Every story has a beginning. This one, too. But how to begin with death? And why?
As a kid I loved the game show. How the answers were asked and the questions were the answers. What is jeopardy?
As a kid I loved the game show. How the answers were asked and the questions were the answers. What is jeopardy?
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I am writing this a month after I had turned 27. I am fascinated with November: How, in temperate countries the cold really begins to take hold, the leaves already falling, and everywhere almost a dead grey. Here, the weather remains the same: a series of sunny days or a week of typhoon rains or thick oppressive clouds that refuse to fall. Nobody really notices the weather. It’s the same day after day after day, until it changes. A different sameness.
Here November, too, is a month of death. Not that of the newly dead, or the dead that grow back with spring. Here, the old dead whose names have been said over and over in prayers, whose souls wear thin as nothing remains of them but scars on whitewashed stone—they are the dead we celebrate. The dead who can never come back.
I began this journal two weeks ago, on a morning I found myself with no sleep, awake at dawn, walking to church. It was a Saturday, the mass was for the dead. The priest kept on asking for prayers for our dear departed, our faithful dead, our dear, our departed, our dead. So I prayed for my brother, two grandmothers, a grandfather I had never met. The homily was on Jesus raising a dead man, and it told how all who witnessed feared Jesus; how later they praised him. Hosanna, hosanna on high.
Everybody prayed for their own dead. And nobody noticed the dead woman in the corner, kneeling, then standing; listening, then singing the hymns. And nobody feared what they did not know they witnessed.
Myself, I hadn’t noticed when I died. I was alive for a long time. I could have been dead for a long time. It was the same day after day after day. Until it changed into a different sameness.
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I am writing this a month after I had turned 27. I am fascinated with November: How, in temperate countries the cold really begins to take hold, the leaves already falling, and everywhere almost a dead grey. Here, the weather remains the same: a series of sunny days or a week of typhoon rains or thick oppressive clouds that refuse to fall. Nobody really notices the weather. It’s the same day after day after day, until it changes. A different sameness.
Here November, too, is a month of death. Not that of the newly dead, or the dead that grow back with spring. Here, the old dead whose names have been said over and over in prayers, whose souls wear thin as nothing remains of them but scars on whitewashed stone—they are the dead we celebrate. The dead who can never come back.
I began this journal two weeks ago, on a morning I found myself with no sleep, awake at dawn, walking to church. It was a Saturday, the mass was for the dead. The priest kept on asking for prayers for our dear departed, our faithful dead, our dear, our departed, our dead. So I prayed for my brother, two grandmothers, a grandfather I had never met. The homily was on Jesus raising a dead man, and it told how all who witnessed feared Jesus; how later they praised him. Hosanna, hosanna on high.
Everybody prayed for their own dead. And nobody noticed the dead woman in the corner, kneeling, then standing; listening, then singing the hymns. And nobody feared what they did not know they witnessed.
Myself, I hadn’t noticed when I died. I was alive for a long time. I could have been dead for a long time. It was the same day after day after day. Until it changed into a different sameness.
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A little something I had started working on late last year. And after the (uncalled-for!) remarks by L. and D. that I might actually be a closet fictionist, the monster is half-way out of hibernation. Let = sleeping = dogs = lie?
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