Life As Performance Art 152

I'm not sure when it first occurred to me that one day I am going to die. I was just a child, and the thought was truly upsetting, and frightening. I was in my twenties when I began working in palliative care, which is to say, taking care of the dying. I still had not been much affected by death. An aunt had passed away when I was thirteen, then another aunt (both by marriage) died in a car crash a year later. Then a few people I knew as a teenager, three young adults, were all killed in accidents. A close friend died from cancer when he was twenty or twenty-one. I would have been seventeen. I was already working in palliative care when my maternal grandparents passed away in their early nineties, three years apart, as well as an uncle. Then everyone I knew seemed to be dropping dead from AIDS, cancer, suicide, overdoses, murder. An occupational hazard of Christian street ministry. Then my mother died from cancer. Creeping death comes soon to everyone. I think I was seven and it was around the time of JF Kennedy's assassination. I had a nightmare shortly after of the funeral procession we had seen on TV, of a coffin, and it had opened and it was full of ashes. I think this was how a lot of people were feeling at the time and as a child unused to death this would have had on me quite an impact. I did get through this, by the way, but then there were two other assassinations that affected me: Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the dead president's brother. Those all occurred in a foreign country, but still a country that so dominated and influenced paltry little Canada that it took me till I was at least nine or ten years old to really figure out that we are not Americans. That was during the mid-sixties, of course. And the American Behemoth was still more robust than ever. I was twelve when I saw the severed leg. It was lying in a pool of blood at the emergency entrance to the Richmond General Hospital. It was late August and I was twelve years old, 1968. I was taking a walk after dinner in the still bright evening sunshine. I proceeded to the fountain in front of the hospital. Then I saw a very nicely dressed lady, around the same age as my mother, with a little boy and a little girl, and I didn't want them to see what I just saw. I took the lady aside, and in a hushed voice, I told her there was a severed leg in blood by emergency and please don't take her children near there. She thanked me, asked how I was, and I said I was okay. I didn't want those children, nor even their mom, to see what I just saw, it was so horrible. I steeled myself, and walked back towards emergency. The blood was still there, but the leg was gone. When I went home I told my mother what I saw, but she seemed dumbfounded and could do nothing to console me, though I likely appeared to be handling it well. I was probably traumatized and had already dissociated myself from it. But that could also be just psychobabble, and really I was okay, just a bit shaken. I was only thinking of the young man who had lost his leg. I became obsessed with him for a while. It had been encased in blue denim, I remember. I later learned he had been riding a motorcycle with his girlfriend at the back. I think he was in his early twenties. They were hit by a truck, I think. I followed the story as close as I could. I wanted to meet this man, to tell him how sorry I was but I had no way of finding out, and that was something that just wasn't going to be expected of a twelve year old boy. I didn't care that I had seen a severed leg. It really wasn't that horrible, after all, it was only a leg, but I only wanted to know that the person to whom it belonged would be okay. I still think about him. He would be in his seventies now, if he is still alive. Perhaps a grandfather. Who only knows? Reflecting back on my own experience, I can say that that was when I really began to become a person of faith. It wasn't from accepting or believing a creed or set of beliefs, Christian or otherwise. Rather, that was the first time that a sense of love and compassion for others really awoke in me and began to flourish. It was only by a natural and organic extension that, two years later, I would be accepting Christ as my saviour, not because I was accepting a new religion, but because now the work of love that had begun in my heart could really enter into its complete fulfillment.