Death isn’t done in slices.
Dying either happens, or it doesn’t.
Writing about the subject is another matter entirely.
Slices abound.
So does taking a stab at, wrestling with, tossing mere abstractions upon a bare page.
Grasping for the truth.
Making sense of. Conquering.
Conquering? Did I just write that?
Death is a non-fictional and fictional beast;
a certain stark reality none of us can avoid and a state not yet inhabited – an alien place, a made up place.
A completely unimaginable yet utterly imaginable beast (of burden).
Maybe that’s why it’s so difficult to get my pen around.
Full of, dare I say, dead ends.
˜
Where does one possibly start?
Because let’s face it, most people don’t seem to think about the act of dying let alone discuss the matter in great depth. Death seems one of those realities least travelled mentally yet most travelled physically. No papers or passports needed, no bored clerk standing behind a teller window deciding your admittance.
That hollow kind of feeling in the pit of one’s belly. How I worry it will actually be a pit. A blink of the eye
now you see me, now you don’t click of the heart, then deep dark nothingness and not even a memory of one’s life lived before. Utter oblivion. Perhaps a striking sense of that oblivion, but wouldn’t that be horrifically worse?
One’s relationship with death. As though it is a relationship. As though you can just trade it in for something else; ‘Gee, it’s been nice knowing you and all, but now I’d like to move on and you know, live a little.’
How does anyone know what really happens on the other side of living? You’d sort of want to be there, right? Roam around for awhile and then come back and jot down an authentic account of your experience. Why am I even contemplating writing about something so elusive? Something I know very little of? Death can only be experienced in the present moment, as it’s happening. In situ. I suppose writing about it is the next best thing.
Of course, no amount of writing will ever be death itself. In the end, you are death.
All I’m concerned about is that the sky is still above me and the earth still below when I wake up each morning. This tells me I am the right way around. I don’t have time to consider death to death. Too painful, too distracting, pulling me away from the act of living (or maybe the very concept pushes me towards it) and being so close to dying, as we all are, life seems so something else. Something transient. So real and crowded I can barely get a word in edgeways. We stand at it’s doorway everyday bombarded, unconsciously or consciously, with fear and trepidation and can’t ever catch our breaths and I’m almost pulled through its door because of it. I’m too strong for that though. Or too weak. Maybe it’s something else entirely. Maybe it’s not my time to pass. Maybe I never will. Now that’s a thought. Reincarnation. The afterlife. Souls living on and on and on and on…
Yesterday I was staring at the ceiling and just before I fell asleep I saw a crowd of souls coming for me and it freaked me out. Sometimes they arrive even more solidly after I enter the dream zone. Last night they couldn’t wait to get across, and neither could I.
My mother walks over the grass and stands at the base of the oak tree where the cross is. She raises her hand and sweeps the bark like she’s smoothing a horse’s coat. I can see her smiling and then I can see she is not smiling. She is frowning, raising her head to the sky, trying to pull out of her tears like a rocket pulling out of it’s terrestrial socket. She’s squinting in the sun’s glare. I realise it’s the only time I’ve seen my mother truly frown. And she’s trying her best to lift the corners of her lips but the effort comes out as a sputter, then a gasp and she falls to the ground smelling the freshly churned earth. Pressing her forehead into the moist soil so that it starts rubbing into her fringe turning it brown, to mud. She’s kissing the soil where her father is buried. My mother is planting a kiss and I want to tell her you won’t find your father there. Look up, instead. Look everywhere. Everywhere is where your heart lives. There, and nowhere.
Death is…being born through a membrane. Suffocating at first – the pulling of the skin around the face, then heart, then in. A stretching horrible ache and wanting to breathe it all over with and away and the struggle for the body and every cell to breathe (because that’s what a body and every cell is programmed to do) and then the surrender, the free fall, the falling and loving the fall to loving the lifting and flying and looking up down around and realising you don’t have a parachute but instead wings and at that moment of release you want only that moment, to be in that moment and of that moment for it is eternity and where and how and what you want it to be and what you always knew it would be and is.
