Death is like silence
Trigger warning: suicide
Silence is like death. Both absences. Absence of sound, absence of life. I remember when we kept pigs. We hadn’t been in Smokeytown long. One, maybe two years. I had started grinding my teeth at night from the anxiety of city life and it took six months of being out here before I could give up my mouth guard. Six months of remembering how to be with trees.
We were married then. About to set off on our honeymoon when it came over me. Suddenly, I wanted pigs. Piglets to be precise. We had kept goats, one sheep, ducks and chickens growing up but never pigs.
I brought them home the back of our station wagon, squealing all the way. They terrified me. They were not docile like sheep, not agile like goats. They were loud, and bullish, and freakishly alert.
From the start they were destined to become bacon. The point was to raise our own meat; we had the space for it. But we weren’t prepared for how attached we’d become. They were our children, before we had children. Loyal and affectionate as dogs.
Still, we hired a man to come out and slaughter them. His rifle did a dance with the little ones snout, letting it be curious, sniffing and being sniffed, until the two came to rest — snout below, barrel above, casually resting between the eyes. Only then did he pull the trigger. The shock of it stalled me. My engine cut out. Brain went offline. I, who had witnessed death so many times as a child, even taken life myself, I found it catch at the back of my throat and stick there till it hurt. I wanted to make a sound, hoarse, throaty, like the bark of the grey heron flying above, muffled by wind. Instead I gagged.
Down in the back corner where the three trees stood, I looked out over the lumpy bed of tree tops. Felt the soft kiss of sky. Let the breeze lick my tears. My heart expanded then, silently searching for the dead. But it found nothing. Their bodies lay limp and their lives were just gone. Snuffed out.
Some months later my childhood best friend suicided. My mother came over with the news. She sounded incredulous as she said, ‘Helen just called. Elizabeth hung herself in a tree.’ I felt she had hit me and collapsed on the floor.
It was some time before I had the strength to stand again. It was some time before I had the strength to stand again. And then at her funeral an old family friend asked if I had been close to her and I lost myself to my grief while he backed off, apologising, as if funerals were not an appropriate place to cry.
Her life was over. But unlike the pigs I still felt her with me. I felt her in every part of my body. I saw her in the shock of dark hair on her infant daughter’s head, in her sister’s bright eyes, in her mother’s sunken cheeks. She was lost to us but she was still here. And I wondered how it could be that these two deaths could come to me so differently.
When my mother got married for the third time she had a Quaker wedding. We all sat in silence for an hour in a circular room, feeling the air shift with each tiny flicker of an eyelid.
I was afraid of what I would find there, in the silence. Afraid of what it would do to me. It felt vast and empty. Would I be swallowed up? Eaten alive? Would I be cast out? Made to look a fool in front of everyone by making the first, the only, the sound that shattered the silence? I felt the silence like a shadow over me, taking away both heat and light, like the nothing in the Never Ending Story, ready to subsume me. But it didn’t.
Instead it developed texture. Within the silence I noticed sounds — a lawn mower cutting, birds in the bushes, tittering, the scratch and tear of banksia against brick. I began to hear the gentle murmur of bodies all crammed in. The strange fluctuations of heat and light growing more and more intense as each body intermingled with air, and in the air intermingled with the bodies of those in front or beside or behind so that we were all tangled up together, moving like waves in an inwards outwards flow; the beauty of it becoming more and more stifling until someone got up and opened the door.
No one spoke and yet the silence assumed form. Now it had the shape of a series of known actions. Now that of a rising and shifting sea. I wondered if it would go on like this into infinity, ever changing, defying reason or thought.
And is death, after all, like silence? Becoming not an absence but a presence. A space in which to arrive, unprepared, but ready none the less. If so, what happened to the two pigs whose presence vanished the moment they died? And if not, why did Elizabeth not go? Is she a ghost? Will she settle here in this earthly realm and never find rest?
I can feel the sadness still. The longing for answers. As if afraid again of what I will find in the place beyond fear. For if I enter into death like I entered into the silence, willingly, but not without trepidation, will it open up to me, creating wave upon wave of sound, texture, beauty? Like the inside of a shell, spiralling inwards, towards its love for the sea.
