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Blindsighted: "Tell me how that felt," she asked, "Please?"

May 12, 2010: Still A Living Thing (Death’s Strange Nature)

It was then that I realized that I must be everything, all at once: a daughter, a child, a woman, a lover, a friend, and what I wanted to be most of all, a survivor.

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I folded the thick, rough paper into a tiny square space, small enough to rest in my palm and big enough to be noticed. I used my eyes as best I could without blinking once. Then I pushed my feet forward and heavy and dull though they were to thought, both moved as if by means of miracle. Feeling was quickly eclipsed with numbness. But I used it in my favor for it required very little of me and much less of anyone else.

Because I’ve yet to master selflessness, I walked in continence for those who needed it the most that day: Grandma Duffy with her small hands and dwarfed, frightened little figure, skin wrinkling and paper-like translucent and my grandfather, proud and strong with World War II at his back but bent and defeated over his brother’s bedside. After a few moments, he reached out to run a pair of fruit-bruised fingers along his brother’s shoulders, a gesture that was as honest as it was painful. He didn’t want to cry and so was choking back while my mother and my grandmother were freely letting loose.

In that room as the monitor above my Uncle Bob’s bed told 0, each of us began the peculiar process of clinging to one dead thing while still embracing the life all around us for it was true, I was still a living thing. I walked even as he lay still. I sang even as he was silent. 

To remind myself of this I pushed my hands together, palm-to-palm behind my back, and clasped them tightly to one another as if they were the guardians of a terribly perplexing sympathy.

And so such is Death’s nature: He comes quite unannounced to steal His foe just as one might pick a flower from the neighbor’s yard or snatch a single grape from the bag at the grocer’s.

Edvard Munch "The Scream"