travel, death, dreams

An interesting article in the L.A. Times today about the prevalence of traveling themes in the visions,dreams,hallucinations and speech of the dying. Travel appears not simply in the most obvious sense of death as the end of the journey, but involves planning for travel and the actual means of travel, like planes, trains and boats. For instance:

Though very weak, Kenny, 45, intermittently recognized and chatted lucidly with family gathered by his bedside. But he would drop in news of his varied travels: He had gone skiing one afternoon in Australia, he told us, stopped by North Carolina another day, and more than once had been "stuck in passport control."

At first, our family dismissed these journeys as confusion; we would laugh through our tears about the various places and modes of transport he had been taking. It must be the painkillers, we thought. Or maybe hypoxia, the oxygen deprivation in the blood that often contributes to delirium in sick people. Or that the cancer now was destroying his mind, just as it had racked his body.

But then our cousin Lynne mentioned that her parents had done a lot of similar traveling in the last days of their cancer battles. Uncle Larry (Lynne's father) had insisted that his passport and fanny pack be kept by his bedside; he was intent on keeping an imaginary 3 p.m. appointment with the emperor of Japan, where I was living then and where he had hoped to visit. He too had asked for a map — of Japan. Aunt Lois, who had died four years before, had talked about needing to catch a train, asking Lynne to buy her a ticket.

Apparently these motifs are well known to hospice nurses and those who attend to the dying. What struck me about this was the connection between travel and death. We are all familiar with shopworn metaphors for death, but I had never really stopped to think that travel itself was somehow symbolically aligned with death. In other words, we've all heard that death is a journey, but perhaps a journey is a death of sorts. Now that I mention it, it seems, mythologically speaking, quite obvious, but in reading this article it struck me with some force, mostly because many of my dreams are about traveling and sound much like the reported visions of the dying. hmmmmm. I need to think about this a bit.