Death's Sweet Kiss

Death comes naturally to me. It lurks around the shaded corners of my life and corridors of my mind. Death is easy for the dying. It is often quick and unrealized before the fact reaches the parameters of the mind. It is the person left behind who deals with Death. The doctor tasked with finding the cause, the analyst tasked with snuffing out the means behind the suspicious circumstances. Or the loved one barging into the lab in hysterics, telling me to work quicker. They plead with me as if I am the only thing standing between them and the truth, when in actuality, there are many fail-safe procedures, machinery, and miles of bureaucracy that even I am powerless to speed along. Even still, they look at me, telling me intimate details of the deceased, even though all I hold are photographs of the deceased and DNA for the records. Some have to be escorted out, cursing me as if I do not know what it's like to be in their place. Death is something I am drawn to because I am accustomed to it. The shadow of Death hangs over me like a loose thread, leaving me in constant wonder if I will be next. My pet rabbit was the first to be taken from me. I only had the rabbit, which I had eagerly insisted on being named Butter, for six weeks. I had just turned six when Death came knocking at the door of its cage. My mother ensured the animal was happy and healthy when she picked it up from the pet shop. However, he was among many who fell victim to poor environments and ill-informed care rituals. The poor thing was merely a husk by the time it fell into my youthfully jubilant arms. It's my first memory of existentialism, being told that all living things must die. My mother, through gothic in nature, broke it to me sweetly, reminding me of how much I cared for Butter right up until the end."You loved him, didn't you?" She asked softly, "Yes, he was my best friend." I answered in the meek voice of a disheartened child, after my tears had let up a little. "He was able to spend his last days with his best friend, isn't that nice? Not everyone is so lucky." Meant to be comforting, only made me think of others who died without being able to see their best friends or being able to say goodbye before they go. She continued, "He died knowing he was loved. Butter died happy, my love." It was a comforting thought that Butter died peacefully at least, but my mind still wandered to the others, those I didn't know, who hadn't gotten love in their final moments the way my rabbit did. Losing the first pet is always hard, and even after my mother's comfort, I still felt terribly about the loss of my newest companion. But now, whenever I missed him too much, I would remember all the times I loved him, just as my mother had taught me to. Knowing that he felt as loved as I did by my mother made me happy that he was resting easily. I fell asleep in my mother's arms that afternoon. I was 12 when my grandma died. We hadn't been terribly close. She and my mom have been at odds since she could remember, and we really only saw each other on holidays. Until I was about eight, my mother, alone, couldn't watch me and work the late-night shifts it took to keep a roof over our heads. With no other option, she packed up her pride and knocked on my grandmother's door, visibly troubled and partly defeated in doing so. It was a surprise when my grandmother took us with open arms and previous inhibitions about my mother gone, or at least set aside, for the sake of our well-being. My grandma would watch me while my mom was at work. We would spend late afternoons quietly, with me playing on the floor with my assortment of strange dolls, silly-faced bears, and miniature cars. She would watch her shows and pray every evening after dinner. Sometimes, on Fridays, we would play a game of cards that my grandmother was partial to, and then go to bed. As years went on, we fell into this daily ritual. As I grew, instead of toys on the floor, I began to favor being tucked away somewhere with a book. We never had many conversations that weren't about God, school, or happenings with my mother. Those were the conversations she enjoyed having. When I tried to bridge the gap, she would divert the topic and find her way back to the latter three. Personal conversation wasn't her way. When Death took her, she was seventy-eight. It was natural, cardiac, and she died loved too. The quiet, unspoken kind of love, but loved nonetheless. Sometimes, when I think back, I wish she would tell me what she was like when she was a little girl, about my grandpa, my dad, and my mom when they were younger. I wish she were the kind of grandma who would bake cookies and read me bedtime stories. But that's just not the woman she was. All her love was evident in what she did, not what she said. She would cut up some fruit as a snack during homework time, memorize my favorites of her dishes, know the times my favorite shows were on, and accept my mother despite her likes and appearance, even defying my grandmother's own. My grandma thought my mom bordered on the satanic. It took years before my grandma truly realized my mom didn't care enough about belief to become devout in anything. She liked black, lace, moody, gothic stories and the Grimm fairy tales. She enjoyed creating her own look by hand, sewing, cutting, bleaching, or gluing. More than anything, she wanted to love outwardly, for herself and for others. It was nice to see my grandma eventually come to respect her in her own space. When I was seventeen, my mother died. A sudden cardiac arrest at work. This was how I learned cardiac disease runs in the family and can become apparent quickly. When she left for work that evening, I didn't see her again until I was identifying her body at the morgue and making funeral arrangements with the payout from her life insurance. I would turn eighteen in five months, and those last five months before my apparent adulthood, I would be in a foster home with a couple who were mostly in it for the checks but took the time to be welcoming and make the living conditions decent. My foster family accompanied me to college tours I had scheduled for me and my mom months prior. They even helped me move into the dorms and wished me good luck before disappearing, except for a 'Happy Birthday!' text every year, which I still receive now. It's still more than most are willing to go through to remember. When the police allowed me to go back home and get my things, I realized none of my possessions meant anything to me anymore. They were all remnants of a home I could never have again. In packing, I found myself loading her things into boxes and baskets, her books, her jewelry, her clothes, which I would come to decide suited me incredibly well. The topic of my mother's Death is still a bitter one. She died loved, but I'm sure she died scared, too. This is what comprised my thoughts in the