Thoughts of a Dead Person

These are the things I think after I am dead.

Or perhaps I think them all in those final seconds.

Whichever it is, it doesn't matter. I am adrift from all concept of time. The latter would feel like the former.

The whole world and everything in it looms, and falls away at the same time. I loom, too, precisely as I fall away.

Memories burn bright, and dissipate. A jumble of them, in no particular order. Interspersed with thoughts sparking and flashing at random.

My perspective is turned inside out. I realise, with a shining laugh, that most of the things I chafed over in life were silly little things. Things that didn't matter.

Like how much I fretted over people having to sort my house out. The work I left them to do. The things they might find. It doesn't matter. It never did.

I have so much regret for leaving behind the ones I love, and who love me. Oh! Their pain! and then that too falls away. Swallowed by acceptance; this is what is.

Of course they grieve. They grieve because they love. And they loved because, although they shied away from the knowing, they knew they would one day grieve. The sharpness of the pain is an answer and an echo to the raging softness of the love they feel. Life would rattle hollow without the bumps and nicks to let us know we were in it. Love is, after all, an elysian sword. We grasp it recklessly by the blade and delight in what spills out.

I remember how people talk about death. How I talked about it. We hardly ever said it; it's nearly a rude word. Not for polite company.

We didn't say, "She died," we said, "she didn't make it". We didn't say, "He's dead," we said, "He passed on".

"...lost a battle..."

"...left this vale of tears..." (how miserable!)

The old dears would say things like, "I lost my husband six years ago..." I wonder for a moment, dispassionately, whether they will say such solemn euphemisms about me. Or whether they will treat the occasion of my death the way my Granny did when her husband died. She said, with a twinkle in her eyes, "I didn't lose him. I know exactly where she is."

I feel such tenderness in this everlasting millisecond for that wise, good-humoured, fierce (and sometimes cranky) lady. In a way, she was exactly right. But in another way, she was precisely wrong, and she will find that out one day. She didn't know where he was. How could she? How could anyone? Ah, but of course she was never so arrogant to think she really knew!

You can know where our ashes are, or where our bones are buried. But you can't know where we are. We are not our ashes or our bones. Behind her stoic jokes and pragmatic ways, she surely knew that. You do, too.

But that is how we get by in life, isn't it? We do little things to lube our lives along. You forgive yourself for it, if you're wise. Like my Granny was. Because in the end, it'll matter as much and as little as a handful of scattered stardust. As much as I can wish for anything in this infinite state, I wish I had taken that to heart more when it mattered.

Am I lost then?

I don't feel lost.

I am lost to them.

But not lost, not really.

Lost perhaps implies a permanent state. And if I am here, in this condensed speck of forever and never and everywhere, shorn from Time and my physical self... Then they are too. I could blink, and they will be here beside me again. One day, soon, now, always (all of those, all at once) - they will blink, and here I will be.

They must trudge through the seconds and years, tethered to their heavy squishy little bodies. Go the long way round, as it were. But not me. I can be with them again in a fraction of a moment, in less than a heartbeat. And when they finally arrive (which will be then for them, and now for me) all of that time that stretched out between us while they toiled through life, will just... fall away. And then it will always be now.

I am not truly lost then. Only misplaced, for a little while. It doesn't stop the grieving. I miss you is surely still the most painful emotion. While you are living at least. But now, how fortunate I am, that I am not living. All I need to do is

blink

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Quick Author's Note

NB. NOT AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL. I did not write this from the Beyond. I ATENT DEAD

Thank you for reading! Please leave a comment so I can reciprocate. Let me know what you think.

Pay no attention to the writer behind the curtain: I wrote this for the Misplaced Challenge, which I will link to below. I'll also link my other entries under it.