Lisa Smartt, "Words at the Threshold"

– e-book

 

Read from February 19^th to March 4^th 2021

My rating: 

 

 

 Maybe I wanted to read Lisa Smartt’s book, Words at the Threshold, because the agony has always been a painfully fascinating theme, with its thread of light under an otherwise firmly closed door, to take farther the metaphor in the title. Maybe because, like many others, I have always hoped to have an epiphany after hearing stories about it, in order to discover that death is nothing to be afraid of. Or maybe because apart from the fact that death is fascinating in its own terrifying way in any circumstances, it is when it robs you of a beloved that you need most to be reassured that it is only temporary, while desperately looking for explanations, for signs, for proof of another (better) world to alleviate your grief.

In such times, books like this one seem to help you cope. When my father died, I re-read Raymond A. Moody’s Life after Life for these exact reasons, somehow hoping to reconnect with my dad at another level. It did not happen, not in the way Lisa Smartt describes the reconnection with her own father, but it gave me peace, encouraging me to doubt the finality of death, to dream that sometime in the future...

All this long introduction to say that with a theme so intensely emotional and challenging, I was disappointed to find the development the author gave it in Words at the Threshold was a little superficial, a little too naïve and a little contradictory. Moreover, the simple fact that it focuses mainly on positive experiences flaws the design. Moody has managed to keep a professional tone, an objectivity that emphasized the credibility and the impact of his stories. In Lisa Smartt’s book the stories are also true, I do not doubt that, but their interpretation is too subjective, too amateurish, an entanglement of stylistic (with the annoying habit of calling metaphor all deviation from denotative language) and semantic (with a penchant for truisms: “I am in the green dimension.” (Dimensions are not green.); “The white butterflies coming out of your mouth are so beautiful.” (Butterflies do not come out of mouths.)), of scientific (medication, she says, does not change much the patterns she discovered – but could it not be the fact that the brain shut down in the same way?) and spiritual (although she commendably avoids religious clichés, using the noun Source instead of God) of psychologic (how to listen and to encourage the dying) and psychic (invested with total credibility). All this mixture of registers is sometimes irritating, conferring the book a negligent, hesitant and dilettante aspect (It is true that she prevents us in Introduction that her investigation ‘is not formal or rigorous’ but nevertheless). Consequently, her conclusions are often rather beautiful, wishful thinking instead of realistic:

During the life review…, near-death experiencers are (a) shown or told the importance of gleaning lessons from their life odyssey, and (b) asked to review life’s events through the eyes of others in order to deepen their ability to love and have compassion. The tales of NDEers tell us that life is a journey, and that our primary mission is to learn to love.

However, should it have offered peace of mind and comfort only to one grieving person, and it has fulfilled its purpose and it deserves to be opened.