By KL Bissenden
I ponder prospects of the inevitable.
Dramatically: My car bursts into flames. Like on TV, the grunting hero tries desperately to reach me, but, oh, the heat is too great.
Tragically: Fraught with altruism I pick a Third World country where I will defeat poverty and illiteracy, but I’m thwarted by a forgotten land mine on a border of new maps. If I were alive, I would wonder which tragedy exploded.
Instantly: On an operating table an anesthetist shoots the wrong creek into my river. Though I am in the place of “First, do no harm,” the white masks will tilt their heads, “It’s one in a million, but she died instantly.” Ah. Justified. I thought death was always instant. One, you’re here. Two, you’re not. I don’t donate my body to science; I like mystery.
Unexpectedly: a miscellaneous tube underneath my flesh explodes while I’m discussing Hockey Night in Canada, then I don’t finish my sentence.
Privately: In my pale walled apartment on a neglected street I die alone, except for my faithful dog, still beside me when I begin to decompose.
Stupidly: I’m walking home with my groceries, and meet some fool so high he imagines he may be on another planet. His 1991 Datsun airship intersects with Earth at my body, then I get unscheduled take-off, and crash at Space Centre Asphalt. Only my groceries begin orbit. Seven of my eggs break. I’ll never sneak home with that stolen chocolate bar, because I won’t go home.
Heroically: I leap into turbulent water to rescue the precious only child of an older couple, but as I hurl the gasping bundle to their embrace, an under-tow rips me into rapids forever more. Damn, I can’t be present for the medal ceremony. Posthumous, sounds like the bin for the potato peels.
Peacefully: I become so choked with dementia that I don’t know them, and they don’t know me. I’m someone else. One night I get tired of the whole twisted tangle, and decide I’ll knock off. Like in nurse novels, they call my family, “Quick, we think the time is short.” I die just 5 minutes before they rush in. Peaceful. The papers will say that I died surrounded by loved ones. A small family, that’s fortunate. I have limited sides.
Senselessly: When I find no reason or relevance in my world, in some wretched small town I short circuit the system, and jump from the bridge into obscurity. Later, the locals will throw flowers into the river.
Romantically: I walk under a painter’s ladder but without my rabbit’s foot. I stride forward, my skull meets aluminum, and splat, like a paint drip I greet drop cloth. In the shadow of the ladder of death I look up into the dark eyes of a man who could have been my lover. I wonder if watching paint dry would have been exciting.
Painfully: I am plowed down by a quiet train and there are bits of me scattered on the tracks like dice on a table, but honestly I’m still alive, and not impressed with the white coats poor at jigsaw puzzles.
While the wheel still procrastinates on my body a bystander holds my single attached hand and says, “Don’t worry it’s going to be OK.” Just before I die I wonder if he needs new glasses.
Naturally: Because I do, you do, have to, eventually die, naturally