Anzacs and autumn days

Death comes when it comes, to everyone. It’s the one sure thing, the one clear line, the one unbeaten conviction. We come and we go and the rituals we have for those who remain become transmuted to the gatherings we have at holidays, it becomes just a day. But I’m always sad for her on these two days that I have, the day that marks her entry and the day that marks her death. I am old enough to know better, to allow it to go, to move away but it feels like the last thing I have of her, this sadness, and it seems like a betrayal to let it go. I don’t know if it would be different with her here now, I don’t know if I would feel a part of my family whether the distance and the difference would be smaller, I like to think it would be but who knows. The man at the first aid course said it was a privilege and a beautiful thing to witness someone’s death, he had seen thousands of strangers die in his career, I don’t feel that way, death isn’t that special, its not an epiphanous moment, at least for those not at the time dying. It or the variety I have seen amounts to a human being who once talked and walked and kissed and laughed gasping intermittently for breath, it is visceral, practical and long. There is no magic, there’s no white light, we don’t have the last vestiges of conscious thought departing so it is not surreal it is real. I can reach out and touch death. And then it is gone. There is something there in its place a still warm thing with my mums clothes on, but there is no her in there. She is elsewhere or nowhere depending on what you believe.

I believe in nothing, the webbed fingers of the universe just let you go, poof gone. I believe that there is no after life, no salvation, no reincarnation, no damnation, just poof and you’re gone, lights out, no ones home. Bodies rot, fade, fall apart. Even stars die, they continue to live on in the memory of space but they die all the same.

I’m sure that sounds negative that as a human the need to have some connection to the forever and ever we envision ourselves existing in is natural. But quite frankly anything mre than nothing seems absurd and somewhat sinister. The great phenomena of some kind of divine will, whether literally the old man with the white beard or the ephemeral collective consciousness the self conscious hippies like to cloak their need to exist forever in, it all seems like a voyeurs dream, the agent provocateur’s idea of a good time. A one god universe and a planet full of entertainment. Intelligent design, it’s more a marketing campaign for a fridge than an explanation for the universe. But really whatever helps you sleep at night, for some its valium, some the promise of heaven, for me it’s the knowledge that I am definitely going to die one day. The one sure thing

my mother, who today if u believe she is floating in the ether or languishing in heaven is 57. i know she is gone but i love her just the same.