I'm taking a class at the local college titled
Perspectives on Death and Dying. The textbook has some very interesting, thought-provoking items in it. This one was particularly so. Thought I'd share it here.
Knowing What a Human
Being Is
Rollling Thunder often repeated, ‘We do so many unnatural
things, we don’t know what’s natural anymore.’
One day he and I were sitting on the ground out in the desert. He was describing a young Indian apprentice
from another tribe and making designs in the sand with a stick. Suddenly he said, ‘You people don’t even know
what a human being is!’ I did not see
the connection between the subject at hand and that sudden exclamation, but I
had learned to understand what he meant by ‘you people.’ It was not a judgmental finger-pointing to be
taken personally, but a sort of generalized identification to be applied
wherever it fit. ‘You can look right at
someone’s empty body and take it down the highway at eighty miles an hour, leaving
the person miles behind, not knowing what the heck is going on!”
As an example, he then described to me an episode in which he
went into the hospital to assist a young lady-a friend of a friends-who had
been in a head-on collision and was a long time in a coma. ‘But the moment I took a good look at the body, I could see
she wasn’t even there. I had to find
her-go get her-and she was way out in the field where the car’d flipped over
the cliff, and she was sittin’ on a rock.
Her friend who was driving was killed.
And this one sittin’ on the rock, she didn’t even know where she
was. But, boy, she was determined to
stay there. She was totally
disoriented. I had to pull her, nearly
force her back. Only time we can do that
is when we know their own will isn’t working—otherwise we always leave it up to
their own choice.
‘Well, in the early days, most everyone could tell when a
person wasn’t in their body. That was
just natural to see that. That’s been
lost mostly. Only thing I can say is,
until you learn to understand these things, you should never, never move an
unconscious body. Unconscious means the
person is not there. So treat the body
on the scene and never, never move it.
Not until you learn how. People
can’t find their own way back to the body—not when they’ve been pulled loose
that way by some accident or something.
Time and time again, traumatized people get abandoned that way. Time and time again, people die in a coma
because of that.’
Quote
in Doug Boyd’s, Mystic, Magicians and Medicine People: Tales of a Wanderer*
*DeSpelder, Lynne Ann, and
Albert Lee. Strickland. "Chapter 4, Death Systems: Mortality and
Society." 2011. The Last Dance: Encountering Death and Dying New York:
McGraw-Hill, 2011. 150. Print.
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