We have all experienced these: Feeling small in a meeting for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. The disappointment of missed expectations from a friend or lover or a child. The sorrow of choices: the loss of a job or the need to move. Social disregard or lack of recognition. Suddenly feeling mortal as our bodies begin to age and deteriorate. The surgery we must have as a result.
You know the feeling: that little (or not so little) tightening in one’s throat that says that something has been lost, something has died. A tiny shift in your universe, your relationships, the pattern of your life has changed, and you won’t be the same again. “Tiny” deaths. It hurts.
What is much more preferable is this: Petit Mort– also little death– but in beautiful French (everything is more beautiful in French). The moment of ecstasy when making love—the orgasm—the release comes, and our bodies and our minds are electrified and transformed and beautifully lost. In that moment, we are on a threshold. A threshold which is a kind of death, a release, and a pause we cannot quite grasp. We are unconscious, though awake. Utterly human. Nothing else exists at that moment. We are intensely in our bodies and even our faces look physically distorted as though we are in a kind of agony. We are also vulnerable then, and if we are lucky, we want to hold that moment for as long as we can. It is fleeting, though–hard to grasp, hard to describe– even though it is one of the most profound feelings we humans can experience. We want to touch it and hold the physical reactions for as long as we can. The petit mort, that little death is joy.
Recently, I have been in conversations with my clients as they prepare for–as one of them calls it– “the big one.” As we reflect on their lives, often we speak of these “little” losses, psychic “deaths” which come up in their recounting of their lives, their stories, their relationships. We talk about how life is in many ways, a series of small deaths. I am glad that they are willing to do this; recognition of pain also opens us up for the recognition of joy.
There is nothing tiny about remembering these experiences. It is not easy to hurt, to be vulnerable and to list regrets. My patients are brave, they are taking the risk of talking about death in a culture which does not support that kind of openness.
It is not surprising that in our busy go-go-go culture, we tend to want to avoid the “pause” for sadness as much as possible. Especially during the past two years, we have been numb and inert to passages as we have struggled through Covid and reckoning. Most of us are trying to get re-centered and past that. So, at the time of death and dying, that is a habit which is hard to break. As a client told me a few months ago, “I didn’t spend my life as a drug addict so that I could feel when I was dying.”
He and I ended up having a wonderful conversation about how it might be worth the challenge. We began to talk about the joyful times in his life; his youthful, sensual beauty and his blossoming into being a sexual creature; (he was very handsome), the beautiful woman who found him. He grieved both the joy of that significant relationship and the sadness and pain that it was lost. He spoke of the ecstasy he felt the first time he held his daughter, the pleasure of being a successful businessman and community leader and the passion he still had for the “love of his life” who left him because of his choices. At times, even the joy was overwhelming, and he wept as I held him. I was convinced, and he was as well, that it was through the recapturing of the joyful passage, that petit mort, that he was able to grasp the sorrows of his life and embrace them as well. He was able to forgive himself for the wrong that he had done to himself and others. The last time I visited him, he said that he felt that he was on a threshold (his word), ready to let go and die. Which he did.
As I continue my work as an end-of-life doula, I have become more attuned to the thresholds, the “pauses,” the petit mort in the process of dying. In a paradox of the calm and quiet as we wait for death to come, there is also an energy, almost electric, as the air shifts in anticipation of the enormous event about to occur. At times, it is a tangible feeling in the room. It is a fleeting moment; an invisible shadow cutting through the air—a whisper– and the more precious because of that. On that threshold, we pause.
To do anything less diminishes both the joy and the sadness of each life.
The poet, Dan Gilmore (and one of my favorite people) captures a version of these thresholds so beautifully in his book, Love Takes a Bow:
In this rapt moment before sleep,
in that haunting silence that comes
with evening rain, you pull him closer
and rest your hand on his back.
Your breath moth-wings on his neck
and he says he likes it when you touch him.
The moon peeks in from the window’s
dark corner, and as you stare at the rivulets
on the pane, it seems important to understand,
to discover order and purpose there, signs
of courage, even helplessness as they intersect,
stop, dart left and right, arrive and disappear.
But you find nothing—no significance,
not a hint of forethought, no rhyme,
no reason why rain falls here and not there,
why you can feel so much bliss one moment
And be terrified and alone the next, by what
miracle the noise in us becomes song,
why, when we learn to dance, we can’t stop leaping?
And why we die, mid-leap. It seems so perfectly imperfect–
this moment when we taste the bread and wine
Of ourselves, when we receive
the blessing of not knowing just before
we join the soft waters of sleep.