Boom crash bang fucking head banging – stay awake – thunder lightening beating, head spinning, dizzy going under shit – stay awake – watch look see this ain’t no dream, going under dizzy brain swimming handhold rock branches snapping, head thrown back car crash back smash rock? Breath tugs out, rain hard as fucking nails, sky cracking handhold – grab on steady, ribs in throat knocked out knock me out now! No, stay awake – don’t die I might die I am dying – the earth’s going under the sky cracking over – NO! stay awake stay awake stay awake stay awake stay awake…
It was the first time I’d ever seen death on a person. On a person I knew so well. My grandmother wore it like a cloak, as I suppose people do when they’re still around when they’ve just gone. I could sense her, despite the chilled air and the generic stuff they spray and fill the skin with. Despite or maybe because of that odd silence in the funeral home. Was the room circular or square or hexagonal? I think it was hexagonally shaped, or perhaps it was my grandmother’s floating presence not quite fitting into that tight, bolted space. My memory betrays me! I am mixing her death up with her husband’s, my grandfather’s. He passed a good few years later. For she was gone. Completely. Resolutely. I remember gazing at her face and hands and her Mona Lisa smile, realising she was well and truly out of there. I had arrived too late to catch her presence. To say an alive farewell. I was mixed by her sudden departure. She had butterflied to a better place; that smile was no smile for the rest of us still living. I felt reassured to have witnessed such swift flight yet I also felt a visceral loss. A cold loss. One I was even more aware of by the time my grandfather passed away.
A week after his stroke and still he accompanied his body to his funeral. His soul hovered around us, a warm shroud. A smile sweet and quiet, like him, brewing with good-byes.
I don’t blame my grandmother for going as she did. I just remember how generic that funeral room seemed, how artificially flowered. And that smell, going up my nose the way ice-winter air is inhaled through the nostrils…sharp, alien, hostile. One has to breath to live, and the irony of not wanting to inhale that distinct disinfectant, that on-the-edge-of
rot masked by enough preservatives to keep a body fresh enough for the few days it has to remain fresh to deny its absolute decay.
I thought about how many other bodies had been Show and Telled in that funeral room. How many caskets on display, hands folded over hearts, cheeks blushed with rouge. How many bones placed in that hexagon for surviving relatives, friends, lovers to do whatever they needed to do.
I kissed your cheek and touched your hand, just like I did grandad’s. I think I had to do that. Even though your body was no longer yours, it was still somehow mine, the last I could have of your earthly self. So cold. So cold, it was almost shocking, though surely I wasn’t expecting heat. And I was curious, I have to admit that. Curious how death worked on a body. I had to be brave to look at you, to give you that kind of dignity. To view you like that.
We begin dying as soon as we are born. Everyone knows that. Does everyone know that? Anyway, if that’s the case then there is a case for the afterlife and the before life cushioning one’s breathing life.
In some ways, I can’t wait for death to begin, for this life to be over, ‘Better luck in the next one,’ and all that. At other times, a pulsing within telling me that existence is never really over and to respect each failed moment, each small success.
Within death such beauty, honouring, dismissal.
From this day forward, the boy always looks away. The boy looks away. He stares at the deer sputtering and writhing on the ground, intestines spilling over and pulsing with departing blood, pupils fading and washing out. The boy lowers his pistol. His father barks at him, ’Pocket that pistol and keep watching, son. You need to see what happens with duff shots.’ The boy runs up, retrieves a smaller pistol from his left pocket, aims it between the doe’s temples. Pupils glistening and rolling and eyelashes sweeping open and shut. Dropping now, the doe’s head thumping to the chilled autumn earth. Neck angled violently, she tumbles with her knees buckling beneath the weight of the bullet exploding her stomach. Cold forest air firing her nostrils and eyes panicked and legs scampering across the forest floor like her fawn. Bang. The boy stands still, staring at her magnificence. Chest puffed and eyes small universes, black and starlit. ‘Shoot,’ the father says. ‘Now.’ The doe and the boy watching each other and waiting. Waiting and watching. A slight twitch of an ear. A heavy click of the safety. The animal is alert but not afraid, not yet. No sound. Squirrels scamper across the leaves and spiral up the oaks. The father steps over a moss-coated log and motions the boy to step forward with his rifle. Footsteps tip-toe the ground. Sunlight spills over the open patch of forest. The doe is munching on blades of grass, nose wet with dew, glistening like a black jewel. ‘She’s going up on the wall, that one. Look at that treasure of a chest,’ the father says. The man and the boy halt. Walking for miles, walking all morning and then they spot her. An open shot. A clear shot. She is making her way through the forest back to her young fawn, pausing for a snack. Her fur flashes tawny gold in the noonday light. The doe snaps her gaze to every movement, her ears to every rustle, her chest white and proud and beautiful to anyone who doesn’t look.
