Beyond the flip side
25 July 2011 09:26 AM Categories: Writing prompts
Some may be lucky (or un-) enough to die quickly (the major coronary, the proverbial bus or truck, the burst aorta), but for most of us, death is slow and sneaky. There are warning signs, there is the long waiting, the room full of loved ones and stale, sickened breath or empty except for the one on his way out. (Don’t feel sad for the person dying alone. That is how it works for everyone, even those in a roomful of love. Support is good, but at the very end, the gathering is more for those left behind, staving off loneliness. Or so I tell myself when I imagine my own death, my letting go in a sparsely furnished room.)
And what about life? My son has finally showed an interest in learning where he came from, the result of some questions about the difference between male and female bodies, and of our reading of the book It’s So Amazing. His birthday is coming up and last night he asked me "How did I start?" We talked about sex (glossed over for the most part, though he knows the mechanics), the meeting of sperm and egg, the cell division, the way he grew inside me and how we anticipated his arrival. It is so amazing. And a long process. That bundle of cells, the zygote future boy that we didn’t even know existed, is life of a sort, but not quite.
When does death become death and life bloom into its full being? I’ve been at one deathbed knowingly and at a deathchair in ignorance. I’ve watched someone’s body wind down until the final moment, but before then, before the fundamental change, the person in front of us, the himness of him, was already gone. His body was stuck in the waiting room of death for a long sad day and then it was over, yes, the switch was flipped, but the process had been going on for days, months.
Death and life overlap, what was supposed to be the beginning can be the end (the miscarriage, the stillbirth, the end of quickening and the heavy knowledge that you contain death).
And what about the death of love, the way something within us goes flat, but not all at once? It happens after years of holding the love underwater, of neglecting it while it plays in traffic. If you get to it early enough, you might be able to resuscitate it. Its death is a process, like all the rest, like the falling, the immersing, the way two people briefly become one.
From the prompt "In the space of one minute ..."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. I could delve much deeper into this one if I wanted to.
Image by redwood 1.
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