Going over the bars- Janice Kulyk Keefer

We have death caused by illness, probably breast cancer. Her cancer spread quickly to the vital
organs, lungs, liver, kidneys,… She is fully aware of what is going to happen and there is nothing
she can do about it. We should though ask ourselves is there really nothing that can be done
about this situation – at least we could think in a certain way, enter a certain state of mind when
everything else seems to be beyond our reach. Most people imagine death as a frightening
experience. There is also a certain attitude towards people who mourn. The attitude of our
civilization towards death and mourning has changed from the earliest times, in the times of
deeper religious beliefs mourning was encouraged and accepted, this was a ritual. Depart is the
right word because the dying person is heading somewhere. But in the modern times we see that
somehow the attitude towards death and especially to mourning has changed. Today, people
arrive with cars to funerals, stay for a couple of minutes and then they are all gone. We don’t
want to spend too much time with the person mourning, especially when it is still fresh, it is
somehow believe that it is not decent and that public display of emotions is not acceptable. We
said that death is experienced as scary and the frightening element about it is that one doesn’t
know what to expect, fear of the unknown and the unknowable. It is possible that a dying person
has that kind of fear but it is questionable because when one gets that close to death, one cannot
think that rationally to be afraid of the unknown. Maybe there is something else that the dying
person is afraid of. On one hand you never have enough of life, people never feel like dying,
even the people who have had the worst experiences that one could possibly have in a lifetime,
like losing children, are not prone to committing suicide because according to the general belief
when children die life loses all meaning. Life is dear no matter how sick one is or how much it
hurts to be alive. The other reason why a dying person might be afraid of dying originates in the
worry for the ones they leave behind. There is this sense of responsibility, the dying person
doesn’t get to see their children grow and how they get on. The difference between believers and
non-believers is that the latter have a blank image of what comes after death whereas the
believers have a certain image of afterlife, and that image is only a reflection of our hopes. We
don’t know whether at the moment of dying what happens is the complete obliteration of all
senses, experiences, hopes.

Death by breast cancer is not unusual at all but there is something that makes this particular
dying woman interesting. Judging by the number of great works of art she mentions, she might
be a professor, scholar, or an artist, she might even be just a well-read person who might have
some menial job but is interested in literature, particularly canonical English literature. There are
many references and quotes in the story. She has a husband and children, but her children don’t
visit her anymore, they are at their aunts’, they used to visit her , but they don’t do that anymore
probably because the father doesn’t want them to see their mother at the terminal stage of the
disease, he doesn’t want them to remember this, although it may even be quite impossible for
them to remember as they are four and two years old. If they were allowed to see her they would
just remember a white skeleton lying on a bed. This is not the only thing though, the children are
scared of this woman because she has changed so much. And her psyche has also changed and
the children can sense that, they realize that this is not the same person. This doesn’t mean that
she doesn’t love her children anymore, it just means that she doesn’t have any energy to act
normal in front of her children. Her husband sits by the bed and holds her hand, and she is
wondering how he is not afraid that her bones will crack under his grip because she has dried up
so much that it is just bones that’s left of her hand. She is aware of his presence but she doesn’t
acknowledge it at all, not anymore, because she doesn’t have any energy left for the things that
happen outside her body. In the terminal stage she is completely concentrated on herself, she has
focused all of her energy on breathing, at this point she is breathing consciously with effort. The
ultimate goal in her life right now is to keep breathing. Breathing hurts now because her lungs
are affected by the disease. Any distraction is too much, the children, the husband, even the smell
of the flowers is not pleasant anymore, but there is more to this – the flowers are in vase so they
are basically withering and her heightened sensitivity can feel the energy that is leaving these
flowers – it is too much for her, even that is a distraction. At this point she is concentrated upon
herself. She uses all her energy to prolong her life. She is reminding herself to breathe – breathe
in, breathe out. We have established that she is a well-educated woman. What we don’t know is
how long she was fighting this disease – if there were early symptoms then it is probably a
matter of years. We know from the story that she has had at least one operation when her breasts
were removed, after that she felt a bit better but then there was relapse. So the struggle took at
least some months. So this woman, in this agony, who doesn’t have any energy left still thinks in
literary terms and she remembers of her childhood memories and that’s what keeps her going for
some time until she finally dies. The childhood memory consists of swinging in a park, it is a
recurrent memory now. She is sitting on a swing and enjoying it very much. She had long hair
which was brushing the ground as she was swinging, that is a special feeling for her. At this
moment she is thirty, so she is still very young and her hair is still long, and she imagines
swinging on this swing and feeling her hair brushing the ground and she has this wonderful
feeling, she is happy and she is free. But she is not completely free while swinging because there
is the bar, complete freedom would be to go over the bar and make a full circle. She has never
done that when she was a girl she was never brave enough. The parents always scare their
children with the possible scenarios such as falling down, breaking bones, losing teeth,… They
don’t let them do things which make them really feel alive. There is also another reason why she
never did it – the parents say don’t do that – so she is a person who respects the authorities and
she has something like a fear of embarrassment that if she went over the bars something would
happen and she would draw the attention of all the grown-ups. She would do the improper thing,
going over the bars is not something that nice children do. And this becomes a pattern – there are
things that we are not supposed to do, because the majority says we shouldn’t and because there
are consequences if we do. But in spite of this there is the regret about her never going over the
bars and experiencing this feeling of complete freedom. And now that she is in hospital she
constantly remembers this situation when she was swinging in the park and she imagines the
swing going higher and higher. She dreads coming closer to the bar, the moment when she
reaches the bars and when she may go over the bars. In her mind that is related to the moment of
dying. And that is why swinging is harmonized with breathing – in, out – and in her mind she
sees this movement of the swing like a pendulum. If we follow this formula then the moment
of death becomes the moment of absolute freedom. Experiencing the freedom which was
never experienced in life which probably dying brings.

