Monday, the 11th of October 2020. I arrived home from my weekly indoor soccer game on a high. I was the sub keeper in a game that ended at 3-1 to my team. I was feeling good, sore but fulfilled. I walked up to the side door entry to my granny flat to find my current roommate & business partner John blocking the entrance, leaning against the door, sitting & smoking his second cigarette. As I approached I felt an immense gravitational pull towards him. I asked him if he was ok, he replied “No man, ____ is dead.”
As the words pierced my eardrums an almost visible dark ring of energy pulsed through me & my heart sank to my stomach. The day that I had been anxiously thinking about for years had finally come. Death had now touched the inner ring. I walked away from him & looked up at the night sky, the only words that came out were “shit, why?” Ashamedly, my consciousness constricted & I was greeted with the ever-present reminder that ____ fate was also my own, & on his & my own behalf I cursed the cruel fate of us all. Cursed God, the universe, & the mechanics of the world itself that it was this way, that it need be this way. I spent a good five minutes convincing myself that I wasn’t dying myself, all the while cursing myself for being such a narcissist for not mourning ____.
Eventually, I came back to John, his eyes gazed piercingly through me as though there was a terrible demon behind me. He got up & apologised for getting in my way. The thought of going inside suffocated me, I needed to feel the open expanse of nature. I asked if he wanted to go for a drive, just anywhere, & he agreed. So we got in the car & drove. I put on a shuffled pre-made playlist of American jazz classics.
My first instinct was to drive to a bar, but it was a Monday, I was in soccer gear & John was wearing something close to pyjamas. Driving towards the city I doubled back after remembering a sanctuary I would go to with my best friend whenever we wanted a place to talk. The silence in the car was only sated by the improvisations of Charles Mingus.
The sanctuary was a filthy minimalist water feature in the middle of a semi-gated suburban neighbourhood in Lidcombe. Every time I go there, without fail I can never remember exactly which roads to go down. I turned in & drove down the main drag, John said something to me that I can’t remember as I began to realise that I had taken a wrong turn. I cracked & let out a single sob. I held it back & John asked if I was ok, through a broken voice I said “yes.” It wasn’t time for me to crack, I needed to get to the sanctuary first. After doubling back a gut feeling led me to the sound of flowing water from a water feature in the centre of a filthy, small, artificial lake.
I couldn’t really look John in the face, his eyes would flood me with memories too close to the bone. We entered into the gated water feature area; the flowing water was calming. I left John & started to walk around the square lake, trying to get control of my breathing. John sat on a brick wall & chain-smoked while texting on his phone. Every two to three minutes, a powerful wave of dread would fill the contours of my perception & I would take out my phone, & text someone I loved.
After a few laps, I came & stood near John, he was watching a video of a coffin monologue he performed about ____. He showed it to me, it was light-hearted, funny & wholesome but I couldn’t believe that he would watch something like that right now, while all I was doing was trying to forget that anything happened at all. We all didn’t think that those coffin monologues would be real events, or that they would come so soon.
I remember calling a few people, a few people I loved dearly. I wanted to hear their voices, it was a beautiful comfort. But ultimately the dread prevailed, I kept seeing it all slip away moment by moment. I hated seeing these things of beauty disappear, I longed for some kind of permanence.
“Look upon my works ye mighty & despair” – Ozymandias.
I wrote all the above a few months after the events. I never ended up posting it, I never really knew where I was going with it. Honestly, I still don’t, but six months after feels like as good a time as any. (Out of respect for my friends & the family of the deceased I did not name him).
What struck me most about his death was how the people around me behaved. We all drank to his memory, we laughed, cried & held each other. But we couldn’t talk about it, mentioning his name; it was hard to make the word leave your mouth.
Death has a strange quality to it, its presence, its taste in your mouth, the way it creeps into every pore of your being. Not death itself but the feeling of the dread around death. For me, it presents so so many strange & dissonant chords. How someone’s death is in some ways their most important event, yet it is spent completely in the background until it forces itself. The way it enrages me to a madness, & then somehow convinces me this is how things must be. There are always those lines; “Without death, life would be meaningless. You would never get anything done, you need the shadow to appreciate the light”.
It makes a lot of sense, but this is only viewing it through an anthropomorphic lens. We have to tell ourselves that because we need a way of rationalising it. I wonder about the universe as a whole, & why exactly it is the way it is. Why does time have to be linear? why is it all waves crashing into each other? why is this the way life evolved? And why life in the first place?
Ultimately questions that I don’t think have a comprehensible or satisfying answer from the point of view of an ape. My own guess is something like;
“The universe needed a way to figure out how it made itself so it made life to evolve consciousness in order to become aware of itself, so that it could create itself again”. This is kind of assuming time is linear, which physicists think it isn’t. How exactly is death a point in time then?
My other guess is that the universe made a huge mistake making consciousness & so it does everything in its power to destroy us. Also it is totally possible & even probable that the universe isn’t conscious outside of conscious life. So most likely I’m totally wrong about everything but what else is new.
Death brings out in me these kinds of big questions & massive emotions, I am afraid of those feelings & of death; especially the process of dying. But at the end of the day it is just one of those immutable facts, & that being the case I try to honour the memory of those dearly departed & never forgot my own destiny to join them.
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