by Diana L. Gustafson

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“What’s death got to do with it?” Our museum tour guide grins as she makes the irreverent reference to Tina Turner’s best-selling hit. Patty knows how to grab the attention of Gen X tourists clustered around her in the grand centre block of Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum. In a former life, she was probably everyone’s favourite high school music teacher.

Patty leans in. “Death simultaneously intrigues and repels us.” I know she’s speaking to me. I signed up for the afternoon tour because I was curious about burial rituals practised in ancient times. At least, that’s what I tell myself. Easier than facing tough questions haunting my messy life. I soon discover that each pause on the tour unearths relics of my struggles to make sense of love and death.

The tourist-curious and I huddle shoulder-to-shoulder facing a sarcophagus that stares at us from behind a tall glass encasement. Patty continues. “Most are familiar with stories of wealthy Egyptians who entombed mummified bodies with jewellery, food, and tools to navigate the path to the afterlife.” A wave of enthusiastic head-bobbing. Her goal, Patty counters, is to point out less familiar artifacts that reveal how other cultures made meaning of mortality.

Mortality. Death. Loss. Patty’s words trigger my inquisitive neural synapses, the same place in the brain where memories are activated. Little wonder I struggle to separate my intellectual from my emotional responses. Maybe this tour isn’t such a good idea.

Patty ushers our group toward the immense entrance gates that once guarded the graveyard of General Zu Dashou and his three wives. She calls our attention to the carved arches with mystical figures guiding the dead into the afterlife. The gates, she explains, are a reminder to the living of their obligation to pay homage to their ancestors.

I’m struck by how much grander the limestone monument from the Imperial Ming dynasty is from the flat headstone marking my grandmother’s grave in a bleak cemetery on the edge of Imperial Saskatchewan. Engraved in the marble is my grandmother’s name, the date she was born, and the date she died. As if that’s all there was to say about her life.

I remember that cool fall day. The prairie wind whipped at my jacket. My mother clasped my hand as the cheap plywood coffin, covered in gaudy, blue velvet, was lowered into the grave. Grief gripped my bones. A minister who had never known my grandmother’s kindness or the softness of her cheeks spoke. “We commit Anna’s body and spirit to a more peaceful place.”

I stared into the dark hole, filled with dirt and empty words. “She’s not there.”

My mother pressed her leather-gloved palm against my chest. “She’s here.”

My young adult brain never considered my grandmother might die because she’d always been there. Today, a photo of my grandmother rests next to the house plant I rescued from her living room. When the pale green flowers release their honeyed fragrance, I breathe in her presence and breathe out my unexpressed love.

But the questions remain. What happened to her spirit? To the person who once was?

We ask these questions as children and revisit them throughout our lives. For many, organized religion addresses life’s unanswerable questions. I’m not religious¾never have been. My parents were godless prairie folk, hardened by the Great Depression. They rejected traditional rituals. Mom wore turquoise to the funeral. Grandma would have liked that.

The tour guide’s voice returns my attention to the group and an elaborate case containing a set of solid jade plaques joined by gold wire. Patty tells us the precious squares were thought to be part of an extravagant ceremonial suit created for Han Dynasty royalty or a prosperous aristocrat. I imagine the bereaved holding tight to the belief that the burial suit would magically stave off the body’s inevitable surrender to decay.

Not unlike the belief I had that machines made of thermoplastics could magically safeguard my partner when death hovered over him for weeks in ICU. A ventilator pumped oxygenated air into his lungs through a tube poked in his neck. His body lay deadly still except for the rise and fall of his chest. The rhythm calmed my chaotic thoughts. A thin, blue gown, not unlike the jade ceremonial suit, offered no protection on that terrifying journey into an unknowable future.

My partner was diagnosed with a rare neurological condition. I searched medical databases for information. Knowledge was my intellectual tool, yes, but also my emotional armour, helping me shred my fear into manageable pieces. Science was my religion. I needed hard facts to address my questions; solid evidence to steady my nerves. I met with his healthcare team. I asked blunt questions about prognosis without blubbering like a grief-stricken woman. I refused to waste precious energy wrestling with things over which I had no control. As I sat stoic at my partner’s bedside, science helped me grapple with the prospect of losing someone I loved.

