June Leavitt, PhD is a retired adjunct professor in the Overseas Students Program at Ben Gurion University (Israel) in mystical literary traditions as well as an author who directs creative writing workshops.
I watched the head nurse at the hospice settling my husband into a freshly-made bed after patient intake. I wanted to protest that this meager person was not truly him. He possessed inner and outer treasures that could never fit into the drawer allotted to him which could contain, after I unpacked, only his towel, toothbrush, shampoo, and liquid soap.
Since then, I am struck by the ultimate reduction of the totality of a human life. Even before committal to grave or a container for ashes, we see human life pruned back into pinched finitude. More than ever now, I am aware of a parallel between this and the art of writing tight narrative.
As I revised earlier drafts of my personal essay “A Crash Course in the Wonders of Dying” (Intima, Fall 2022), I took out a long section about the patient intake at hospice. I also removed my husband’s last day on earth when he asked me to bring ice cream to the sad boy on the other side of the curtain.
I believe that the strongest narratives are those that are able to convey not only the pain of reduction, but also the powerful life force that has been removed. While I am not sure I have done this at all, Beda Higgins, in her story “A Life” (Intima, Spring 2021), does so with great sensitivity. Sister Josephine, diagnosed with breast cancer, will not only have her breast surgically removed. After surgery, she feels her very soul cut away:
Her physical recovery was uneventful, but, for Sister Josephine, something else had been chopped off. Often, in the middle of the night she tried to pray, but there was only darkness… She fretted her crucifix, holding it for courage, but felt none.
Her spiritual being that had filled her with boundless joy now constricts into fear. When the cancer returns a few years later, she is rushed to the confines of the hospice. There, she expunges her assumed name Sister Josephine. She wants to be contained in her Christened name Anne. Then, when little of her life force remains and she sheds tears, a thin line appears on the horizon. Upon this extreme reduction of endless space, a heron of infinite mystery appears. In its elegant form, she perceives all that has been deleted from her life.
Every morning thereafter to the background thrum of finitude, Anne alone sees what cannot fit into that unforgivingly tiny space of death bed in the hospice.
June Leavitt, PhD is a retired adjunct professor in the Overseas Students Program at Ben Gurion University (Israel) in mystical literary traditions as well as an author who directs creative writing workshops. “A Crash Course in the Wonders of Dying” was drafted in the hospice over a period of two months as she sat by her husband’s bedside, where profound teachings about love and forgiveness, the nature of hope and the soul could be learned from nurses, patients, their visitors and from her husband's journey as well.