As Lola Laid Dying

Lola may die tonight, repeated the ambient voice over in my head, as I looked down at her shriveled form--almost no longer human, disconnected from any memory, almost impossible to create as a possible idea or an imagined image of her, none, nulled. The bulge and outline of her skull, as if itself alive, pressed against her face, wanting to tear away from its body. But she was still technically alive. Only in a comaesque sleep, and breathing with much effort. Her hollow mouth, all teeth gone with every son or daughter she bore, gapes and shuts like a tired socket. Her tongue receding to that dark place in her body. She even had that look behind the glass. The family she could no longer see--which she hadn't seen for a long time anyway--gathered around her, as if suddenly, in contest for her attention. But she was just there like part of the bed and the crumpled sheet, her face an embossed design on her pillow.

I have seen a lot of dead things. Fishes mostly and dogs. And I could not trace any difference from those things and with what I was seeing then. A thought passed me, that as the soul perfects itself, the body deteriorates. I can only imagine the darkness she was seeing behind her cataract-blinded eyes. As she was almost dead in the waking world, I can feel that she was, as if given a second childhood, bouncing, running or even gliding in that dream-state, in that delirium, in that buffer between the living and the dead.

My childhood was made up of pretty sick, superstitious, and terrifying stories of moments like this. It was mentioned that she had called for a name belonging to a dead person. Which only meant they were beckoning her already. Which only meant she was walking that path lined with flowers and a bright light at the end. Around her house/chapel filled with saints and misalettes, interwoven with laminated pictures of the dead and the living, in gray and in color, I had felt the room was crowded, yet my skin felt flushed with a certain chill. I'm a sucker for horror stories, but I felt the fear in this one was more of awe rather than just fear for pain or even death. The awesome mystery of death. Death, the misunderstood. Notions about dying came to me...everything I had read or seen. Reincarnation, the afterlife, heaven and hell, merging with the void, but none of these had calmed me down. I just felt so lonely and pitiful, that I was sure I would breakdown. Not that Im too crazy about Lola. But I guess my sorrow was for myself too. For one day I will also go through this solemn brutality; this tearing away of the non-degradable from the degradable. This part wherein you wouldn't know where to go: you are too set up for leaving life but your are too afraid to embrace death. And I guess that's what will transform us. Okay I guess I have wet myself enough.

I have many approximations of what we will "see" in death, one of these is the classic falling into a bottomless vortex. But I wish from here to the moon and back, that what I'd be seeing there would be all the best moments in my entire life and all the worst fixed into best moments, played out before me in eternal repeat mode. Amen.