas of the brain secrete endomorph molecules that bind to nerve endings, and the effect is to alter sensory awareness. They tell us that the light is nothing more than the hypothalamus generating electrical sparks into the brain. The chemical activities in the body that induce a feeling of peace and light at the hour of death have nothing to do with God, they tell us, and everything to do with biochemistry.
I grant the integrity of scientists and the validity of their research, but I have seen enough of life and death to suspect that this is not the whole story. There must be more to the strange species we call humanity than biochemical reactions. If there is a God, then perhaps the brain was created to release endomorphs, and the hypothalamus to release light at time of death, for the peace and comfort of the dying.
We will never know what awaits us after death. But we do know, because many people have returned to tell us, that the gentle hand of love guides us through the passage that leads from life into death.
Mrs Merton’s sister was her only living relative. I wrote to her twice, but received no reply and feared that Mrs Merton would be alone when she died. I told the nurses that we must therefore give her special love and care. On the space given for next-of-kin was also the name of Lady Tarrant, a former employer. So I telephoned the number given. The response was immediate. ‘Harriet Merton, you tell me, dying? I did not even know that she was ill! I will come tomorrow, and I will inform my sons and my daughter. They will want to know.’
Had I told the nurses that Mrs Merton needed our love because she was alone in the world? I could not have been more wrong. Mrs Merton was surrounded by love.
Lady Tarrant told me that Mrs Merton had been nanny to her three children and had been given absolute charge of them when she was abroad with her husband. When the children grew up, Mrs Merton had been retained as housekeeper. The whole family loved her, and her devotion to the family had always been well beyond what was expected of a paid servant. Lady Tarrant spent about half an hour with Mrs Merton, who afterwards said, ‘My Lady has been such a support to me in life. She was always so good, so kind. I’ve been blessed.’
It wasn’t until the sons and the daughter came that we saw the extent of their love. They were distraught, especially the youngest, Jason, a man of about thirty-five who was well dressed, competent, affluent. No one would have expected him to break down in my office – but he did. Nanny Merton meant almost as much to him as his own mother. Was she really going to die? Could nothing be done? I assured him nothing would cure her – the sarcoma had been spreading slowly, and now the bones had broken, which usually caused the malignancy to spread faster through the lymph system and the bloodstream. He broke down and wept. I told him to spend as much time as he could with his childhood nanny, because she had, we estimated, only a week or two of life left, and the presence of those who loved her would be precious.
The older brother came with his wife. Mrs Merton was surrounded by pineapples, peaches and grapes, none of which she could eat. When the orchids arrived, she murmured ‘how pretty’ and drifted off to sleep again. But when their sister arrived with her children, who had picked a bunch of forget-me-nots from the garden, Mrs Merton stretched out a frail hand and briefly returned to the world of the living.
‘Forget-me-not eyes … Never forget my Bert, my lad. Smiling and waving and marching off,’ she murmured. The children didn’t understand. How could they?
Before going off duty that evening, I went into the side ward to see Mrs Merton. It was quiet in there. Time had never seemed so measureless, silence had never seemed so intense as it did while I was feeling her pulse, feeling the slow, ever slower pulse of mortality.
A nurse had put the orchids on the windowsill, and placed the forget-me-nots in a small vase on the bed table where she could see them. Mrs Merton sensed my presence and opened her eyes. ‘I will soon be going to my Bert,’ she murmured, looking at the vase. ‘He’s waiting for me, I know. Waiting, my dear lad.’
‘I’m sure he is. I have not the slightest doubt he will be there to greet you,’ I said.
Slowly she turned her eyes from the spring flowers to meet mine. ‘One thing bothers me, though,’ she said softly.
I leaned closer. ‘What is it? Surely nothing can bother you?’
She made an enormous effort to speak. ‘Sister, do you think he will know me? My hair was chestnut brown when he went marching off. He loved my hair. Now it’s all grey. Do you think he will still love me?’
Close to tears, I said very slowly, ‘Mrs Merton, nothing can change love. You know that, don’t you?’ She nodded her head. ‘He is waiting for you, and he loves you. For him, you have not changed.’
A little moan of contentment was her response, and she glanced again at the forget-me-nots. Her lips moved, but her words could not be heard. Then she closed her eyes, and did not open them again.
I telephoned the younger son, Jason, and told him that Mrs Merton would probably die that night. He arrived at about 11 o’clock and sat with her through many watchful hours, and she died as the dawn of a new day was breaking.
None of us knows whether there is life after death, but the simplicity and beauty of Mrs Merton’s faith is something I have seen many, many times. It was not necessarily a religious faith – God, the Church, Heaven, were never mentioned. Mrs Merton’s faith was grounded in love. And God, we are taught, is love.
THE ADVANCE DIRECTIVE
Mrs Cunningham. The name was on the admission list for the day. Ovarian cancer, total hysterectomy at the Royal Free, and referred for radium treatment to the Marie Curie Hospital. The name rang a bell, and I remembered old Mrs Cunningham and the perpetual feud with her daughter – but was it the same person as the lady I had known when I was a junior student nurse?
