STORY BY

Drs. Blair & Rita Justice

This is the month of Janus, the ancient Roman deity, regarded as the doorkeeper of heaven, presiding over the entrance or beginning of things. He is represented with a face on both the front and back of his head.

Like Janus, at the beginning of a new year, we look in two directions at once, reflecting on the year past and making plans or resolutions for the year ahead.

It is a time of living between two spaces.

When our friend Mary Nell Reck was dying of metastasized breast cancer last November, she lived for weeks in the liminal space between two worlds. She looked intently at what she was leaving-her beloved family and the richness of her life on earth-while at the same time she heard "celestial" music and the voice of her son who preceded her in death by one week. Mary Nell described feeling "great joy" as she stood with one foot in each realm.

Although she knew she was dying, Mary Nell also knew she was well, inside herself. Living in the liminal space is not reserved only for the dying, and not all dying people step across the threshold with the grace Mary Nell demonstrated. But when we can learn to move into the "thin places" between the physical and spiritual, exceptional healing and benefit at both levels abound.

While You Drink Your Tea

Thich Nhat Hanh, renowned Buddhist monk and peace activist who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, says. "If we want to walk in the Pure Land all the time, it helps us to let go of the things that keep us from being in the present. It can be done when you drink your juice or your tea. Drink in such a way that the Holy Spirit is present in you.You have enough already to be happy now.Nourish yourself every day with the wonderful things that life has to offer you. Nourish yourself in the present moment." Thich Nhat Hanh is telling us how to live in the liminal space between the physical and spiritual. (From his book, No Death, No Fear, pp.113-115.)

Reverse
Living

Life is tough
It takes a lot of your time,
all your weekends,
and what do you get
at the end of it?
Death, a great reward.
I think that the life cycle
is all backwards.
You should die first,
get it out of the way.
Then you live twenty years
in an old-age home.
You are kicked out
when you're too young.
You get a gold watch,
you go to work.
You work forty years
until you're young enough
to enjoy your retirement.
You go to college,
you party until you're ready
for high school.
You become a little kid,
you play;
you have no responsibilities,
you become a little boy or girl,
you go back into he womb,
you spend your last
nine months floating.
And you finish off
as a gleam in someone's eye.

This poem, by an anonymous
author, was passed on to Jack
Kornfield (After the Ecstasy, the
Laundry, p. 284) by a student
at a retreat. It invites us to
look differently at where we are
in time and space as we live our
lives and even to think of
ourselves always "a gleam in
someone's eye."

The Body's Door Key

Neurobiologically, the brain's limbic system serves as a liminal border across which the physical and psychological, the seen and unseen, the emotional and spiritual interact. Its "door key" is the synapse, which connects cell to cell, axons and dendrites for instant intercommunication within and among parts of the brain.

The limbic system is so named for crossing the borders of neurons. It is our emotional brain, whose energy can carry outside ourselves.

Having limbic resonance with another person, as Mary Nell did with many, speaks a silent language more moving than words. Such attunement between two worlds—the inner and outer, the unseen and seen, the energy of one person touching another—is not a rare experience. But it is one that neuroscience is giving us more and more technology with which to see into the brain and to picture how the phenomenon works physically.

For years, "liminality" was a concept found mostly in anthropology and sociology. It referred to the "limbo" American culture assigned to the physically disabled and others who didn't fit the neat but oversimplified categories of being either "sick" or "well."

The limen marking the threshold between the two worlds of the sick and the well is almost certain to become even thinner. The traditional continuum marking health at one end and illness at the other must accommodate the fact that more and more of us (one in three) have chronic pain or some other physical disorder but experience ourselves as well inside ourselves.

Core Self-Health

When surveys ask, "Do you consider yourself a healthy person, a very healthy person or a sick or very sick person," a large number of people with acknowledged pathology answer: "I am a healthy person."

We were so intrigued by such a response that we researched the question among breast cancer patients shortly after they finished treatment and two years later when a number of them still had cancer. At both points in time, many considered themselves to be a healthy "person." The word "person" was a defining feature to their answer. A person has more than a physical part, and they recognized this. A person has a relational part used in bonding with others, an achieving part for having an impact on their world and a spiritual part for connecting with something bigger.

Many, like Mary Nell, also knew they had a core self, a soul, that could remain well despite physical illness. If they felt "well" in these other parts, they felt justified in answering that "as a person I am healthy." In short, they were saying, "I know I have cancer, but cancer doesn't have me."

Living With.Not Dying Of.

Thanks to continuing advances in science and technology, much cancer is becoming a chronic illness—along with heart disease, diabetes, some pulmonary disorders and some strokes. As the population ages, more and more of us will join "the remission society," a vast invisible community of people living with chronic disease as we go in and out of acute phases.

We will not be "cured" of our disorder any more than we will be "cured" of growing old. But the best news is that we can still be healed. Healing is an internal experience. Curing comes from external intervention, such as medication or surgery. Well-being is feeling well in our "being"—in our core self and those other nonphysical parts of us.

Mary Nell, as she slipped across the threshold and lived in the liminal space of two worlds for a period of time, is a good example of how to die well. She found the way to live in the liminal space, which all of us can learn to do, even as we enjoy physical health.

UPDATED: 1-26-2004