When I walked past the water towers, I saw myself dead.
It was very accurate and final: physical decay of the remains, bones crumbling into dust, the wind scouring the earth clean of me. Not even a smudge. This happened three days in a row. I usually walk in the evening around sunset, taking an unofficial road up the mesa. Almost always the exact same path, up the mesa and down, and I pass the water towers early on. There’s a lot of early Native boojum in the area. You see the ATV tracks running through the the potsherds and feel the tension as the desecration/consecration pulses back and forth.
Cell phone antennas in the amphitheater of the gods
Three days I walked past the water towers, three times I died. It was getting to be quite predictable. Maybe it was just time for this, I didn’t know. I thought I’d been aging badly, but how would one know that either? This was just like being born, but backwards.
I started looking for other signs, reading ravens in the sky, concentrating on my breath to slow the thought-train down so I could tell if there was really something there, sending me a message. At night I played the death movie again in my mind’s eye. Maybe it’s a lesson of some kind, I thought. Maybe the movie is in my genes, set to play at a certain point, whether I liked it or not. Who wants to die, after all? But death isn’t like cleaning the garage, you can’t put if off until you feel like it. The overall effect of seeing myself a putrefying corpse was awareness of a process. I felt like I was swimming in a funnel of sand.
But yesterday, the fourth day, as I climbed the steep slope beyond the towers, Death was right there with me. I’ve never experienced this before. I’m perfectly healthy for 61, but so are lots of us who just drop dead without any warning. Death was right beside me like a person or a god, a translucent, sentient blackness, ready for me, wanting to know why I shouldn’t have a stroke and fall down cold beside the junipers. I’m not kidding: IT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN AT THAT MOMENT, unless — unless what? Unless I had an answer, an argument, a defense, unless this was happening for a reason other than it being time for me to go? I didn’t want to go. I was only beginning to figure out this life, and there was so much more I still wanted to do. I saw myself dead on the ground — my wife trying to find me, grieving, wondering what to do with all my things. No more writing, no warm loving body beside me in the bed, no more grand adventures in the astoundingly beautiful world I’d only seen a particle of while stumbling around inside a dream.
This state of being was absolutely real, though I wasn’t scared so much as shaken. I watched my breath and kept on walking, and the images receded like leaves floating on a river. Thoughts of how the images receded went by next, and then the river. It was second to second, riding with the words or coming back to the air moving in and out of my body. More and more this happens to me: I’m doing anything at all, or nothing, and suddenly realize I’ve been lost inside my head. Then back to the sensation of my breath, then thinking about that and letting go, until I’m gone again…
I’ve only seen one dead person up close, so far in my life. That would be my father, and I was with him when it happened. There was one long soft last breath, with bubbles, that wasn’t followed by an inhalation, and then the limpness, like all his bones had turned to jelly. We laid him on the bed — with great difficulty — and I gently pulled his eyes shut with my fingertips. I had never seen such a disorienting transformation. He simply wasn’t there, and you couldn’t FIND his chin. It wasn’t even Dad, you see. Not even a little bit. The hands, the face, the swollen feet poking out from the pajamas were like parts of a generic stranger, a biology exhibit or a pile of mud.
With the ashes, I felt differently. This was more to the point, and there was something of him I could sense.
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Jeezus John
Just when I start to think you’ve scraped it all raw, another layer gets ripped off.
I flew back east last week, after receiving a call that my Mom was really sick. I never made it back in time-she died while I was on a layover in Chicago. (One of the drawbacks to living in the middle of fucking nowhere).
She was buried last Saturday, and as I entered the room to see her one last time before they closed the lid, an unbelievable peace flooded through me. That wasn’t her in the box; she was long gone…
I knew that she was the lucky one; the rest of us just muddle through until it’s our turn. Keep on muddlin’ man.
Very sorry you missed being there at the end, but you did see her, and so you know.
————-
Muddle indeed! So far, it’s working.
I’m a couple of years older than you, also a military brat (army) and have a degree in German (B.A. only.) I’ve never mentioned either fact here before, and why it should seem relevant now, I haven’t a clue.
I have to tell you though, that this post rings the big bell for me. You see, that hooded chess player from The Seventh Seal has taken up residence in my spare bedroom. We talk occasionally, and I’ve kinda gotten to like him. He’s not what you’d call jolly, but he’s deep, and he’s got a Zen master’s aesthetic sense, and a real genius for making you pay attention to the important things.
Please don’t take this wrong John, since you’re definitely a creature of the light, but he kinda reminds me of you.
I take that as a compliment! I also think you’re very lucky. No doubt someone is going to tell me to make the dude my friend. That hasn’t happened yet, but damn, he sure is HERE.
Did I sign up for this???
[sigh]
I know, I know.
“Pay attention to the important things.”
Ayup.
As I get closer to being dead myself, the phenomenon seems less mystical to me. The first time anybody in my life died (my grandfather, when I was five years old) it just about shook me to my small-fry foundations. It was a brand new idea – that anyone could just stop being what they always had been. It terrified me beyond belief. That Halloween a neighbour dusted his face with flour and poured ketchup over the flour and stretched out on his front porch as if he were a corpse. I couldn’t get that image out of my mind for years – even though my mother took me over to talk to the smiling gentleman a few days later.
When my father died two years ago, in his nineties, it was just a slow shutting down of all the familiar parts of him, one by one. At the very end I was finally able to talk to him in the more emotional way I could never do at any earlier stage of our lives, largely because he could no longer talk back. He just listened, and I wasn’t altogether sure how much he understood any of what I had to say. I suppose it should have horrified me but it didn’t. I felt grief and sadness, but no horror. I could easily imagine it happening to myself – now that I am at 60 plus years of age. What was novel and horrifying at age 5 seems now familiar and not particularly dreadful.
Better men than me were dead long before the age I’ve reached. Every breath from this point on is a borrowed one – one I’m glad to take but in my heart figure I don’t deserve.
Oh of COURSE you deserve it!
If you say so, my friend! However, there’s a beautiful bleak exaltation that comes from being hard on oneself. You should know!