Mrs Cunningham had had a minor operation, for varicose veins, I seemed to remember, the stripping of which in those days necessitated a fortnight in a hospital bed and a fortnight’s convalescence. Such a lengthy stay in hospital enabled patients and nurses to get to know each other, and she invited me to her home after her discharge. She was a very interesting lady, and also amusing in a la-di-da kind of way. Her husband had been in the diplomatic service and she had travelled all over the world with him. She had a sardonic humour and her comments were witty and pithy, and mostly directed against her long-suffering daughter, Evelyn.
Evelyn was a lady of about forty, a professional, with a first-class degree from Cambridge and a worn out expression, the latter acquired, no doubt, from her daily commute between Henley-on-Thames and London. Why they lived together, when they clearly hated each other, I could never make out. They would have been better off living apart, but they clung to each other with the horrible force of a lifetime’s habit. What had happened to Mr Cunningham I never discovered. They were both extremely reticent about him, but I gained the impression, rightly or wrongly, that he had disappeared with somebody else’s wife and a large sum of money.
One way or another, the two ladies were very hard up. They lived in a huge house in the best part of Henley-on-Thames, with a vast garden terraced down to the river, where they had a boathouse, but no boat. The house and garden were far too big for just the two of them, but they were too proud to give it up and move to something more suitable. And so they struggled on, Mrs Cunningham keeping house and tending the garden, which was really beyond her, and Evelyn earning the money, which just about kept body and soul together.
Mrs Cunningham had been all over India, Ceylon and North Africa with her husband, and as I had never been beyond the shores of England and was longing to hear about ‘those far away places with strange sounding n
ames’, I cultivated her friendship. At the time she seemed to me very old, being sixty-two, but she had obviously had a very lively and adventurous life. In Morocco, at a time when all Moslem women were heavily veiled, she had dressed as one of them, and gone into the souks alone, something that few English women would dare to do, she told me.
‘It was the time of the French Protectorate, you know.’
No, I didn’t know. What did ‘Protectorate’ mean?
‘It really means domination. “What is it worth to you, if I don’t blow up your country?”’
‘That sounds dreadful.’
‘It’s common enough. All powerful countries do it, expanding their empires. But it wasn’t all bad. The French did a lot for Morocco, and a lot for me, indirectly, because it meant that I could converse with the women in the markets in French.’
‘Tell me about it, please. I’m dying to hear.’
‘Well, you have to get used to being woken up in the middle of the night by the muezzins’ calls to prayer, cried out from the mosques.’
‘The whatzzins?’
‘The muezzins, the callers.’
‘What sort of call?’
A noise like animals howling. It’s their religion. I can’t go along with it, myself. All religions are a lot of cant, in my opinion.’
She sniffed scornfully.
‘And you have to get used to never seeing a woman. I was about the only woman in the streets. If the women left their riads at all, they had to do so in groups, for mutual protection, I suppose, though I must say I was always alone, and none of the men molested me.’
‘What is a riad?’
‘An enclosed dwelling. It’s a kind of central courtyard with the dwelling areas all around it. I always thought this arrangement was a way of keeping the women locked up, but the men reckoned it was to protect them. There’s a very fine line to be drawn between protection and domination, you know.’
‘Tell me about the men.’
‘Well, they go around in these djellabas – long gowns with pointed hoods. Half of them look like Jesus Christ, and the other half look like Judas. I don’t think I ever spoke to a man unless my husband was present. Women couldn’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Religion, perhaps. I wasn’t going to risk it. I wandered around alone and spoke to the women, but I thought I might be publicly stoned if I spoke to a man.’
‘Oh, surely not!’
‘Well, perhaps not. Perhaps I exaggerate. But I assure you, a woman could be stoned to death for adultery. Religion again! Let’s go out into the garden, dear. The sun’s come out, and you can help me to weed the rockery. It’s not often I get help. Evelyn won’t so much as lift a fork or a trowel.’
I reckoned that Evelyn probably did quite enough, earning the money, but kept my thoughts to myself.
Whilst we weeded, Mrs Cunningham continued:
‘The women did all the work in Morocco, as far as I could judge. “Women and donkeys always go heavy laden”, and by God, did they! Massive loads on their backs, and miles to walk. And if the woman had a baby on her back, the load would be carried on her head. Very often a strong young lad, a boy of fourteen or so, would walk beside her, carrying nothing. Though I must say a man would push a barrow or a truck. But he would never be seen carrying anything. He would lose face with the other men, you see.’
‘You were going to tell me about the markets.’
‘Ah yes. The souks. Fascinating. You would never see the likes here. Produce, food, animals, carpets, jewellery, ornaments – thousands of things brought in from miles around by donkey, and laid out on the sun-baked earth. Piles of fruit, fish, vegetables, meat, just stacked up on the ground. Great mounds of rice or lentils piled on a sack and weighed out by the bucket full. Meat, offal, lights, liver, brains laid on a sack, and swarming with flies, and the water seller going up and down, ringing his bell. Oh, it was wonderful! Here, for once, the women were in command, because they were the buyers. The men were the sellers, and in any economy the purchaser has the upper hand. I could have watched them for hours – the men wheedling and whining, the women firm and controlled. And the women always won.’
