Death

When the body collectors come, I’ll be in my home. This place is older than me, older than any human has ever been. As best as anyone can tell, it was built before the Civil War. Living in a place this old, letting it seep into my bones has been a humbling experience. It’s symbiotic. I care for it and it cares for me. It’s mine and yet it’s not mine and it will outlive me just as it did the people who built it, and the ones that came after and after and after. It will outlive all of us, because in a month’s time death will be at our doorsteps.

When the body collectors come, I’ll be with my wife, a woman I’ve loved for long enough to forget what that means. We filled our home together and it is hers as much as it is mine, a melding of tastes, an enriching argument. She will look up at me from her phone on all the days that remain where she can pretend that life is still the way it once was, and god-willing I’ll be present enough to catch every last time that it happens. I have always been a man easily lost in the tunnels of his own imagination. I have missed so many of those errant glances and I regret each of them. A moment of connection slipping away into past, one of the last few we have left.

When the body collectors come, my heart will still be beating, neurons firing, but I’ll already be gone. This me that walks this earth and lives in this home whose oldness makes me feel impermanent—who loves this woman in a way that feels the opposite of impermanent—will be no more. All of us will be undead. Alive and yet not ever truly alive again. Here and yet not ever truly here again. They will come for my body. They’ll put me in one of those vats of Vaseline. They’ll preserve me like some great Pharaoh, just as they will for all of you. By the time they are done, a part of me will be older than my house. A part of me will have lived for longer than any man ever has. A day will have passed and I will be one hundred and eighty five years old. Will this part of me still love my wife? Will this part of me have found a home that makes him feel death’s breath on his shoulder? Will it matter when that death is tens of thousands of years away?