Science, not prayers, returned him to me. Much thinner. Much weaker. But on this side of the thin line between life and death. He recovered. I recovered. Sort of. For weeks, I walked with an emotional limp; my grief evolving like a lavish requiem.

Today, my partner squeezes my hand as Patty pauses at her favourite piece in the museum collection: the Athenian carving of an unknown woman. Her robes are exquisitely chiseled in billowy folds of marble, an enduring testament to the tender regard of those who loved her. I wonder how long her family mourned her death. Did visiting this monument ease their pain as they grieved helplessly after she exited this life?

I understand helplessness. When I learned about my sister’s struggle with alcohol, I was shocked and confused. Debbie was the model of success. Genetic granite. Again it was science, not religion, that I clung to. The harm reduction approach to addiction guided my support for my sister on her journey toward sobriety. That set of evidence-based principles helped me love more and agonize less. When Debbie finally understood she had lost control over her drinking, she relinquished responsibility to a higher power.

That worked for her. Until it didn’t.

Our family gathered on the gravel shores of Patricia Bay to sprinkle my sister’s ashes. Debbie’s husband waded knee-deep into the icy water. Facing north, he raised the urn to the sky, whispered a prayer, and poured a circle of ashes onto the water’s surface. He repeated this ritual facing east, then south, and then west as the summer sun rippled the watery horizon. We watched the ash circles swirl and float on the high tide into the Pacific Ocean. My youngest sister sang our goodbyes, mournfully strumming the ukelele on her lap.

Powerless and vulnerable, sorrow bloated my throat for months. I felt abandoned. Why did Debbie leave? When would I hear her voice tease me again? Would I ever return to Patricia Bay, where there was no headstone like the one marking my grandmother’s grave?

My mother painted her sorrow on canvas. A blue jay in flight. The form Debbie jokingly told us she’d take when she visited us from the other side. The painting hung on the wall in Mom’s dining room, above a book and other treasures that Debbie had gifted her over the years. A shrine Mom passed each time she laid one less place setting on the table.

I have no such rituals. No lasting monument declaring my love for my sister.

My rational brain doesn’t believe in reincarnation. I know Debbie is gone. Yet, how do I explain my reaction when a blue jay settled on a tree branch along the trail my sister and I once walked?

“Debbie? Is that you?”

Neither science nor religion has an answer that satisfies me. But the question remains.

As the tour ends, Patty guides our group toward the spectacular rotunda at the museum’s entrance. “Every culture creates rituals to help make meaning of death,” she says.

I breathe deeply and recognize myself in the solemn faces of those around me. I am not alone in what has seemed like a solitary search for answers. Death is an unknowable space. The group is silent, bonded for a few moments in contemplation, yet surrounded by a noisy crowd, shuffling through the revolving doors. As in life and death, some are coming; some are going.

In this moment, I am calm. I am awash with the certainty that the spirits of those I have loved are with me in the taunt of a blue jay and the scent of a blossoming flower. There is something at work here. Something I don’t understand, but it’s reassuring how these coincidences bump into each other, making life’s transitions more survivable. This revelation, as today’s tour ends, is undeniable, as concrete as the limestone, jade, and marble monuments curated in this museum.

My partner hugs my shoulder and kisses the crown of my head as I raise my eyes to the magnificent, gold mosaic dome.

I want to sing.

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© Diana L. Gustafson

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This work was inspired by a writing prompt assigned by critically acclaimed author Mandy Catron, in a CNF course at The University of British Columbia, where Diana L. Gustafson completed her MFA in creative writing in 2024. That degree marked a shift away from her successful career as an academic at an East Coast university, where she conducted and published health research with and about under-resourced populations. As an emerging creative author, she has received an honourable mention in an Off Topic Publishing fiction contest and published flash fiction in Dreamer Magazine and curio fiction in the anthology titled Tales I Was Told.

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