A Brief Description of One Man's Death

   

                                                            A Brief Description of One Man's Death


   I cannot presume to say what every death feels like. I can only speak to my own, and it was really not all that interesting once the knife was removed and the murderer escaped, but I will do my best to enlighten the reader as to its effects upon my body, and also to its effects on my inner thoughts at the curious moment of passing.
   
   I can tell you that the wound succombed quickly to shock, so there was little pain, but there was the frightening knowledge of something terribly wrong, of some important thing inside of me being irreparably damaged. Having little knowledge of anatomy I cannot say for certain sure what that something was, but the blood was dark, almost black, so I suspect it was the liver, or a kidney that suffered the injury. 
   
   The blood was plentiful. It pooled around me until it encircled my every appendage. It touched my face so that its strangely-sweet odor filled my nostrils until I accepted the smell of the blood as being the smell of death itself. I recall being shocked at the amount, and presumed correctly that a body cannot lose that amount of blood and survive.
   
   With the shock and the blood loss came the cold... a deep, down to the bone cold that sent my muscles into spasms. The spasms acted upon my blood vessels like squeezing a sponge. My body did what it could to speed-up the natural process that it instinctively knew had begun. In a final effort at self-preservation I curled myself into a fetal position, my arms pressing into the wounded area in a feeble attempt at both warmth, and to thwart the flow of blood. The effort was far too little, and it came far too late.
   
   And finally came the exhaustion, an overwhelming desire to sleep that pressed against my eyelids with an enormous weight that willed them shut, a feeling not unlike the sun gives you after a heavy, afternoon meal. My eyes closed under that weight. Sleep massaged my temples with the gentlest of fingers, but something inside my head, something in the folded gray matter of my brain railed against it, knowing that, at this point in time, every second, every feeling, every thought was sacred, and that I must induce one more of each! To sleep was never to awaken, but I was so very tired. I wondered then that I could really die! I would be no more. In my vanity that did not seem plausible, that the world could carry on without me. Of course I had always known that I could die, that I would die someday, but now that it was upon me, I did not deem it acceptable. Who gave that person, that murderer, the right to end me, to take the only thing that really belonged to me and to run away into the night? How is it that he should live and not me? I? To die? I, who was life’s greatest advocate! I, who was filled only moments ago with joy and song? I, to vanish as though I had never existed?
   
   But it was true, and so I did, and the world did go on, and the earth did still turn. A few tears were shed, and then the life that I held so dear ceased of its importance, ceased its appointments, its deadlines, and its pleasures, so that the hole my absence left on the earth’s face was no greater than the hole that is left when you pull your finger from a glass of water.

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