Death

I am not sure when I first thought about death. I remember going to a funeral when I was young, and because of the influx of mourners and the limited amount of seating in the tiny lounge-room, I found myself sitting on the rounded edge of an old, fabric sofa watching the faces of people I did not know, except that of my grandmother, who was crying and talking in soft whispers to other old women who obviously knew the deceased. Even then, I was not really thinking about death as such. I was looking around the room at the furniture and worn out old photographs on the mantelpiece, the dark clothes that hung limply on exhausted bodies that wore a 'death is knocking on my door' look on their weary faces. Being the only child there I recall feeling out of place amongst these old people and their memories and yet, somehow I knew what they were feeling. When I think about it; death - the kind of death associated with feeling too cold to move or having a thought that silenced your body and mind so much that you felt that perhaps you were already dead, was always dealt out in small packages, a little bit here and a little bit there, but death for me, like most people, was usually associated with the loss of someone or something passing. The death of a small child who I did not know is probably one of my first recollections, but as I said before death was not always about the passing of a person it was more to do with feeling the death of abandonment. And abandonment could be dealt with if there was no attachment, but there was almost always attachment because you clung too easily, too readily to any morsel of love and so, you felt more abandoned than others who never had to get use to being cast aside. Abandonment sticks in the throat like a sharp fish bone that methodically scratches away at the soft, exposed and vulnerable inner flesh of your psyche until you can no longer fall blissfully asleep, it can gnaw at you like a raven pulling apart a rotting carcass. The stench of half dried blood over white bones, glistening in the morning light. Death, or rather the thought of death holds on and never relinquishes. Death and abandonment for me are always going to be associated with my childhood, and the way that my mother and my father, as estranged as I was from them and them from me, lodge in my esophagus and produce a gagging sensation that will be there until I too die; for they are already passed into that unknown space of abandonment where all souls reside. When my son was four years old, in one moment of passion and anguish he had the realization of death and tearing at my face with his tiny hands he cried 'Don't die'. He tried desperately with his scratching gesture to hold onto, yet remove my face from his sight . I tried to console him, but there was no consolation, only erasure of the whole existential experience. So, death comes again this morning. It crept up quietly in my mind triggered by the light globe that flickered on and off until it finally gave up. Death is a strange thought and yet, still, I cannot think of the first time I thought of it.