David Gilmour: Extraordinary

“Yes, Sally, yes, I will stay with you.”

For a long time, nothing, and then she mumbled something. I leaned over. “What?” I whispered. I put my ear to her mouth. “Yes?”

And then she said, or I think she said, “I’m almost there.”

Some quarter of an hour later, she took a deep breath, as though she was going to say something; and then she slowly exhaled. And then I never heard her breathe again. I kissed her on the forehead. I could feel the life leaving her body. I said, “I love you, I love you. Please take this with you wherever you’re going.”

I had never before sat in the room with death. But I stayed with her because I have always suspected that there is something between dying and dying, a zone of after death that precedes extinction. And I wanted her to have company for it. Who knows when we’re really born into consciousness or when we leave it?

I remained in my chair, holding her hand, speaking quietly to her. Suddenly, a wave of goosebumps covered my whole body; my voice broke; the tears streamed down my cheeks. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

Her hand grew still colder, and as it grew colder, I could feel a change come over her, see a change rather, and I understood for the first time in my life that we are born with a soul and that it inhabits our body our whole lifetime and when we die, reluctantly, like children leaving a park, our soul very gently disengages and moves off, like a shadow, and takes with it all that ever made us human, all that ever made us us. And behind, in its wake, is just a body, an uninhabited residence. The doors blowing open, the windows creaking. Grass growing up in the cracks in the floor.

So this is death, I thought. I touched my sister’s face. It too had grown cold.

But still I stayed. “Will you tell me?” I said. “Will you find a way to tell me?” But from this body on the chesterfield in front of me, in its green dressing gown, her lips lipsticked, her brow unwrinkled, I knew that she had gone, and it felt as if I was talking to no one, talking to an empty room.

“Where did you go?” I said. “Where are you now?”

But there was no answer.

“Is there anyone there with you?”

I stayed with Sally’s body until the sun came all the way up, a morning, I recall, almost metallic in its sheen. I taped the note about calling the police to the outside of her door. Then, certain the hall was empty, with the ashes of her son under my arm and my bottle of pills rattling like teeth in my pocket, I kissed her on the forehead. “Goodbye, Sally,” I said, “goodbye,” and then I went down the back stairs and went home.

DAVID GILMOURis the critically acclaimed and internationally bestselling author of seven previous novels and one work of non-fiction. His books have been translated into 27 languages. For many years, Gilmour was a fixture on Canadian television as the national film critic for CBC’s The Journal , as well as the host of his own Gemini Award–winning show, Gilmour on the Arts . He is presently the Pelham Edgar Professor of Literary Studies at Victoria College at the University of Toronto.

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Extraordinary © 2013 by Back on Tuesday Inc.

A Patrick Crean Edition, published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

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E-Pub Edition: August 2013

ISBN: 978-1-44342-372-4

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