recent weeks. No matter what I did at work, on the commute or when I settled in at home, continuing my binge of indie cult movies and decades-old box office flops. I couldn't get my mind off the deaths. This feeling, of which I've chalked up to nothing more than grief and nostalgia, gnawed at my mind and lingered in my person. Even coworkers, whom I usually have no interaction with beyond social niceties and work-related questions, were coming up to me asking if everything was alright in my life or if I was feeling okay. Admittedly, I liken my appearance to that of a lifeless doll, or if perhaps a different kind of tingle toward the supernatural itches me, a vampyre. I tone it down for the sake of work, but the general dark eyes and pale skin suffice. The reflection seems the same to me, except for the slightly darker circles under my eyes, which are a result of the lack of sleep I've had this week, but nothing my coworkers haven't seen before. In my dreams, I've been seeing and hearing Death from those I don't know, pleading for me, telling me it's not their time, that they can still make it right. In consciousness, none of the faces or voices are distinctive. However, unconsciously, when I'm dreaming, their pleas are incredibly clear, almost too much so that I jerk myself awake, trying to escape them. But tonight is different. It's me. I'm floating in a lake with a shallow black currant gently pulling me with it in its leisure. Around me, it is pitch black, with the only light coming from the reflection of the water around me from some unknown source. It's gloomy, but it's peaceful. Just as I am about to drift off with the gentle ripples tapping me, pushing me along, allowing the lake to take me where it may, there is a voice that sends vicious ripples through the water. I couldn't make it out at first, with the noise sounding guttural yet soft from the distance. After some time, the voice is successful in breaking through the veil. "Adaliah," It said in a pointed whisper. The voice itself I could not distinguish as either a man's or a woman's; it just was. "Do you hear me?" The voice rang. My heart raced at the vulnerability of being watched from afar and a mysterious entity calling my name."Yes. I hear you." I muttered in curiosity, just above a whisper, afraid to break the level at which they were speaking. "Good," they said with a drawl. "I'm sorry to come to you like this, but there is no time for another choice." With some inflections, they sounded like my mother, in others, my grandma, and in others still, the voices from my dreams, all stitched together in sound to create one sentence. The figure slowly came into being, passing through the mist, standing next to me where I floated, in water I had deemed much deeper. As if in total cliche, a skeleton stood before me with the black robe and scythe to match. The only curiosity about him was an etching upon the forehead, marked in black. "Are you the grim reaper?" I asked facetiously, a hint of humor in my eyes at the stereotype. "As you understand it, yes. I reap the souls of the dead." They answered. "What you see before you is only a piece of my land in the Realm of Vices. It used to be much more…dynamic than you perceive it now. It has fallen into ruin at the hands of greed and undeserved pride." My expression fell when my quip was not reciprocated. However, I knew in some shallow form of consciousness that I had been dreaming. I had the ability, albeit vaguely, to understand in my waking mind that I was dreaming, but not enough lucidity to control them. "My time is up any moment now, for the king from the Realm of Virtue wishes me erased and is on his way to collect my bones. This is why I've come to you, Adaliah; you've always had one foot in life and one in Death. I am asking you, Adaliah, to forsake your life and take my place. Protect my Realm and unite it." They pushed toward me where I lay, "I'm sorry, I cannot afford you the luxury of time in this decision, and I cannot move on without your definitive answer. What is your answer, Adaliah?" In that moment, their question echoed in my mind and rang in my ears with the voices of what I could only assume were the dead pleading with me for help, urging me to say yes. The water rumbled with their voices and seemed as though the voices grew hands, pulling me tight, closer and closer to the brink of life. "Okay!" I screamed, writhing, wriggling in an attempt to escape their rigorous grasp, "Yes! Yes! I will help you! Let me go!" With my confirmation of choice, Death himself leaned down and laid their cold, bony teeth upon my brow in what I assumed was meant to be a kiss. As they did, I felt the incredible burn and carve of what felt like the searing of a scorching blade pressed upon my brow through to my skull. But no blade ever came near, only the remnant burn of the kiss after they moved away. It was now that I felt utterly aware of the body left behind, asleep in my bed. It had gone still, letting out a deep exhale. The grasp of the dead and Death itself clung to me no more and seemingly disappeared entirely into the fog. It was now that I, no longer held up in the water and no longer floating, fell straight through the depths of the water as if I were made of lead. I flailed, grasping aimlessly at the water. Every time I resurfaced, I hoped to catch onto something that could stabilize me, but to no avail. The water had a quality of vengeance to it. Every time I was able to break the surface for more than a moment, I was only able to desperately and instinctively inhale with a breath I could not fully catch before a wave threw me back under, where I once again began fighting the current. This was the end. My body outside this horrible dream had stopped breathing, and my attempts to reach her were becoming futile. It was astonishing how quickly I grew tired of flailing, trying to catch my own breath. Fighting for life is exhausting. In my faltering, flailing, I swore I heard a 'Thank you' from the voice of Death that carried on the water. In my fatigue, I conceded. The waves were thick and too quick for me to find balance in. If these were to be my last agonizing thoughts, I wanted them to be about my mother. I wondered if this is what she saw when she left. I asked what would meet me on the other side, and sent out one last hope that it might be her. As I closed my eyes and let my breath go, I decided I was wrong. Death is difficult. Clinging to life as you die was even harder. But Death itself was gentle. When the pain of dying subsides, Death wraps you in its embrace; it may not be warm, but it comforts you all the same. Just then, as I let my thoughts sink away, I felt arms under my own, pulling me out of the water and placing me on the shore. I heard the concern of two discernible voices, and the chatter became distant in my haze. I had died, I was sure, but here I lay alive again.