dying time

entering dying time happens gradually. you are in the world. you are reading the news and paying attention to this disaster and that affront. you are planning meals and checking items off your calendar. the dust on the mantle matters. the balance in your accounts has meaning.

then you dip into the knowing that death is coming soon. you submerge a foot and then a leg into the syrupy waters of memory and no-doing, of bits of information that seem like they need to be shared — how to do the things the dying person had done, where the extra keys are, how to make the dumplings — followed by the vast realization of how unnecessary any of this is.

you consider morphine. you consider ice cubes. you hold gently to living wills. the silence is enormous. it has eyes and a heartbeat. the room pulsates with the cellular experience of decades lived.

you touch the skin you love so dearly and wonder — unable to take in the reality — that it will not be here under your hands much longer. we are not built to understand this. unlike so much knowledge we have lassoed and lashed, this non-being is not in our grasp.

dying time is underwater-slow. immediacy is the only way. not immediate fast. but immediate as in this is it. here. this second. click. on the clock. click. this is it.

and after you leave the room, that underwater chapel where the human is unraveling into something else, something larger and more ethereal, you sit in your own home and do no-thing. the tv seems profane. books are too complicated. you make an egg. you sit. and sit.

doing is not possible. only being in quiet reverence of this process. dying into time. dying to be with her again. dying on your own in this slow, sweet space.