The Jester of Death came to me in the world between dreams.
He wore a mask, made of white bone with bright stripes across the cheeks, like a candy skull in November. Behind the mask I could see glimpses of a spirit-human form, shape-shifting from one face and body to another, the mask all the while remaining steady as the glint of a black top hat, set askew, likewise sat strangely still, even as the spirit flickered and blended into the darkness that surrounded us and then became visible once more.
Death’s Jester spoke. Do you know why I am here?
I hesitated. Did I enter into some compact with Death merely by acknowledging its messenger? If I waited long enough might he simply vanish? Yet I could feel my delay feeding the Jester’s impatience.
“You’re here because I chose to sleep in the land of the dead.”
I stopped. There was more, and he knew it.
And?
“Because I invoked you.”
I had. That day, in the late afternoon, I had been trying to write a poem as I climbed the mountainside up to where I now slept. At that time, I was only a few lines in, and found myself chanting them repeatedly in rhythm with my footfall:
Let me be a doula of death
To American empire
Let me ask what is needed
To aid in its unraveling
The hill had grown steep, the chanting reduced to something like:
Let me be
A doula
Of death
Let me…
Be a…
Doula…
Of…
Death…
Like most poems I write, it remains unfinished. But I wrote more lines after I stopped for the night and pitched camp. They included:
In the forest the trees have been taken
Even where they leave some standing
Promising more will grow
The necrosis is clear and the skin of the earth
Slides away in a shower
My camp, such as it was, sat at the base of my next ascent. I had arrived mid-evening, stared up the hillside, and reluctantly admitted I lacked the energy to climb. So I found myself on the compressed and trampled dirt of a recent logging effort, all plant life beneath the surviving trees stripped off, bits of bark and branch scattered every which way over the broken ground. Agitation hummed in the air. I tried to ignore the sensation, to reason myself into believing this a perfectly acceptable place to stop for the night. Certainly it counted as “Leave No Trace”—the traces had been left already, and indeed, the dead soil would likely begin washing downhill in the next big storm, only a day away.
My reasons really meant nothing. I was exhausted, so I stopped. Yet there was no denying it: I was camping in the land of the recently and restlessly dead, and I knew it.
Do you wish to remain with the living? The Jester inquired, his voice sonorous as a phosphorescent sheen lit up his spinning being/non-being behind the mask.
“Yes!” I said, as clearly as I could. I wanted no mistakes on the matter. “I did not mean to bring you here… No, I do not wish to join the dead.”
Then tell me what you must do to keep on living.
He looked unsurprised as I gave the short list of my own personal demons—which I somehow knew to produce as my answer, and which I shall omit here, for my own sake; as is the nature of such things, they are likely to sound trivial to other ears, yet as they are my demons, their shadows loom large for me—but I understood, as he did, that wrestling and challenging them, rather than succumbing to my own fear of them, would serve as the marker of my dedication to the realm of the living.
When I had finished, he nodded. Well then, clock’s ticking!
With a laugh the Jester vanished, but as he did and the darkness around him turned back into the mere darkness of night, it seemed clearly understood between us that I had been warned about careless invocations and inappropriate camping spots both. And though he was gone, I knew the Jester would be watching, on Death’s behalf.
I think of the Jester’s rather unfunny visit with some frequency. I say “visit” as I do not feel I can rightfully call it a dream. If a dream, it was a lucid one, in which I was aware throughout of the absurdity of the vision; aware also of where my body lay on my sleeping pad in my tent, and yet how it seemed to have been pulled into an inky blackness that was its own space simultaneously present with the world of the tent and the sparse trees about it. Whether one calls it a dream or a vision doesn’t matter so much; regardless, one does not typically go talking about encounters with Death’s messengers. Except, perhaps, on Halloween (or Samhain—pronounced sah-win—as the neopagans like to call it, with all their talk of the “thinning of the veil”). When else but Halloween to talk about how our modern world is haunted, both because we deny Death—refuse to see it when it shows up before our very eyes—and at the same time because we fail to let the dead be?
Readers of George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo will know the lesson: failure to recognize the dead and let them be as such—to aid them in their dying when needed—leads them not only to haunt us, but locks them into a world of unhappy ghosts, unable to complete their transformation from one state of being to the next. Both the dead and the living suffer.
We cause death so recklessly these days—trees, people, whole species—that there is hardly time to let the departed settle. And in the grief that goes by many new names—be it solastalgia or eco-anxiety—we see the refusal of many a person to reconcile themselves with our new reality. Like Lincoln we return again and again to the cemetery in disbelief, only our graveyard is everywhere: the forest slope, the river canyon, the front yard with plants smothered by smoke and heat.
We do not let the dead rest, and they return the favor.
So how could we expect the era of climate change to be anything other than a haunting? We have literally torn the dead up from their graves to burn them. No wonder it’s all havoc in the atmosphere—we’ve set the ghosts of dinosaurs and massive prehistoric plants to wander loose across the globe.
I’ve no interest in carelessly calling the Jester back for another visit. Still, I’ve wondered since that night, a little over a year ago now, if there isn’t something to the notion that we might all be called—not, as so much activist lingo encourages us, to fight or resist all that is changing—but to honor all that is passing, and to actively aid Death in putting to rest a good many things that presently exist but whose time is rightfully up (American empire among them). Maybe the idea of being a doula of death isn’t just a poetic gesture, but an appropriate role for these times, an entirely practical approach for relating to all that we’re losing, understanding that death is but one form of change, and that change is the essence of life. Maybe the way out of our haunted epoch is to cling less closely to our dead, that we might pass more quickly through the bardo, and on to the next era of life.
Let me be
A doula
Of death
Let me…
Be