My readers will forgive me, I hope, if I put up this tribute to the love of my life, Elizabeth, and then take a day or two to reflect on my loss. Tomorrow, 8th June 2011, will be four years since Elizabeth died. If it hadn’t been for her I wouldn’t be writing a blog now, for only Elizabeth’s love and encouragement enabled me to think that perhaps, after all, I might have something to say. If you think this is too personal (or too sappy, as Elizabeth would say), then pass by. This is about someone whose life meant more to me than my own.

Elizabeth died on 8th June 2007, in Zürich, Switzerland, with the help of Dignitas, the assisted dying organisation founded in 1998 by the human rights lawyer Ludwig Minelli. (Coincidentally, the disease which was to cause Elizabeth so much suffering and heartache began in the same year, on 6th September 1998, two weeks following her 30th Birthday.)  It was about 1:00 o’clock in the afternoon when she died. She died, with great courage, dignity, and peace, lying in my arms. We were listening to the Snow Patrol song “Chasin’ Cars,” which includes the verse, “If I just lay here, if I just lay here, will you lie with me, and just forget the world.” She might have listened to Richard Strauss’ “Beim Schlafengehen”, with its soaring and hauntingly beautiful:

Und die Seele, unbewacht,
will in freien Flügen schweben,
um im Zauberkreis der Nacht
tief und tausendfach zu leben.*

… but for those words, that reflected so closely what she wanted to do, to lie enfolded in my arms as she drifted off into nothingness, forgetting the world. (And it would have been Jessye Norman’s “Beim Schlafengehen,” Elizabeth’s favourite contralto.)

[*A rough non-literal translation (my own): "And the soul, unguarded, wants to soar in unbounded flight, so, in the magic circle of the night, to live a thousand times more deeply." It is very difficult to speak about death, by the way, without presuming an afterlife, which is probably one of the reasons why the idea of an afterlife is so durable.]

Snow Patrol, Chasing Cars

Jessye Norman, Beim Schlafengehen

It was, in fact, nothingness that she sought, because, for her, to think that life would go on, as the religious often believe, would have been not only to value her suffering and misery, but to endorse it as a positive good, and this she could not do. As I felt her life ebb away, all the joy and happiness that I had known with her was ebbing away too. It has never returned, though, indeed, memories of joy remain, and the sense of oneness will, I think, never fade away. Elizabeth made all the arrangements, down to airline tickets, hotel reservations, limousine service — as always, everything was meticulously planned. She even talked to a Bestattungshaus Direktor in Zürich. I was sitting in my study and I heard her say on the telephone: “Well, that seems all arranged then. Thank you. You’ll be seeing me, but I won’t be seeing you.” She had also chosen the day for her memorial service — 23 June 2007 — and had made all the arrangements with the ”Middleton Funeral Home” (Middleton, Nova Scotia). She had even read over the words that I was going to say, so they were her thoughts as much as they were mine. Elizabeth was self-directed, determined, decisive.

After the memorial service, in addition to the grief which still clung to me like a shroud, I was subject to a police enquiry, and met a barrage of attention from the news media. Much of the attention was stirred up by Alex Schadenburg and the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition. While some of the attention was unwanted, Elizabeth had chosen to make what she did public, by way of her obituary, so that there might be another chance for Canadians to discuss the issue of assisted dying. Aside from the fact that the RCMP took an interest, because Schadenburg asked them to check to see that no Canadian laws were violated, quite consciously and deliberately using the police to intimidate those who might be considering a similar course — and just to make that clear, said that he would do it again — the attention that Elizabeth’s story received right across Canada was, I think, greater than we had expected. One interesting footnote to the story is that Schadenburg received so much bad press that he wrote a letter of self-justification to the local paper in Halifax, arguing that this was a social issue of great importance, etc. etc., but failing to mention, as is common with this kind of religious intervention in public affairs, that the main reason for the existence of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition is the Vatican stand opposing assisted suicide and euthanasia — the pretended “pro-life” stance. The duplicity of the religious voice is, of course, the norm, but it is, in itself, morally deplorable.

As I said, Elizabeth read over what I would say at her memorial. I spoke briefly about our love and our life together, but it was, by her choice, a condemnation of the religious beliefs that made it impossible for her to receive assistance in dying in Canada, a fact which meant that she died earlier than she would otherwise have chosen to die, since she did not dare take a chance to leave it too late, and be unable to travel. Being trapped in her body was a fate far worse than death for her. These are the last few minutes of that address:

I wrote a cycle of poems about a year after Elizabeth had died which I entitled “Flesh and Fire: Elizabeth – A Requiem.” I have shared a few of the poems with readers of this blog already. This poem, entitled simply “You,” is the closing poem of the cycle. I place it here as a tribute to the remarkable woman who made a world with me. On our gravestone are the words, taken from a favourite film, The Bridges of Madison County – favourite, because it expressed so well the oneness that we knew, and the sense of shared identity that we experienced, deeper than any supposedly religious or mystical state, I think, which never left us for the twenty years we were together: “Certainty like this comes but once in a lifetime.” Here is the poem:

You

I said I knew the meaning
and the answer that we knew.
Besides the silence, and the dying,
recall the real meaning — you.

