Her Dying Day

(5-minute read) – The morning sun warmed her room like it did every day on her dying day. Its rays coming through the window fell upon the outer half of her bed and lit up the lilacs and greens in her bedspread. She’d always loved those lilacs and greens.

Her bony skull with its gaunt, colourless face was on the sunny half of the bed, perched on a pillow that had long been its comfort. Her hair was matted and her pyjamas wrinkled. She hadn’t been out of that bed in a long time. She hadn’t had a proper wash for three days.

The bright blue Irish eyes in that bony skull stared incessantly. There was something alive in them that was out of place in that wracked body and that gaunt face. They belonged more to the beautiful contrasting lilacs and greens of the bedspread.

Every now and then they scrolled left to right, then back again across the room. They never seemed to see anything in the room though. They never rested on anyone or anything. It was distinctly as if they were looking into another dimension – something beyond the four walls of that place.

She hadn’t communicated much with anyone in the last few weeks. In the last few days it had been none at all. There was absolutely no sound coming out of her as if the sounds of life had left her already.

For ten years her body was trapped in its chorea as her mind slipped further down a tunnel of dementia. Whereas she had jerked and writhed and stiffened so much before, now she lay dead still. The nerves and the muscles that had twitched and contracted at the command of faulty cells in her brain, now gave up the ghost. There were no faulty signals coming anymore. It seemed her brain had stopped. And her mind had moved on.

A gentle summer breeze rustled the pine trees outside the big bay windows of her room. The tall grass on the edge of the flower bed and the flowers in it danced in time to its music. That flower bed was vibrant and fresh, unlike the bed in her room.

All the same energy and life was out there like it had been for millions of years, regardless of the waning life inside.

Her breathing was shallow. She breathed in and straight out, her tired lungs not wanting to work anymore. Then there was a long pause. No breath. Eyes scrolling… and then stopping. The pause was extending into eternity. Her eyes radiated peace. After all the years of suffering it was time to be free.

But then some impulse in that thirty-seven-trillion-cell-body shot to her lungs again and she breathed. The energy in her was not leaving just yet. Another short breath and another pause on the brink of eternity. And another. And another.

Until eventually her energy and her mind could stay no longer. They had to leave that body and that world. They had to say goodbye to the sights, the smells and the caresses that had characterised their moment in time. And they moved beyond her cells to a new reality. It was sad but joyous at the same time. A mystery of death and life.

She breathed out one last time and the pause went on. The breeze coaxed the flowers to keep on dancing and the sun kept shining on her cooling face. One of the nurses that had grown so fond of her put out a hand and cast a shadow as she softly closed her eyes.

Never again would her loved ones be able to look into those beautiful lights. But the memory of her was imprinted upon each and every one of them. She would live on in those that knew her, those that had ever gazed upon her eyes from the day she was born until her dying day.

He was one of those.

Now, though, he could only see the eyelids that the nurse had slowly shut. The sun’s rays had slipped off the bed and were warming his feet on the floor beside her. He stared at her, half expecting another breath to break a pause. But it never came. He looked at the vessel in the bed and the familiar room and it was all suddenly empty.

Unbearably heavy sadness hung on his heart as he walked out the room. The weight of that sadness constricted his throat and almost pushed him to the ground. But he kept walking. He walked outside into the breeze and the morning sun.

He walked outside into the field with the pine trees. He’d walked in that field many times with her over the years. They were usually slow and sad walks.

Now, as the breeze brought the scent of pine to his nose, quite by surprise to him, he felt his spirit soar. As if propelled from beyond him, he started running. He ran and ran over bumpy ground without tripping once and barely even feeling the ground beneath his feet. The breeze was coaxing him to dance to a musical chorus that lifted him to a new dimension. So he ran and he danced as he ran.

When he stopped, he was right at the bottom of the vast property, where he’d never walked before.

The music sang out one song that impinged upon his soul with absolute certainty. He knew without any doubt she was alive and all around him carried by the wind in the pines she loved so much.

He wept quietly at the bottom of that field. They were tears of sadness because he would never hold her with his thirty-seven-trillion-cell-body again. And tears of joy because she was free.

Then he regained his composure and started walking back, phoning some of her loved ones as he went. He could not dwell on his experience because there were things to do. He had to start arranging her funeral.

Time passed and through all that time her memory lived on in him. Through all that time she was there in his heart and in his mind, in his space and time, from her dying day until his dying day… and then way beyond.

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