Man, the body disappoints, then impresses, then fails, then triumphs, it's a sad old
miracle to have to watch. The whole thing misbehaves with hours. Dressings, tubes, fentanyl
patches, weird sticky-wrapped crackling palliative props in the slow, banal mystery of when is
this person going to die? His soon-to-be-deathbed smelt of dry roasted. I solemnly promise I
have not been giving him snacks of any kind, said nice Claire, the carer. Why is there
no dry roasted residue around his mouth, my mum asked. Someone must have been dusting
his chin and lips. His crumbling architecture, like a balsa wood cathedral, his buttresses
and columns collapsing, and us, obliged to notice. Weakened bones, bruises, dehydration,
confusion, all these items on the death list correctly occurring. Did he look peaceful
when he finally passed? Yup. Did he look suddenly younger? Yes. Did it seem as if he
was not there, like his soul had left his body behind? No. It seemed he was the same
bloke, dead. His last few hundred breaths, tricky to pull in and trickling, diminished
out. His children argued, quietly, fizzing bitterly on the lateral axis while their dad
shed the weight of all the meals he'd ever eaten, all the things he'd ever done, all the things he'd ever done.
All the things he'd ever been, officious, stubborn, witty, dedicated, kind, privileged,
all of these words naked and cooling towards meaningless, pale in the unkind light, unfixing
their meaning from a body. Gazing down upon him, ten of us, our thoughts all burrowing
towards each other, breathing the held air, waiting for him to be gone, marvelling at
his slightness, the quiet, the swallowed, the sighing.
My cousin said, the idea of the living outnumbering the dead is nonsense. The dead club is always
going to be bigger, he said. One hundred billion, he said, or thereabout. We nodded and looked
back down at this man we apparently know. The body farted, the kind of fart you do when
nobody's there, because nobody was. We were all dead. He was alive, triumphantly emptied
his condors and organs of dirty, useless air.
What an odd, blindfold performance family it is. We live in such strange ways. It's like
a pact. We act surprised. And by and by, we are.
We live in such strange ways.