Conversations with the Other Side

“So, you died.”

“Yes.”

“What’s it like? I mean dying.”

“Well it depends.”

“On what? On how you die?”

“More on how you lived.”

“As in?”

“It doesn’t matter how you die, stabbed, shot, drowned, kidney failure, liver failure, cardiac arrest, brain hemorrhage, car crash, third degree burns, none of it matters. How you feel death depends on how you lived.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You begin to feel it in your extremes. Not just the tips of your toes and fingers. In the thin end of each hair that sprouts from your skin, you feel it coming. It approaches you like an army of ants, joined leg to leg, moving up on you as a blanket that creeps in. You begin to sweat, because you know it’s happening. How do you know? You’ve never died before. How do you recognize the feeling? From a previous birth? I don’t know. But I knew it was happening. I started to sweat. My blood was rushing farther away, abandoning the parts that the blanket of death had already covered. My joints put up a valiant fight, twitching and trying to shake it off. But they got tired too, and the blanket covered them. My eyes wanted to stay open, but the fatigue of an entire lifetime was pulling them shut. The heart slows down knowing that it no longer has to pump blood to the ends of the body that the blanket had already taken over.”

“And this is irrespective of how you die, you say? I mean this is what would happen, whether I’m stabbed with a knife, or if cancer is eating me from the inside.”

“Yes. You won’t know all of it though. Not everyone would. And that’s where it’s important to know how you lived.”

“Go on.”

“The blanket covers more and more of you and the eyes begin to blink slower and slower, staying shut more than open. The turbulence that had been raging inside you spirals inward and begins to settle. You may even feel calmer, the breathing is slower now, deeper perhaps. There is no more sound to hear, nothing more to see, nothing from the outside world will now disturb you. For all it cares, you have been cut off, for lightening the burden. “Dead” weight, you see. And when the bonds of the present are no longer part of your future, your past swims in to fill the void.”

“And…”

“Yes, this is where it matters how you lived. You know every time they portray death in art, you never see its face, it’s always shrouded in darkness, under a hood or something like that?”

“Mostly, yes. But not always. Sometimes, it’s…”

“Yes, sometimes it has a skull for a face. A skull over which you could wrap the skin of your strongest memories, place your fondest eyes, or the moving lips of the voice you hated to hear. That is your choice. The face, the face of your death, is shaped by your own hands. When you look up at Death, the shroud falls, the darkness is driven away, and the skull is filled with flesh. The bony hands stretch to reach you. Your legs are no longer twitching. No use. Your breathing is still, except for occasional gasps, the cough of a dead engine that doesn’t know yet that it’s dead.”

“And then what happens? How does it matter how I lived?”

“Well, when Death reaches out for you, how you lived, decides whether it takes your hand and walks with you, or grabs you by the neck and drags you with it. That depends on how you lived. That’s the only thing that matters.”