I do not have the best track record with this conversation, until about three years ago, I was numb. But my Uncle died right round pandemic started and from then on it was death everywhere, every week, every day.
We were counting down the deaths, remembering the dead and praying we didn’t join them. I was counting down the deaths and getting accustomed to the “new normal”. But it was not normal.
To wake up weekly and be stung by the death of another. Stung, sudden, sobering. Sobering because damn, that could have been me. Damn, we just talked the other day. Damn, that’s there are no new memories, nor hazy ideas.
Since heaven has no data plan, what am I to do? Fear the long night? Grieve your absence? Pretend it’s a nonexistent problem altogether. Problems usually assume that there is an answer and if you’re a Christian like me that answer is Jesus Christ.
Yet in the back of my mind lies a cold room, a tiny square cold room enveloped completely in ice with ideas and questions and fears that I’m constantly fighting with myself. I mean, wouldn’t you also feel gripping fear with life’s final boss, death?
I don’t even like sleep as much because every aspect about sleep reminds me of death. No I don’t have sleeping problems, I just feel like living all really happens while awake. I don’t have dreams or nightmares anymore so I literally just black out and wake up. Feels really wasted on me this gift of sleep and yet I know I can’t function without reasonable sleep I even prioritise it on occasion.
Yet that nothingness taps into that cold room and chills my entire body. I don’t know what it means to have a morgue in your mind but that’s what death is to me. Minus degree weather with echoes of memories in search of their owners. I don’t know what I expected to find and I don’t know what I’ve found.
Perhaps behind it all is a question of worth. Am I enough? If I die, would I have been enough? What was it all for. Whatever happens on the other side, would it all have been enough? With all this pain I’m suffering caused by others, are they enough?
Sitting by myself, second guessing every second after thought. At the banks of the river out stretched hands looking to serve/save anyone. Looking to be anyone. Looking to matter, looking to escape the ultimate nothingness of death.
In the end I guess it’s all nothing. It doesn’t really matter, because we don’t know. But also because time doesn’t stop for the dead or living which is dreadfully annoying because the world must stop and mourn with me. The world must feel the absence yet it only continues to move.
Of death I truly couldn’t say, whether it aches to cross into that threshold. Whether the streets are paved gold or melting inferno I don’t know what awaits.
Not surprising but this is one journey I am definitely prepared to wait out as long as possible. Whatever death is, this is one question I don’t mind not knowing about.
Maybe it would be nice to know when so I can be decent. Or not sacred when Grim finally rears its precise head to take me away. Maybe it would be nice to just prepare for it, write my letters, say my apologies and share all I have. Leave things right you know?
Maybe it would be nice to just tell the people I love them one last time knowing what’s next. Just to really enjoy their overbearing presence. Take it all in knowing, you know. But we don’t get any of those, death just comes like a thief in the night and honestly I don’t know.
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