A Witness to Life

The door swings out upon a vast sea of darkness and of prayer. Will it come like this, the moment of my death? Will You open a door upon the great forest and set my feet upon a ladder under the moon, and take me out among the stars?

—Thomas Merton

The Sign of Jonas

It breaks my heart to see her lying there, worn out, dying. But she is so happy to see me, and to see Jack, and this elates me.

And I am more than glad to see Jack too. I am renewed. It has been so long, so very long. And I have searched so far.

But Margaret. Oh, Marg. My princess. That this should happen to you. That I can do nothing about it.

My daughter. My first.

It is 1984. I am in the Women’s College Hospital, Toronto. She is seventy-four. I look around, at the beds, the curtains, the tubes. The wrong place to die: a waiting game without dignity.

And yet she is older than I was when I died. I had the good fortune to die of a heart attack on the streetcar. But I was only seventy.

We are both too young. Everybody is too young.

I reach out, touch her face.

So does Jack, my son, whom I have not seen for more than fifty years. I do not understand how it is that he is here with me, nor why he is still a young man in his twenties, but I accept it as one of death’s gifts. I understand very little anymore. Death has not taught me what I thought it might.

Margaret smiles, her eyes smile, knowing, understanding, and I think I might die again, just by seeing this. I know, suddenly, that there is not much more time. I do not know how I know this, nor what it means. And I have no idea what will come next.

One’s life is supposed to flash before one’s eyes when death comes. This is not true. It is no mere flash. It is much more complex. At least, it was for me. There is reflection. There is travel along the arc of space and time, back to source, ahead to destiny. I have been traveling for thirty-four years. I do not know how long it will last.

Something awaits me. Something. I know it. I feel it.

I am close. So close. Finally. Jack. Margaret. Here with me now.

It is part of the wonder.

Part of the mystery.

It was Christmas Day, 1950, a Monday—back before the subway was built, when the streetcars still ran up Yonge Street in Toronto and snaked on rails around the city everywhere, clanging, methodical. I was sitting in an eastbound car, on Dundas near Bloor, looking out the window, thinking about the eventual walk along Eglinton Avenue, about the icy wind that would burrow through layers of clothing— thinking about Dennis, my newest grandson, who would be two years old in March, and how much he would enjoy Christmas.

And it happened. I imagine that it has happened, and will happen like this, to millions, to billions, before and after my time—that it was happening to others even as it was happening to me. A complete surprise. So much surprises us, and yet so little should.

It was my turn to die.

I was coming to see you Marg, coming to spend the day. We hadn’t spent enough days like this.

The pain filled my chest, but it didn’t last long. Not really. I understand more now about time than I did then, and in reality it was merely a cosmic eye blink. I looked at the woman seated beside me, a stranger, said, “I can’t breathe.” My left hand clutched the chrome rail on the back of the seat in front of me, while my right hand instinctively squeezed the stone in my jacket pocket, the one given to me that day in the garden by the monk—that day in the sunlight. This stone is life, he had said.

I squeezed it fiercely. I thought of Joan, Margaret, Jack, then died.

Death has not been what I expected.

Not that I knew what to expect. I did have some concrete images in my head once, images that had blurred to vague concepts over the years, of a God, an afterlife—from being taken to church as a child, from my parents, from catechism lessons so many years ago. Nor would I have been terribly astonished if nothing at all had awaited me—a leaf fallen from a tree, becoming soil.

The streetcar shuddered to a stop, the woman next to me clutching my arm in fear and real concern. I heard a muffled hollering, knew confusion, as all that made sense slid away, like a morning dream. The conductor appeared beside me, and within seconds the car was being cleared of passengers. From far off, I heard him announce that the trolley was out of service and was proceeding directly, with all haste, to Western Hospital.

I remember looking out the window, from deep within me, through whirling, dying eyes, watching a flock of starlings rise up in widening circles from the pavement in a floating wave, a current toward the heavens. And as I watched, as I died, I became one of them, leaving my body behind, spiraling high above the street, the winter sky crisp, clear, seeing the interstices of streets below with an acuity of vision that I had never had before.

And then a kind of sense returned, a new order. This is what happens, I thought: a new clarity, a new vantage point.

I saw ahead to Yonge Street, north to St. Clair, farther to Eglinton. I tried to see Maxwell Avenue, running south off Eglinton, and the semidetached house that held much of what was left of my family, waiting for me.

Where you were, Marg.

Then I climbed higher, swooping with the flock, wondering where we were going, where I was going.

My name is Martin John Radey. I was born in Elora, a village some sixty miles northwest of Toronto, in 1880. I have been dead, as I stated, for thirty-four years. I accept what has happened to me, but I do not understand it. Perhaps acceptance is the beginning. Maybe understanding never comes.

