When I was 19, I was alone in a hospital room with my grandmother when she passed away. The term “passed away” seems spot-on from my perspective then, as it does now, because what I witnessed was a kind of movement. One instant Grandma was laying there alive, breathing, transmitting signals to the hospital vital monitors which responded by occasionally blinking or bleeping, and then she was… not there. One moment there was Grandma, a person, and then there was something less.
Admittedly, her passing didn’t happen in a decisive, Hollywood-style instance. She didn’t utter some profound observation to me from the frontier of her long life. She didn’t gasp one last dramatic breath, and then exhale conclusively. No, the exact moment of her passing was ambiguous. I remember thinking, “Oh my god, here I am witnessing Grandma’s death… oh wow, Grandma just died… wait, maybe she didn’t die… maybe she is still alive…. is Grandma still alive? I’m not sure… it’s hard to tell. How do I know?” I looked for signs. Her face was tranquil, unaffected, and her eyelids were still open just a crack. Her hand was still warm in my hand. However, if she was still breathing, I could not see evidence. Her chest was still. Her nostrils were unmoving. The hospital vital monitor didn’t seem to be beeping. I sat beside her and I wept. Eventually a nurse came in. Seeing the situation, she gave me some condolences, told me Grandma was happy that I had been with her, and then turned off the machines.
I too had the sense that Grandma had felt comforted by my presence at that time. It wasn’t until later that my mother told me she believed my grandmother had waited for me to arrive before she passed away. I had been on the other side of the continent when I got news of her illness. When I arrived at the hospital, she looked at me, nodded her acknowledgement of my arrival, and then passed away a few minutes later.
As I sat with her, I was flooded by a rush of thoughts and emotions. I remembered as a child holding her hand while crossing the street, and I realized this would be the last time I would hold it. I remembered stories I had heard about her exodus from Europe during the Great Depression, searching for a chance to build a better life, settling in Canada with her young family, desperately laboring as an immigrant for decades to make ends meet, saving her pennies, sleeping insufficiently, and eventually succumbing to mental illness.
“I am proud of you,” I remember thinking as I looked at her in the hospital. “I know you labored and sacrificed for the family and for me.” I remember feeling a tremendous gratitude. I remember feeling an aching desire to demonstrate my gratitude to her. How could I show my gratitude? “By doing something worthwhile,” I realized. By spending my time well. By living my life in a way that inspired others, just as her life inspired me.
This experience catalyzed in me a deep reflection about life, death, and the transition from one to the other. What was it exactly that I had witnessed that afternoon in the hospital?
It was clear that a transformation had taken place while I was there watching.
Despite the fact that Grandma looked very much the same after she passed as she did just before, obviously her transformation was compete, total, comprehensive, irrevocable. It may sound mundane, but I was struck by what felt like a profound realization that Total transformation happens. It wasn’t just that the change was comprehensive, but also that the change was instantaneous. We are used to seeing transformations unfold by degree over time.
The hospital episode revealed in no uncertain ways that instantaneous, comprehensive change is part of life. It happens to all of us. It happens all around us. It is happening somewhere all the time. Yes, it’s true that we often witness changes that happen in small, gradual ways; but it’s also true that some changes happen as sudden, quantum leaps. It reminds me of that Ernest Hemingway line: How did you go bankrupt? Two ways — gradually, and then suddenly.
The hospital episode also sparked an inkling that what I had witnessed was just part of a larger process. After she passed away, she ceased to be a person. At that moment, the only remaining evidence of Grandma was a biological collection of cells in various stages of disintegration. But there had also been a time before she was a person, more than 84 years earlier, before she came alive as a tiny baby in Europe. Total transformation goes both ways, it seems, from life to death as well as from death to life. Ashes to ashes. We talk about “the miracle of life,” but it is also a miracle of death. Both total transformations are miraculous in their own ways. Both are awesome processes, bewildering and mysterious.
In some sense, I became obsessed with this concept of total transformation. A Singular Link — that is, a total transformation created by combining unrelated elements — is a metaphorical manifestation of this process.
When I started actively looking to spot Singular Links, they began to appear all around me. I now see examples of them literally every day. Perhaps by gathering them, and sharing them, and interpreting them in ways that allow others to recognize their significance too, in some roundabout way I am acting out the aching desire to demonstrate my gratitude.