The absurdity of cancer is that it kills that body that it lives in, it is a sort of suicide, basically the
body is killing itself. The cancer cells replicate so quickly that they can possess the whole
organism. These cells are hungry for life because replication actually is one of the mechanisms
for supporting life. We don’t know the name of the dying woman so her case is generic, she
stands for the whole human kind. Her first response is the refusal to surrender. In the beginning
when she realized that she was sick she tried to fight it, she tried to take the positive stand. So
first she was positive, she was ready to do anything to overcome the disease. After this stage
failed, she started negotiating with her cancer cells telling them that they shouldn’t bite the hand
that feeds them, she literally talks to the cancer cells trying to talk some sense into them.
Unfortunately this doesn’t work either so that she is sent to hospital, her breasts were removed
and she thought it was the end of this agony. When after that the situation again got worse she
felt anger and was in denial, the last stage is acceptance and surrender. Only when she accepts
the situation does she become capable of letting go, it is the moment when she goes over the
bars, and feels free.

The first literary reference that she makes is ‘Oh I do think it’s the pleasantest thing / Ever a
child can do.’ It is a quote from a nursery rhyme by Robert Louis Stevenson who writes for
children.

HOW do you like to go up in a

swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest
thing
Ever a child can do!

Up in the air and over the wall,

5
Till I can see so wide,
Rivers and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside—

Till I look down on the garden

green,
Down on the roof so brown— 10
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!
This seems to be an ordinary simple nursery song which it is, but very often as in fairy tales these
simple rhymes contain the wisdom of life – that you go up and then you have to go down. Your
whole life is this struggle to go up which ends in going down. It might be a coincidence that at
this moment when she is dying and thinking of swinging she remembers the words of this
nursery rhyme but then of course it makes a lot of sense because it also in a way deals with
death.

Another quote – ‘Ellen went widdershins around a church, and no one caught sight of her again
on God’s good earth.’ – it is taken from Childe Roland. In the ancient folklore of pagan Britain,
to go widdershins was to walk around an object counter-clockwise. In a magical sense it was to
walk against the light, or in the opposite way to the movement of the sun, making it an act
contrary to God. To go widdershins while reading prayers backwards was considered to be a way
of connecting with the devil. The vVictorians, in 19th century England, revived a lot of the pagan
myths and folk stories as so-called fairy tales. One folklorist was Joseph Jacobs and one of his
best known fairy tales is Childe Rowland that clearly explains the consequences of going
widdershins. Rowland and his elder brothers lose their sister, Burd Ellen, when she disappears
after chasing their football around a church. Rowland seeking an explanation goes to the
‘Warlock Merlin’ who tells him that she must have been carried off by the fairies, because she
went round the church widdershins – the opposite way to the sun. Childe Rowland, after both his
brothers fail, rescues his sister. The story ends with: And they reached home, and the good queen,
their mother, and Burd Ellen never went round a church widdershins again. So this Byrd Ellen
did the forbidden thing, she went round the church widdershins and she disappeared, and here we
have the dying woman who else feels like doing something that is forbidden, going over the bars.
At that moment she remembers this old story that was told to her when she was a girl and she
restrains herself because of this fear that was bred into the new generations over and over again.

