I’ve always wondered what death looked like, what death sounded like and if death even had a personality. Was it just a force of nature, appearing differently in its own way according to the dying?
I spent way yoo much of my life wondering what it was like to die. Was it just the vacuous oblivion of the countless eons before I was born, or is it something entirely different? After all, if I’ve ever been born more than once I certainly couldn’t have remembered; how could any one of us?
It was in the swaying breeze in the midst of my flower garden that Death came to visit me. I was sitting contently with my tea in the waning hours of twilight thinking of future possibilities still yet to be realized in the ample years that remained of my life. Death, it seemed, was not without a sense of irony.
I was not ready to go, I would not go, not before my time. Death took the seat next to me, his spectral robe fluttered in the variable breeze. I had internally committed to doing anything within my feeble abilities to resist him. Seemingly aware of my aversion to his very essence, he spoke.
“You cannot outrun me, I find everyone precisely when I mean to…please sit.”
Knowing that escape was futile, I sat.
“Why are you here?”
“Why can’t you visit much further in the future?”
“I want to live!”
“I want life!”
I cried out in a sort of denial, knowing my desperation would hover straight through Death’s indifference to it.
“Though I am Death, there is no life without me”
Death’s words strangely resonated with me. I thought of all of the countless life that perished so that I could live; both plants and animals equal in death’s eyes. Either through my own volition or through some projection conjured by Death for which my mind was the screen, I saw the circle of life. I saw images of death feeding life. The succession of a forest, the ecosystem of a whale carcass and many transcendental images that changed my very fear of death into a calm resigned understanding of its necessity, it’s inevitability and its communal place in the merry-go-round of life.
“Yes, death and thus life”. Death remarked, seemingly aware of my visions.
As darkness fell, we spent the evening chatting and musing on the state of affairs on earth, he shared with me the secrets from beyond the grave, and in due time drank his final cup of tea.
Then in the hour before dawn, Death turned to me, staring with black eyes that accepted one, and all in a cloak of oblivion.
” Very well, I am ready to go, Death”. I said solemnly.
” You are here for me, and if it is indeed my time, then I shall do no more to resist you. Take me where you will.”
Then Death replied “ I only wanted you to understand, I am not here for you.”
” I am here for your family”