It had been a difficult night. Dad had made a lot of noise, whimpering and groaning as though he were worried and in pain, even in his unconscious state. Mom, who spent her nights on a cot in his room, had barely slept a wink.
That morning, when I arrived, he was calmer; I sat alone by his bedside, holding his hand. It was warm and damp; his rough fingers were stiff like bits of wood. He was quiet and completely still. I listened to his breathing, faint and irregular; between each breath, the seconds stretched out like eternities.
And I wondered, for the first time, how you recognize death. How do you know when it has come?
“When the heart stops beating,” is probably what most people would say. When the last breath leaves the body and everything is still. That’s how we’ve traditionally thought about the moment of death; heartbeats and breathing are necessary to live, and thus we have a clear boundary between life and death. The exact second the heart stops beating is the moment death occurs. The time of death can be definitively established. Like a candle being blown out.
But that’s not necessarily what death looks like. Hearts don’t usually stop beating from one second to the next; instead, they gradually beat slower and more irregularly. They can stop beating and then start again. Blood pressures drop, oxygen levels fall. Rather than suddenly replacing life, death seeps slowly into it.
In Sweden, legal death has nothing to do with heartbeats and breathing. According to Swedish law, a person is alive as long as his or her brain shows some form of activity. The first paragraph of the law outlining the criteria to determine death in a human states that “a person is considered dead when there is complete and irrevocable cessation of all brain function.”
It’s worded that way partly to make it easier to harvest organs for transplant from a brain-dead person on a respirator, but it’s also a definition that puts a kind of value on life. Because it means life isn’t simply a biological function but rather something linked to consciousness—if not to waking consciousness, then at least to the theoretical ability to perceive things, to feel or dream.
That ability doesn’t seem to be entirely dependent on heartbeats or breathing. In 2016, a research team from the University of Western Ontario in Canada studied the moment of death in four patients. After all life support had been disconnected, brain activity was measured with electrodes. In three of the four patients, all brain activity had ceased before the heart stopped beating, in one of them no less than ten minutes before. But in the fourth patient, the opposite was true. The instruments showed brain activity ten full minutes after the last heartbeat. What was going on in there? What did those crackling peaks on the EEG curve consist of? Images? Feelings? Dreams?
In another study, conducted by Lakhmir Chawla, an American intensive care physician, heightened brain activity was recorded at the moment of death. Chawla noted increased activity for thirty seconds to three minutes from the moment the heart stopped beating in seven patients. The patients, who had been in a state of deep unconsciousness, had, in the final moments of life, suddenly demonstrated levels of brain activity almost equal to those of a fully conscious person. Since he published his report in 2009, Lakhmir Chawla has observed the same phenomenon in more than a hundred dying patients, and though his results have been questioned, they seem to lend some support to the notion of what are commonly referred to as near-death experiences. Perhaps there are mental states we don’t know about and which we will never fully understand until someone can tell us about them from beyond the grave. And perhaps these mental states are completely dissociated from the things we usually use to quantify life—heartbeats and breathing, but also time itself. At least that is a theory put forward by Arvid Carlsson, who received the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2000. Perhaps, he commented in an article, we experience at the moment of death a state that is completely dissociated from time.
“And what is that?” he asked. “It’s eternity. Right?”
My dad had no electrodes connected to his head. I didn’t know if there was any level of awareness left in him that warm morning, or what he might have been feeling or dreaming about if there was. Nor did I know how long I’d been sitting there—I had eventually lost all sense of time—but when I squeezed his hand harder, I suddenly realized I hadn’t heard him breathe in a while. I called a nurse, who came in quickly and reached for his wrist to feel his pulse. I watched her, still holding his other hand in mine. She looked back at me and nodded quietly.
THE NEXT DAY, WE WERE SITTING OUTSIDE THE HOUSE, LISTENING TO the church bells ringing for Dad less than half a mile away. We were sitting on the lawn next to the apple tree, in front of the greenhouse where the tomatoes were starting to turn red, in the exact spot where we had planted the pitchfork to drive the worms out of the ground, where we had painted the rowboat, and where Dad had put out the eel trap one day. The bell tolled dully and ponderously from what sounded like endlessly far away.
A week or so later, after the funeral, we went out to the cabin. It was another warm, stifling summer’s day. The grass was dry and in need of mowing. The osprey soared above the lake, which lay completely still in the blazing sunlight. I stood by the water’s edge with a fishing rod in my hand, staring at the bobber. Someone called me; I put the rod down on the grass, the bobber still in the water. When I came back a few minutes later, I realized something was about to pull the entire rod into the lake. It was sliding quickly through the grass, the line taut; I grabbed it at the last second and immediately felt the undulating resistance of a fish. I had time to think the feeling was familiar before the fish set off toward the water lilies. Then it suddenly turned and swam back toward the shore, and before I could react, the line had disappeared in among the big rocks next to the shoreline. And there it got stuck.
For a moment, time stood still. The taut line and the tiny, struggling movements. I coaxed and pulled, and the rod bent like a reed; I took a few steps to the side to find a new angle, tugging so hard on the line the nylon sang. I thought there were only two ways out of this situation and both had its losers, and I cursed under my breath and finally sank onto my knees, clutching the line, peering down into the murky water.
I know it was an eel because I saw it. It slowly slithered up out of the shadows and came toward me. It was large and a pale shade of gray, with black button eyes, and it looked at me as if to make sure I could see it. I let go of the line and saw the hook come out just as the eel reached the surface, then it turned and slid back into the hidden depths.
For a while, I just sat there by the water’s edge. Everything was quiet and the lake completely still; the sun sent a white sheen spreading across the water and everything beneath the surface was hidden, as though behind a mirror. What lay hidden underneath was a secret, but now it was my secret.
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3: ARISTOTLE AND THE EEL BORN OF MUD
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5: SIGMUND FREUD AND THE EELS OF TRIESTE
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7: THE DANE WHO FOUND THE EEL’S BREEDING GROUND
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9: THE PEOPLE WHO FISH FOR EEL
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11: THE UNCANNY EEL
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13: UNDER THE SEA
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15: THE LONG JOURNEY HOME
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16: BECOMING A FOOL
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17: THE EEL ON THE BRINK OF EXTINCTION
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18: IN THE SARGASSO SEA
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About the Author
PATRIK SVENSSON is an arts and culture journalist for the Sydsvenskan newspaper. He lives with his family in Malmö, Sweden. The Book of Eels is his first book.
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Copyright
THE BOOK OF EELS. Copyright © 2019
by Patrik Svensson. English translation copyright © 2020 by Agnes Broomé. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Originally published as Ålevangeliet in Sweden in 2019 by Albert Bonniers Förlag.
FIRST EDITION
Cover design by Allison Saltzman
Cover illustration © Grady McFerrin
Sea waves illustration by Marzufello/shutterstock
Digital Edition MAY 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-296883-8
Version 01222021
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-296881-4
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