The Old Lady and the Lab

There is a sense in which human beings resemble plants and molting insects. Moths, butterflies come to mind: egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly. If all goes according to design, in advancing age a transformation comes, in some cases almost visible.

I knew an old lady just blocks north of here; I got to know her on my walks. I’d pass her house about the same time every other day about the time when she took an old, old dog, a lab as ancient as she was, on its very short, very slow walk. At one time I’d stopped to talk, and after that we exchanged a few words every time, and over the period of a year or so I saw the strange process of her “detachment” from this life. She was exceedingly thin, frail, almost translucent—translucent enough so that I could almost see her spirit shining through—and it seemed like a light to me, especially brilliant in her eyes—and each time we parted and I marched on, I thought to myself: “She’s almost done. Almost done.” She was an ordinary, simple woman. Our exchanges turned on weather, seasons, plants, the grass. But I sensed a quality in her that transcended all of that.

We can learn many things by intellect, reflection, observation. But to have the inner, visceral, experience of it takes its own time. Odd word, that, visceral. There’s nothing more physical, material than our viscera—yet what I means is something quite different. The feel of this process of gradual detachment has the character of sensation, but it isn’t physical, quite the contrary. By “visceral” I mean something direct, experienced—not the abstract emptiness of concepts.

Long before books, culture, ideologies, philosophies, arts, sciences, religions—long before empires of rhyme and indies of calculus (Nabokov)—humanity already passed through this strange process of growth in which the body itself contained the winged creature and caused it mysteriously to develop into a being that could take to the skies. The old lady I knew—and yes, she did pass on—had little actual knowledge or contact with these highfalutin realms, but the process of life itself had worked on her—and she on herself—just living and being and participating in the ordinary chores of ordinary life. Yet at the end she was translucent and illuminated.