There is another quote – ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’ – Mr. Kurtz says this, the brutes are the
savages, African indigenous people, in the heart of darkness Kurtz, such a civilized man becomes
a savage. In the story the savages are the cancer cells, and now she wants to destroy all these
savages because they changed her, like the savages changed Kurtz. He lost his moral compass,
not that he forgot it but he indulged in activities previously prohibited by the society. The worst
in him, the potential for evil came to surface now when there was no social control imposed by
the civilized society. By saying that all the brutes should be exterminated he desperately cries
over himself because he realizes that there is nothing he can do about himself anymore and that
is how he will die. But here in the story there are the cancer cells that destroy the body.

‘Once out of nature I will never take / My bodily form from any living thing.’ – Sailing to
Byzantium, W.B. Yeats –

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing;
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

She recognizes her own situation in all these literary references. He is talking about what is past
or passing or to come.

‘All are punished.’ – Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare

Another reference to all her bodily cells being punished by cancer cells.

There is also the mention of Heathcliff and Catherine from the Wuthering Heights. There is also
Goethe – more light. These are Goethe last words. This is the idea that the dying person should
think of something memorable to pass onto the following generations.

In the last scene her husband is there, holding her hand, unable to comfort her, and though she
doesn’t have any energy left she would still like to explain to him what it feels like to be dying.
She uses the expression of being in between life and death – ‘It is something like looking at
colour transparencies whose outlines haven’t quite meshed’ – so there is a gap between the place
where the line is drawn and the colour begins. A little gap formed between the colour and the line
and she sees this gap as something significant, certainly not an abyss but just some unexpected
space to slip through. Symbolically she sees this as the only space that is left to a dying person.
This act of going over the bars is like going through this space. The line could be the life, the
form that life takes, the colour inside could be the meaning, the two should coincide for life to be
meaningful. And she sees this space in between the two as the necessity of dying. She is lying in
bed and she is looking at the ceiling, and in the ceiling there are all those little cracks and to her
it’s like a universe, so she is watching that and she can see everything now, in other words her
life gets meaning. ‘She can see everything now; the cracked ceiling over her head pulls back, like
flesh from the sides of a wound. It shows whatever it is that lies in the gap between outline and
colour.’ – it shows the unknowable. When she is swinging she is looking upside down and she
sees the earth as the sky and the rocks as the stars – in the story Unless the eye catch fire there is
another woman dying and in the last moments of her life she is looking through a tiny space in
her window pane looking outside and she has exactly the same feeling that this is a small gap
which opens for her and becomes so big that a ship could pass through. And there is this idea that
– we are one with the starry heavens and our bodies are stars – like the rocks and the earth, now
our bodies are stars, inner and outer are the same, the colour and the border line, the shape and
the colour merge. The water in the locks is level, we rise to a higher level, we move to a higher
water, a high sea, a ship could pass through, it is the moment when life gets absolute meaning
which happens at the moment of dying. – Vesna ocigledno hoce da povezemo ova dva iskustva
poslednjih trenutaka zivota, al mi nije bas jasno kakve je paralele ovde povukla I na koji je nacin
ovo povezano, ovo je sve sto je rekla…

Milena:

The technique used in the story is the stream of consciousness technique – basically we get into
the head of a dying person who is probably losing her consciousness because of the various
stages of the disease. This technique is used here for the sake of evocation of some of the
childhood memories. It seems that there are various versions of what happens with the body and
the soul, there is the question of afterlife. Various versions of what happens after death can be
found in the story. The technique is used to evoke the childhood memories and bring them to the
present so as to make the present moment more meaningful and maybe better for understanding,
because it seems that nothing makes sense anymore. This is a young woman, her name is not
given so obviously this is not just a personal crisis, she cannot control it, it could strike anyone.
She is a representative of the human kind. So there is no meaning and there is no certainty, all the
ideas that we have believed once they do not offer any sense of security anymore. This young
woman is an intellectual we know because of the numerous references to books and classical
music for example Bach. An intellectual striving for the sense of meaning and security in her life.
It seems that at one moment in her adult life she was actually above all the fears that troubled her
when she was a young girl. We can talk about the fears that troubled her and since she is not
given a name here it means that these fears troubled all of us when we were kids. We can talk
about that based on her memory. Usually a person before death can glimpse into all the things
that happened to them since their childhood. The fear she had as a child was the fear of going
over the bars related to swinging. She remembers her hair brushing the ground. She never did go
over the bars because her parents told her not to do so and they were the authority, it was
considered dangerous, she was afraid of it. There was this option of going over the bars or
entering the realm of the unknown – it would be similar to going widdershins to relate it to
Childe Rowland. The other world that exists as parallel to this one, the fear is that she would
never be able to come back from it, it is the fear of the unknown which in her mature years was
define as the fear of death or what happens after the soul leaves the body. She remembers and
she even recreates the song that she used to sing when she was a child it is titled the swing by
Robert Louis Stevenson and it talks about what happens when a person goes over the bars. This
story, the story Here and Now and Unless the eye catch fire all deal with the theme of death and
dying and this is probably or exam question. They show different attitudes toward death. And
here and now again there is an intellectual, a professor at a university, in this story she reacts to
the problem of death she wants to evade it, to prolong the blissful unawareness of death, the state
of ignorance by simply referring to the idea that in Canada it was still Sunday and not Monday
because on Monday in Australia her mother died. The first response towards death and dying
although it comes from an intellectual is to prolong the unawareness. In this story we have a
woman, an intellectual who is aware of the fact that she is going to die. When she grew up she
forgot all about the childhood fears crossing the bars entering the realm of the unknown and now
that she is suffering from this disease she is wondering whether she is going to experience this in
a proper way as if there was a proper way of dying and one of the ideas is to die with dignity.
And if there is a public around her, her final words would be from the Wuthering Heights – I am
comparably above and beyond you all – referring to her illness, so she is going to go with dignity
to her death. She thinks that death is not going to be absence but a gap. At one point in the
story she is clinging to the idea that she is going to continue living through her children, the first
idea is this recreation of childhood going back to childhood, then she has these memories of her
life as a married woman, her children, the idea how her daughters are going to memorize her,
what is she going to represent for them because they are so young and maybe they won’t be able
to remember their mother the way she would want them to remember her. We can see her way of
fighting the illness and there are certain stages apart from home vs hospital. At one point even
home cannot, which is regarded as a symbol of security, provide security, she feels trapped, she
cannot escape the disease. The place doesn’t make any difference in the struggle against the
disease, maybe it is more difficult in the hospital because she is not surrounded with the people
she knows, friends and family but at one point all of this doesn’t matter anymore because she
cannot fight anymore. The idea of death is best presented through these stages in her disease. She
says at one point that death may be an accomplishment of which we are all capable, dying is
another matter, it is the loss of control. And this is the idea that she cannot tolerate, the loss of
control. It means that there is not certainty in life, and although she was trying to create this
image of safety and security at least for her children in her adulthood, she finally suffers from
this idea that death is loss of control and there is nothing dignified and noble about it, nista ne
vredi sad sve ono sto je citala sva ta verovanja ideali I principi. Dying here is just a loss of
control.

At first she dismissed the rebellious cells, I’m not giving an inch,… but an invading army… my
body has simply stopped talking to me.

