Yesterday a friend asked me about “soul,” whether I believed in a “soul.” Actually, her question pertained to the word “soulmate,” although, as the song goes, you can’t have one without the other.
I said no. Or maybe I hedged. What was a soul, anyway? In an Argentinian movie I recently watched an English teacher asked his students to locate parts of the anatomy on a large poster that he had hung on the chalkboard. Then he asked them to locate the “soul.” They were confused since of course they couldn’t “find” it, but, when asked if they had one, they all agreed they did.
Do we have souls? Do I? “Soul-less” is certainly a put down; soul music gets to something within and “soulmate,” that original real inquiry, defines people who connect in ways they cannot really define.
This is what I can say about the possibility of soul:
I held its death. I held his death. I mean, my grown son’s. I had stood by the bedside watching him breathe, heavily sedated, hopeless to recover but alive, for days. Days. Each morning when I went to the hospital, I didn’t know what I would find – an empty bed, or what?
On this day, November 3, 2020, I could see –and the nurse told me—that the end was quite close. So I sat by the bedside, stood by the bedside, embraced him from the bedside, read and recited poems at the bedside, told him he was loved from the bedside and watched his breathing – the breathing of my son, watched his last breaths from the bedside, my arms stretched around him.
And then the breathing stopped. I had my arms around him and the breathing stopped.
I held his death. And something that had animated even his sleep, even his unconsciousness, was no longer there. Was it a spirit? An animus? A soul? What had made the difference between a breathing unconscious son and the body in front of me now?
There was a clear and alarming difference. I was numb.
I told the nurses he died. Then I sat with that lifeless, soul-less body all afternoon, wondering who he had been, who I had been, who I was now. Nothing made sense.
Nothing in this world makes sense or matters much when, in that one person, your son, you have held its animated existence–held its birth–and also held its death.