More of my efforts at fiction....
He tried everything he knew to keep his eyes open. Every wave of exhaustion that swept over him made it harder and harder to fight, but he fought hard. He did not want that last, long sleep to come. He wasn't afraid, but he felt a deep, aching sense of loneliness coming on and he thought it would just get worse if he allowed himself to close his eyes.
Finally, he couldn't fight it any longer. His eyes slowly closed and he felt the energy in his body slip gently away. There was no pain, no discomfort, only relief, though he didn't quite understand the sense of relief. It was more a sense of bending to the desire to rest, to give in, to give up.
He was sad, very sad, as he felt his will lose the battle it had fought for so long. There would be no more conversations, no more arguments, no more laughter and tears and pride. There would be nothing. Once his eyes shut, there would be blackness and nothingness and that would be it. He knew his children would still be there, that their feelings and their emotions would roil on. But for him, the world would end when he shut his eyes. He was sad. He didn't want that to happen. He didn't want his children to feel the heartache and anguish of his loss. But he was almost ready. He was ready, except for the permanance of it all...nothing, forever.
When the time finally came, he didn't even know it. He had lost consciousness moments earlier, silently weeping at the thought of his children without a father.
So it was for an old atheist. Unlike his friends who felt certain they would go to a better place, he was certain he would go nowhere. He would just stop being. Yet his friends who had gone before him were just as sad as he when the final moments came. All of them sensed, finally, that they were near the end of everything. They would go nowhere. It would all just be over. And those who remained would be the only ones who cared. And they would be gone one day, too. So what did it all mean? The answer came just before he took his last breath, but by then, it was too late.
1 comment:
Well, I just wrote a comment and it went *poof* into cyberspace. However, I'll try to reconstruct what I said.
Interesting piece. I think it is probably a fairly accurate fictionalization of how one might feel in that situation. I spent a lot of time with my father when he was terminally ill, and spent all of the last day talking with him when he felt like speaking. Some of what you've written came up in our conversation.
I think the sadness part is very accurate. I base that on things my father said, as well as my own feelings when I ended up in ER a couple of years ago this month. Things went quite wrong and, for awhile, I wondered if I might not have a chance to say goodbye to my family and friends. That made me feel quite sad -- along with thinking of all of the things I'd left undone, things I wished I'd gotten around to. I had no fear, just the sadness. A couple of friends who have had very close calls have told me they had similar feelings -- sadness over feeling that they weren't going to get to finish up their lives. Btw, in many ways, my close call was a life-changing event for me.
Anyhow, to return to this piece of writing, the one thing I might explore as well would be the feeling that there are things being left undone - an unfinished life.
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