Life In Death
“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The
greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.”
-Norman Cousins
Chapter One
My brother and I sat in the
near-bare hospital room and watched my father breathe his last living breaths.
Months before this moment, the doctors had told us all that there was nothing
to stop the cancer now, that there were no more lung snippets to take without
suffocating the man I had grown to respect. Weeks later, he made this hospital
bed permanent, shrinking into it like a deflating blow-up doll. Minutes prior
to his final living breath, my father spoke his last words, which were simply, “It’s
about time.” We sat there now, waiting for the flat line, and the answer to our
long awaited question.
It finally came, and the high-pitched
tone of the machine was deafening. We bowed our heads in respect to this
long-awaited outcome.
Then our father opened his eyes.
“Well?” my brother, Jared, asked
anxiously.
“Well nothing,” said our father as
he looked around the room. “Get me out of this bed and take me home now. If I
have to eat any more Jell-O out of that fairy nurse’s hands I swear he’ll be in
this bed next.” He tried to sit up, but it looked as if all his energy were
going to his protests. “You should’ve seen him when he washed my backside;
spent a whole hour down there, I swear. It’s weird, I tell ya.”
My brother’s shoulders sank. “Dad,”
he started, “tell us what it’s like! What’d you feel?”
“It feels like I crapped my skimmies,”
said Dad. He turned his sunken face toward me. “Casper, can you check down
there and see? Better you than that damn nurse.”
This would turn out to be my first
up-close, personal encounter with death. At the time, I was twelve and my
brother was fourteen. Our aunt had started taking care of us once my father had
become bedridden. She had left us with him so that we could be there for his
final moments with life and so that we could get the answers that we had
eagerly anticipated. Instead, I was stuck reaching behind my dad, checking his
soiled sheets.
“Dad, there’s nothing there that I
can feel or see,” I said. “It’s wet though.”
“Eh, must be piss,” he said,
sounding relieved. “I guess the textbooks were right. Sit my damn bed up.”
Jared pushed the button to lean him up just as the door behind us swung open
and the nurse my father spoke so highly of pushed his way in. “Ah, damn it,” Dad
said. He had hated this place since the day of his admission. “What’s the
point?” he had said. “It’s not like dead is dead anymore anyway.”
“Mr. Carson,” said the nurse as he
turned off the EKG machine, “how was it?” He asked it as if my father had just
eaten at a steakhouse he’d suggested to him earlier.
“Well, it wasn’t all blowjobs and
butterflies, if that’s what you’re asking,” Dad said. “I’m sure you know enough
about those.”
The
nurse, Jimmy, laughed and placed his hand on my father’s shoulder. “You’re
lucky I like you Mr. Carson,” he said. “Only you would be able to guess my two
favorite things in life, but just so you know, you’re also included on that
list.”
“Ah,
shit, Jimmy,” my father said, and placed his hand over the nurse’s, “it hurt
till the end. I don’t wish this on no one.”
“Well,”
said Jimmy, releasing his hand and turning to us, “it’s over, and I’m sure your
boys are wondering what it was like, aren’t you boys?”
“Sure
are,” we said in unison.
My
father looked down, sobering his thoughts like he usually did before his words
became serious. “I know you two have been waiting for an answer since this
whole mess started,” he said, “but I’m afraid you’ll have to find it all out
for yourselves, and God willing, that won’t be until you’re too old to care.”
My dad reached over and touched my hand, rare for any occasion. “Some things in
life, or whatever the hell this is, are meant to be experienced, not explained.”
We
took him home that night after my aunt signed some paperwork, and we continued
to watch after him the next few months that he was around. He ate and drank
normally, which had baffled me, and my constant questioning of things soon
became just wind in his ear. I’d ask, “How are you still hungry? You can still
get drunk? What’s that horrible smell?”
“Listen,
son,” he’d say, in an increasingly weathered voice, “I didn’t make the rules of
this gig, I just abide by them. Stop asking so many goddamn questions, ya hear?
I’ll make sure and take them to the top of the ranks when I get there.”
That
smell, I later learned, was his body eating itself, and he died again in his
bed a few months after, completely rotted from the inside out.
I
finally cried for my dead father.
-----
Bright
lights, walking through a tunnel, total darkness, angels, a meet and greet with
Saint Peter, long lost loved ones, feelings of ultimate ecstasy—everyone got it
wrong. The first to try to explain death in full detail after his rerising said
that he really couldn’t put the feeling of dying into words. The next few said
that it was like being kissed everywhere inside yourself, all at the same
moment. Some say it’s like being turned inside out, or imploding within. After
a while, it just seemed like everyone was trying to outdo each other with their
descriptions; no one seemed to be able to fully describe it right. One would
hear about tasting rainbows, or shitting candy, or flying, and everything else
imaginable and in between. It all just became so unrelated to the real world;
there was nothing on earth like it. Unless you were an enthusiastic eater of
Skittles, who really knew what it was like to die, besides the dead themselves?
It became a cult topic among many theorists who sat around talking and shaking
their heads on television like it would solve anything, but like every other
pressing matter on earth, mankind seemed to think that talking about it was the
best step toward progress.