She leaned back on her heels and gazed up at the trees. ‘Oh, I’ve had a great life. I don’t know of any other European woman who dared to go alone into the souks, but I did. The colours, the smell of the spices, and the donkeys, the sun, and always the High Atlas mountains, snow-covered, in the distance.’
It sounded dreamy to me. I wanted to burst out of the constraint of my nurse’s training and take the first boat to Morocco. The very name of the country inspired dreams. But Mrs Cunningham was continuing:
‘The women had their fun, though, in the hammams.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The public bathhouse; hot, wet and steamy. You lie naked on the stone floor, heated from underneath by wood fires, and a bath attendant throws a bucket of water over you and starts rubbing you with soap and a rough cloth – to stimulate the follicles, they say. But, believe me, that’s not all it stimulates, I can tell you! All those women laughing and massaging each other! What happens in the men’s hammams doesn’t bear thinking of. Crowds of men and boys rubbing each other! Boys from the age of seven or eight – just think. There’s a dandelion there. Look! Try and get it out, will you?’
I had done enough weeding with my grandfather to know how to attack a dandelion.
‘Good girl. You’ve got the root. That’s more than Evelyn could have done.’
She chuckled a throaty laugh.
‘Poor Evelyn. What she needs is a good slide around in a hammam. She’s like a dried up bit of old soap – she needs a good rubbing and lathering in all that steam to soften her up a bit.’
She chuckled again, and I thought of poor Evelyn on the 5.30 from Paddington, returning to her clever and scornful mother and a few hours of guarded conversation and mutual backbiting.
But I liked Mrs Cunningham. It’s funny how you can see real nastiness in some people, especially in their relationships with others, and like them just the same. She was different, and I felt flattered that she seemed to enjoy my company.
She invited me to her house one Saturday afternoon, but when I arrived it was clear that she had forgotten, because she had gone to stay with her son, James, for the weekend, and Evelyn was there alone. I felt embarrassed and said I would go, but Evelyn pressed me to stay.
‘I suppose you’ve been hearing all about the souks and the hammams and the veiled women?’ she said.
‘Yes. Isn’t it fascinating?’
‘It probably is the first time you hear it, but when you get the same old stories over and over again, you can grow tired of them. Has she got to the one about the camel trek across the desert yet?’
‘No.’
‘She will. And the one about the time she wandered into a brothel by mistake?’
‘Wow! A brothel! That’s interesting. What happened?’
‘She’ll tell you. Nothing can be more boring than an old woman who lives constantly in the past.’
‘She’s had an interesting life.’
‘Yes, but she’s a scorpion when you get to know her. She drove my dear father into the arms of another woman, that’s for sure.’
I began to feel uncomfortable; getting involved in this female feud was something to avoid. I changed the subject.
‘She seems to have a lot of dislike for religion.’
‘Oh yes. She is a very enlightened woman, in that respect. My father was an atheist – or is, perhaps I should say. My brother and I were brought up non-believers. Really, it is the only rational way to think. Religion has had its day. I don’t know that any intelligent person can believe all that nonsense about virgin births and rising from the dead.’
I did not know how to answer. I was very young and impressionable. I had been brought up as a Christian, and had attended Sunday School, which entailed a lot of bible study, but I don’t think I was very committed. T
o hear this older woman, who was a Cambridge graduate, make such a statement shook me.
‘We are members of the British Humanist Society’ she continued.
‘What’s that?’
‘We believe that men and women are on this earth to do their best for one another, to act with goodness and kindness and justice for the common good. There is no divine intervention – that is just the wishful thinking of weaker minds.’ She glanced at me, and smiled a faintly superior smile. ‘I suppose you were brought up to believe that old business about God the Father, God the Son, etc.?’
‘Well, I suppose I was.’
I hadn’t heard anyone talk like that before, and it disturbed me.
‘Darwin proved conclusively that there is no God who made Man. Mankind has evolved over millions of years from the animal world. It’s all biology, not theology. Man made God from his imagination.’ She laughed derisively. ‘Anyway after the last war, what is there to believe? Nearly two thousand years of Christianity – “love thy neighbour as thyself” – and what did it produce? The German concentration camps.’
She had struck home. Nothing has ever horrified me as much as the newsreel pictures of the Belsen and Auschwitz victims which were first shown in British cinemas in 1945, and which I saw when I was ten years old.
‘I hadn’t thought of it like that.’
‘That’s because you were indoctrinated when you were a child. You need to be more of a free thinker.’
I felt ashamed. I didn’t know that I was indoctrinated. It was a horrid word, I thought. I wanted to be a free thinker.
‘You must take some of the newsletters of the Humanist Association. That will open up your mind. Now, let’s have a cup of tea before you go, and some cake. My mother is a good cook, I’ll say that much for her.’
I tucked into cake and biscuits, then cycled back to the hospital with a comfortably full stomach, but uncomfortable thoughts.
The next time I visited Mrs Cunningham, she was studying a document received from the British Humanist Association entitled The Right to Die.
In the Midst of Life Page 12