I’m lying here looking out of the escape hatch of my Cederberg Mountain cabin into the night sky turning dark turning light with one star then a sprinkling then an explosion and I almost start sobbing right then and here because the sky burns bright when left to shine without man-made light and I imagine lonely angels sending me off to a lonelier sleep, a sleep so deep it will take me in and away and wake me up in another town on another planet in another sky screaming the same beauty as this one.
butterflies are simply
moths growing colours
little rainbow splashes –
laughing wings knowing
what is to come
I spin round and glare at the empty space in front of me. It glares back. A yell from deep within me then from a crazy place, wordless and rising, up and out and it’s long, loud and scary as fuck and I’m barely done freaking myself out when I crouch and cover my head with my arms expecting something to come flying at me, but there’s nothing. Peeping through my elbows everything goes back to a silence even more so than before. The worst kind of loneliness. So lonely, it feels my whole body’s being hollowed out. And my throat. That one scream had so much in it there’s nothing left to screech out, so everything’s hollow inside, hollow without.
Diary Entry – July 2010: The eyes. The eyes are the windows to the soul, they say. My son’s were pitch dark, like black-out blinds. But then all babies arrive this way. Maybe newborns are that close to God that when they emerge, their eyes don’t. Maybe they need such protective layering to give them time to see the world and the world to see them. At first Evan’s eyes frustrated me. I wanted to see my son – his light, colour, soul’s expression. I knew physics was involved. Photosynthesis. And then I thought of the spiritual angle and the black-out blinds made more sense. How necessary for a birthed spirit to have that kind of shielding. To be enveloped and cushioned against the blow of entering artificial light and earthly life. One needs such safe keeping. So it was Evan’s eyes that I first saw, or didn’t see, when he was born.
Five months on and they are still revealing themselves.
And I am still waiting.
Am I at the beginning, the ending, or somewhere in-between? The way the sky looks now. I’ve never seen such a colour. Peacock blue fanning over a line of dark chalk. This hell on earth? Or earth on hell? Or is earth long gone and I’m standing on something else? But I’m still here and I am walking and shifting. Or maybe things around me are shifting. Muggy on the outside, shivering on the inside, shivering something nasty. Stuck in a desert of muck, soot-coloured, like the soils been caramelised on top. A thick layer of burnt. Opposite things swapping round and I’m seeing things alright. I’m seeing things. Like this path. This a path? A few soppy bushes flanking either side. Sky sizzling. The sun a small dot, a peeping Tom. Clouds dripping. Earth sponging it all up. How long’s it been this walking and watching? Walking and watching and seeing and stumbling. All the time in the world but since this ain’t my world there’s nothing for any time to be in.
Death grinds.
Death inspires.
Death unites.
Death writes, ‘Somewhere over the rainbow i still believe that people are really good at heart for whom the bell tolls it tolls for thee to be or not to be stop all the clocks let the mourners come for nothing now can ever go gentle into that good night because i could not stop for death i am not resigned quietly they go death is nothing at all is well someday I’ll wake up where the clouds are far behind me do not stand at my grave and weep he was my north my south my working week the stars are not wanted nothing now can ever come to any good for i am not there i did not die do not stand at my grave and cry i simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion misery and death rage against the dying of the light if i look up into the heavens i think that it will all come right i am the soft stars that shine at night i am the gentle autumn rain-bow way up high once in a lullaby and the dream that you dare there’s a place that i dream of…
why, oh why can’t i?’
Anyway the soil’s smelling anything but pretty and I almost puke over it before lifting my head to examine the situation. The world’s morphed into another and I’m crouching in a race with fuck knows what else with no finishing line and no start line either. I shudder so forcefully I’ve got to hold my head from spinning. It’s the strangest thing trying to stay calm while sinking in the slush, in this world that ain’t my world once a desert and now a flood and I’ve always wanted to go to the sea and I laugh a crazy kind of laugh thinking that I’m finally in one but with no a boat or oar and I’ve survived and surviving and what am I surviving for?
row row row your boat gently down the stream merrily merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream
Death makes me wonder what I am doing, thinking about death like it’s something to ponder with any serious undertaking like it’s a state I know enough of, a place that can be pondered as though it is a something. Being on the other side of its nebulous border, I wonder who I will become when I become nothing or a hell of a lot more of something.
Diversion. One hell of a diversion it is to think about one’s demise.
The diving slipping plunge to one’s death in a single breath – yes – a breath is all it takes to finish the body and start the soul. The reality of passing on – over – through helps me wonder what is the reality of my life and what is life.
The breath of life is not our own.
When the body’s journey is done, this incredible gift is gone.
The gentle ferocity of the breath.
I think without death I would just keep on going not knowing anything other than everyday exiles.
We grow into who we become. We die into who we are.
You know, I could go on and on and on and on…
And probably I do.
Where does one possibly end?