You took a broken man and made him whole;
you loved him back from a lifetime of self-doubt
and empty dreams;
you gave him love without question,
loyalty without stint,
encouragement without restraint;
you became so at one with him,
while never losing you,
that I can still feel the closeness and the warmth,
still sense the smile,
still turn and hope to see you radiant
with that sparkling inner fire
that made a world with me.

You were the answer and the myst’ry,
you were the meaning and the purpose, you,
just you,
and me, of course, joined to the I of you.
There was no deeper meaning, beyond us two,
at least no deeper than the love we knew;
nothing beyond, no transcendence to construe,
nothing to last beyond our when and where and who.

Perhaps a few memories,
a tear, a thought or two –
a friend’s, or someone else’s that we knew –
a stone, a restful grave,
where all the radiance of our bodies,
the love that burned within us,
the fire that welded us in one,
is staunched in the deep earth from which we come.

I used to fret about being buried,
dug deep in a foreign land.
I passed towns and villages,
and fields of ripened grain,
I surveyed forest and river,
seacoast and plain,
and knew that I looked for my place on earth in vain –
until I came back and stood above your simple grave,
knowing that you had seen it too,
with your own eyes, a month or two before,
and knew at last that here, alone,
in all the world, would be my final home,
my resting place, my country.

Here I would belong, at last,
in oblivion bound to you fast,
and belonging there, I knew,
because I had belonged with you,
in life, and in your dying too,
that the fire that raged within us
might burn in others too –
what we had known together
might be known and sung
by other hearts and bodies,
in other flames of flesh and fire,
that the world we had created might go on
in others’ worlds, not ours –
while we, beneath
the grass, unknowing sleep
for countless hours,
the pain all past,
at peace at last.

I’m not, as perhaps you can tell, a poet. The poems came to me during the summer of 2008, all in rush, almost word for word as they were written. It was a strange, beguiling experience, to sit, reading quietly, while, somewhere in the background, a poem was composing itself, and suddenly, knowing intuitively that it was finished, I would go to the computer and type the words as they had formed in my mind, all but unconsciously. I had never written a poem before — except, as I recall, a sonnet in school, as an exercise — and I have never written a poem since. The poems are, in some sense, an outpouring of my love for Elizabeth, which was and is very deep — it marks out my waking hours – and, I think, in some ways, unusual.

The alienation expressed in the poem –

I used to fret about being buried,
dug deep in a foreign land.
I passed towns and villages,
and fields of ripened grain,
I surveyed forest and river,
seacoast and plain,
and knew that I looked for my place on earth in vain –

was a very real experience until Elizabeth and I fell in love. I never belonged in Canada, and felt deracinated and out of place, and Elizabeth knew this early. One day, very early in our relationship, she came into the house with a red maple leaf — it was in the Fall — handed it to me with great seriousness, and said, “Now you have a country.” That simple gesture changed my life. After I came back from Switzerland I retraced our journey across the country, as I told Elizabeth I would do, (we had driven across Canada, from sea to sea, in 2002 and 2003), surveying, as the poem says, forest and river, seacoast and plain, and then came back, and found a little plot of ground where alone I could belong, next to the one whose life had made mine possible.

The obsequies we pay to our beloved dead are our earnest of a future — not our future, but one in which what we value can live on in others’ lives, not ours — as the poem says. That is the human hope. We can only hope that those who succeed us will place value on those things we most aspired to, and things greater than these. The real disaster of religion is placing value in another world, and despairing of this one. While we need to be aware of the limitations of our sympathies and abilities, we also need to strive to achieve those things which people have most valued in this life, forgetting about religious dreams and delusions.

As I say, the feeling that we shared never departed. Love is very often spoken of as something that flares into life and then diminishes over the years. This was not our experience. For some years Elizabeth kept a journal, which she would not let me read until after she had died. The entry for 20th January 2003 reads:

With each passing hour my love for Eric increases. Sometimes I think my heart will break with the overflow of emotion. If there were ever two people who were made for each other then it is us — we complement each other perfectly.

In this respect we were alike, and there was not a moment in all those years that I could not have said something very alike, and not a day passed that we did not share that love with each other, not one day in nearly twenty years. Without that love and joy, my life would have been a very poor thing indeed. I do not think I could have said that the balance of pleasure over pain, of good over bad, would have been a positive quantity. Now it could never be negative. I write this with gratitude for Elizabeth’s gift to me — of herself, her deep passion for life, and her love – from a well of love still as deep, and with the greatest admiration for the courageous young woman who was my wife, lover and best friend, and who lived with such passion and intensity. As she said towards the end: “My flame burned quickly, but it burned very high.”

This picture was taken in August 2006, shortly before Elizabeth tried to take her life on 6th September. I did not know, when I took it, that she had planned this to be her final picture, a special gift for me.