I am the youngest of thirteen children who lived—eleven sisters and a brother. There were sixteen of us, if you count the three babies who died. We were all born in Elora.

Now we are all dead.

Back in 1950, as I soared high on the winds, the winter air searing the new, tiny lungs, I wondered, with a burst of incredulity and exhilaration, if I would see my two brothers, who died as infants, or any of my sisters—my big sister, Sarah, who died before my fifth birthday, or little Loretta, five months old, who died later that same summer of 1885—my mother, my father, here in my new existence.

And Gert. Maybe Gert. Maybe Maggie. The thought startled me, exploding a rainbow of memories.

The flock circling me leaned in unison into an updraft, left wings tilted downward, and as one we barreled north and west. My heart, stopped forever in the body below us on Dundas Avenue, had been replaced by one beating wildly with wonder.

Ahead, the horizon arced and rolled as we left the city behind, and below us the calm, brown and white winter landscape spread far and wide in soft refuge. And then I realized that I knew where we were going. We were going to Elora. I was heading home.

Flying low over the fields around Elora, the snow disappeared. Time vanished. The past was here, to be felt, viewed, examined.

I could see the old house on McNab, the post office in Godfrey’s shoe store on Metcalfe Street, the carpet factory, the old bridge across the Grand. The Tooth of Time was there, the stone fang jutting from the rapids beside the mill, as always.

Suddenly: summer. Gardens with flowers, vegetables. Elms, oaks, maples. The tannery, the brewery. The town hall, the Dalby House, the sawmill. Cords of hardwood, piled high. Horses.

And Father’s shop, right beside Mundell’s furniture factory. Where it used to be.

Through piercing avian eyes, above the earth, free, in death, I saw things and places that I had forgotten, and a past I never knew.

And above us, a single, hawk, wings motionless, circling, entered a cloud. With new instincts, I watched for it, waited. It did not come out.

Father and Mother were Irish Catholics. They had liked to tell the story of how they’d come as children on one of the coffin ships—so-called because famine, cholera, typhus, diphtheria, and every other sort of blight sailed with them—that slid from Cobh, which the English then called Queenstown, in Cork Harbour. My mother, Ann Whalen, was one year old when she left Ireland in 1846. John Radey, my father, was three. The ships destined for North America docked at New York or Boston if they were headed to the United States; the cheaper passage was to British North America, up the St. Lawrence to Quebec City, then Montreal, before turning about and heading back across the Atlantic for another raft of human flotsam.

My father and his brother Dennis were in the arms of Peter Radey and his wife Julia, themselves twenty-one and nineteen. As with one-year-old Ann Whalen, her brother Mártain, and her mother, they took the cheaper passage; after the ordained quarantine at Grosse Isle in the St. Lawrence, all disembarked at Montreal, from whence they made their ways, along with so many others, by barge, steamboat, and lake boat, to Toronto. There was the special landing wharf, then the fever sheds at King Street West and John Street. That summer, more than eight hundred died in the sheds. Catholics mostly, they were buried in trenches in the graveyard at St. Paul’s Church on Power Street. Even the bishop himself, ministering to them, died of cholera.

Eventually, it was by foot, wagon, and stagecoach over corduroy roads into southern Ontario, establishing themselves as best they could in the strange, new land. They settled, along with several other families, in and around Guelph for their Erst decade, then finally in Elora, when Da and Ma married and Da learned to be a blacksmith.

We were all born there. From 1860 to 1885, Ma had thirteen babies who lived, and three who didn’t. I was born in 1880, the last survivor; I remember Patrick and Loretta, the babies who died in 1884 and 1885, and then there were no more. My oldest sister, Sarah, died of consumption, just before Loretta was born. Sarah, Julia, Margaret, Mike, Mary, Ann, Emma, Elizabeth, Kate, Bridget, Rose, Teresa, and then me.

I spent the first seven years of my life in Elora, until we left for Toronto in 1887. Moving to the city was an astonishing idea to me. I had been there only once, when I was four years old. We rode on the Grand Trunk Railway, to see Gramma Whalen, who lived in a strange stone building that Ma told me was called the lunatic asylum, and who did not know who I was. The building had a big shiny dome on top with a water tank in it that let everybody inside have running water, and Ma took me up the round staircase to the top of the dome to see it. I remember staring at the tank, picturing the wonder of water flowing into the rooms below like magic.

After twenty-seven years, Da abandoned his blacksmith shop, the soot and the fire, the ash settling everywhere about him. The city held the promise of husbands for his girls, husbands that they would never find along the banks of the Grand.

TWO