To: Death

Have you ever looked Death in the eye? Talked to it? Have you let it speak to you? Did you want to say anything back? When you can see it and smell it and reach your hand out and touch it—can any words suffice?

For me, Death looks like a room in the back of a small house in Richmond. It looks like tables cluttered in old food and dried cups of coffee and dusty pill bottles. It looks like a bed, that bed, which has accumulated a growing mass of family pictures over the years tacked on every surrounding wall, so he can have something to look at. So that when he got worse and couldn't leave that room, at least those four walls would remind him of us.

Death smells like expired food, the chalky scent of old pills, and things that are painful. Like letting go of a certain dignity humans have programed deep inside which makes them rebel against the idea of letting someone else bathe them, feed them, clean up their mess.

Death crept gradually into that room; it took its time. It slowly closed its fist around my grandfather’s body and his life, constricting. Restricting. Slowly tightening the scope of the places he could go—from the ocean to the beach house to the bedroom there to Richmond to his house to that room, just that room, where Death lies there contained, much too large for a room so small and a man so frail.

When Death speaks you have to listen and you can’t look away. My Gidu has a stricken look on his face now when he talks and his eyes, wide and earnest, latch onto me in a way where nothing can make them drift away. Where sometimes it seems like he's not even seeing me, but something else, something far greater. He speaks of surreal things and our eyes hold a connection, tether us together, by some infinite strand that can only be anchored in the windows to our souls.

My Gidu tells me things of regret, of sin, shame, redemption, suffering, and love—the kind of love that he can’t comprehend, that smooths a soothing blanket of forgiveness over everything you never thought you could let go of. Those nasty, sticky sins you swear can’t be forgotten. The ones that you meet in your adolescence and visit you again on your death bed.

If this is the last time I see my Gidu, Death wouldn’t care if I wasn’t okay with the way we left things, the goodbye in this life that we shared. If it was perfectly said or if the moment felt right somehow. What is right? What else can I say? I told him I loved him and thank you for the beach house and I love you but the tears were clogging my throat and nothing else came out.

He told me many things, but what sticks with me now is the way he held each of our hands and looked up into our eyes and made us promise we’d be there in Heaven, that we’d see him again, and that we’d look after our cousins who needed it. It’s a legacy of family he’s leaving, the kind of family who loves in a way that uses that perfect Love as a model. Death can’t take that away no matter how hard it tries and I suppose it’s an important thing to think about legacy because when someone dies, and all that love for that person has nowhere to go, the only things left are the things that remain. And what remains is the Everlasting.

My Gidu has always told me to strive for the Everlasting, to find it and never let go of it. And in the face of Death, as you try to talk to it and understand it and figure out how to scoop up the broken parts of yourself in the wake of it, what you are left with is that desperate need which God has created in you for something.

You can feel it, right? How is anything worth it if everything ends? There has to be more, doesn't there? Because this life just isn't enough. Not when it ends in the way it does—with the smell of expired food and bodily fluid and translucent skin and old weary bones that can't move anymore.

God, there has to be something else. That something which is not temporary like everything else. God, I know that's you.

And because words evaporate like mist in the air, I will try to look beyond this frail and imperfect life. This frail and imperfect desire to say all the right things and share that last, meaningful look.

I have touched Death. I have seen it and smelled it, talked to it and let it speak to me. And I have found my own little Everlasting in the words my Gidu has told me—the ones that have remained the same from the time his body was well and strong to right now—the advice he's given me, the affectionate names he's always had for me, the press of his bony hand in mine as we both acknowledge this could be Goodbye.

What is your Everlasting?

I hope you'll let yourself find it.