These are the four stages that she talks about – the first stage is the stage of a rebel, fighter a
winner. At this first stage she experiences death as an intellectual, everything has to be based on
certain logical conclusions, the reasons that she has for her attitude. In this first phase she is a
fighter. She is not going to let these bad cells to invade her, this is her reason talking. And
everyone applauds her spirit because this is the person they are used to, she’s been a fighter her
whole life. But this attitude won’t do, what happens next is that she tries to reason with the cells,
she is lecturing them – don’t bite the hand that feeds you – she tried to reason with them the way
she would probably lecture her children. But reason won’t do. In the third phase she realizes
that reason won’t do, she is seen as a city under siege, she will do whatever is necessary in order
to defy them - we have a direct reference to the radiation she is exposed to, this is her will to do
whatever is necessary to remove the bad cells that corrupt her. The last stage is an absolute loss
of control, whatever she does is meaningless, she is going to die. She has to face this and accept
it, her body is committing suicide and she doesn’t get any say in the matter. This is that tortures
much more than the fact that she is going to die – I have nothing to say in this matter, my body
has simply stopped talking to me – there is this feeling of helplessness. A young intellectual
who’s done everything by the book, successful, marriage, family, degree, and now this is
something that appears quite unexpectedly and nothing can be done about it. The first idea she
has is the idea of dignified and noble death but then she realizes that there is nothing dignified in
that way of dying. Especially because she is young and she has children. At one point she said
that knowing that she was going to die didn’t bring her peace, that was the only certainty that she
could hold onto but that certainty did not bring peace. Her dying brought no revelation only
confirmation of obscurity, so it is meaningless, her death brought no meaning, why was she alive
at all? There are some stereotypes about death in the story, the swing wavering about death and
life, darkness, going over the bars, closing eyes, the flowers withering, trees in winter like
skeletons but there is no the implication that her body is going to recuperate as happens with
trees in spring. There is this stereotypical image of death with the scythe and the maiden, and
then she says that the reason why she doesn’t see death with the scythe coming for her is because
she is not a maiden anymore, she gave birth to two children. Then she clings to the Christian
version of afterlife – do we at least get the afterlife we desire or does it depend on whether we
perform our death the way we should, she thinks that if we perform this death in a dignified
manner maybe she will be rewarded with an afterlife. She is as nervous as when taking off all her
clothes for her lover, but it is simple she just has to assume transparency, her soul will weigh no
more than a scrap of cellophane – so she clings to the Christian version. But at one point she also
mentions metempsychosis – ‘Once out of nature I will never take / My bodily form from any
living thing.’ – Sailing to Byzantium, W.B. Yeats – and then she says – what made the poet think
he’d be given any say in the matter? Metempsychosis is the pagan idea that your soul after death
enters a body of an animal or another human being. So as a young intellectual she is quite aware
of these different versions of what happens to you after death. But all of these theories offer her
no security and peace. Even the idea of being noble at the moment of death doesn’t help, because
after awhile as her disease progresses she realizes that it is impossible to die dignified. So
through this idea of metempsychosis she is hoping to live through children, death is like a
physical gap, I am physically not present but I am going to continue my life through the lives of
my children.

And then there are allusions to the various theories of death and afterlife. At one point after
operation she says that she is going to stay home and listen to Bach, read Dante (because of the
divine comedy), he wrote about hell and purgatory. Bach composed prayer music. She was
hoping to find some meaning there. But the bottom line is that everything meaningless, she is
helpless. The kids are afraid of her, and her husband cannot perceive the truth because he is
experiencing the beloved one dying. He is hoping that somehow she is going to recover, he was
quite confident in his belief that she wasn’t going to die, but after all, she says, he wasn’t dying.
Up to that moment they were sharing their lives but from that moment on they were totally split
apart, he couldn’t understand that. We can draw a parallel here with the story Here and Now
where there is Walter the father who is mourning his son. And by the way we could link these
stories through the perspective of the mourners.

Incomparably above and beyond all – she is actually preparing for the final moment, she is to say
something if her voice doesn’t give in on her. ‘Such things happen – everyone dies alone, though
some are fortunate to have an audience.’ ‘All are punished’ – the good and the bad cells. At the
moment of death ‘Swinging back and forth, higher and higher,… Over the bars’ – Now if this
passage was given for the exam what would we say – this is the moment of her death, all the
images and memories are somehow fused together, she can see everything now (ceo zivot joj
prolazi pred ocima) – The writer of the story cannot know what had happened to the dying
woman in the moment of death, so she ends the story with the stereotypical idea that her life is
flashing before her eyes, all emotions and memories in that short moment when life is lost. It is a
stereotypical representation of death. Going over the bars is the liberation, she reaches the
freedom, the unknown of which she was afraid, and she was also afraid of the authority, her
parents who told her not to go over. So she clings to life with all her effort and finally when there
is no more energy she lets go and she is not afraid anymore. So she is finally ready to cross to the
other side. Over the bars – and there is no any punctuation mark after it, and on purpose, because
we don’t know what happens after going over the bars, maybe this is an attitude of the author
that crossing over the bar is not the end.