-----
My
father had passed over twenty years ago, and society has now adapted to the
rerisings as well as it does with these types of things. It seems to me that
there’s always been shit that goes on unexplained in this world that we, as
imperfect humans, just learn to accept as normal happenings: objects in the
sky, airline disappearances, whole societies and species from a time long ago
that just seem to go up in smoke. There are even the daily questionable
situations: why your farts never seem to stink as bad as others’, if Elvis or
Tupac are really dead or not, why we insist on still keeping up with the damn
Kardashians. All these things seem to matter but they are unsolvable to the
point of acceptance. When the dead started walking, it was just another question
of life that joined the list.
I
ran into my fist postmort, as they eventually came to be called, on my way to
school one day. They had been on the news for years but I had yet to see one up
close and personal. He was a homeless man whose greying skin hung from him in
folds. It grossly reminded me of the time that I had accidentally walked in on
my grandma undressing; she had her back to me and her underwear was hanging
from her age-worn behind. Seeing that man back then, it was something, but for
some reason, seeing my grandma like that, all near-naked and exposed, it still
haunts me to this day.
The
postmort had asked me for change, which I provided, and then I just went on
with my day. At the time, my father had just been diagnosed, so death to me was
still just a big question mark; it was a word that ran along with others like
God, heaven, and sex. It was only three years later that I could stick those
four words into a sentence without so much as a flinch. They just were. Who cares and life goes on.
Soon
after my father’s death, my life went to shit. It’s a sob story like the best
types one can see the American Idol judges falling for on TV, but I’ll just sum
it up and say that I thought life was worse than it really was, so I drank to
compensate for everything I presumed I was missing, just like good-ol’ Dad. It
didn’t work, so I drank more, and my life soon became an echo of the Saturday
Night Serenity stories I hear on a weekly basis now—full of loneliness and
false hope.
I’ve
become a cynic like the worst of us, and the world has become a spinning, literal
reminder of the cycle we addicts loop ourselves into, each day just running
into the other. Even my brother pushed away from me, gained a new family, and
moved as far from Seattle as possible. Things aren’t the same without him
nearby, but I’ve adapted. It’s what we do, as humans, at least those still
alive. We adapt. We live on. We go until we can’t.
Tonight’s
meeting thus far is a disaster. People around me stir around anxiously as the
speaker, a damn postmort, spills his guts to the room—almost literally. The
room smells of stale coffee, stale perfume, and his grotesque, stale innards. He
shows us the scars of the surgeries that did no good and pictures of his dead
liver that finally gave out after years of abuse. He tells us of his failed
marriage and the two kids that he is leaving behind. With each minute that I
sit and stare at this talking failure, who is trying to tell me how to live my
already failed life, I grow increasingly annoyed that no one has spoken up and said
how much of a walking contradiction this guy is. How dare he try to give us
hope and tell us how to live life after he has already failed so miserably with
his? Not only that, but the man forces his smell onto us, which he tries to
mask with some Versace knockoff that he no doubt bought at the Macy’s in the
downtown square.
I
can no longer take it. When it’s time to share, I let my voice be heard. “Most
days I just sit here and listen,” I start to say when it’s my turn to speak. “I
like to hear the stories. It makes me feel like my life isn’t so shitty in the
moment. Other days I really feel compelled to share but just can’t think of the
words to say.” I stop to take a deep breath, and think about if I should go on.
Yes, today there is no holding back. “Then there are days—rare, but like today,
they do happen—when someone’s diarrhea of the mouth reeks of such idiosyncratic
ignorance and hypocrisy that I can just no longer hold my tongue.
“Everything
that man just said,” I point at the dying man as I speak to the room, “is such
crap that I don’t know how half of us haven’t run out to grab a drink to drown
the sorrow that he just put us in. I mean, it’s fucking outrageous how he can
sit there and be so calm about dying and then try to tell us that things are
going to turn out okay! What’s the damn point of it all if we are just going to
end up like this guy and be miserable, despite it all?” I stop to try to
breathe.
“Casper,”
someone says behind me after a brief moment of silence.
“No,”
I say. “I am entitled to my opinion—” I turn to see who mouthed my name, “Gene.” I turn back to the dead man. “Seriously
man, you’re dead. What right do you
have to come in here and tell us how to do things? Isn’t it just supposed to be
‘what it was like, what happened, and what it’s like now’? How is your life now, umm—“
“Colton,”
says the stiff, while squinting at me with his stare of death.
“How
is it Colton? How’s life for you now?” I cross my arms and lean back in my
chair. I inhale deeply as I try to calm my thoughts and rage.
“I
was merely—“
“No,”
interrupts the secretary. “We will not turn this into a discussion. Casper, if
you’re uncomfortable with the speaker, then you’re welcome to—“
“Yeah,
I’m going,” I say. I push my chair back and ensure that it scrapes the ground
and is loud enough to cause a ruckus—for effect, of course—then leave. Outside,
the rain falls on my sweaty hair as I step out on to the curb. To my right
stands the bus stop, which leads home. To my left, the corner mart’s double
doors stare at me and mock me from afar.
I
fish in my right pocket with my hand and feel for the matted up bills within. I
count them—just enough. Perhaps I was too
harsh on the guy. I cough into my hand and take five steps toward the bus
stop. I should go back in and apologize.
I fish in my left pocket and grab the cigarette pack within. I light one up,
look to the ground, and turn toward the corner mart. There is no going back. I begin to walk to buy my beer.
We
go until we can’t; I always told myself that, and I believed it too, until the
doctor told me that I was going to die.
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