i. “get used to dying,” father told me. “you will have many deaths, many burials and many graves, and no time to mourn any of them.”
ii. but how? death is the end, not the journey, and I am no cat. I do not have nine lives— only one.
iii. he smiles, and it is sharp; cruel. I realize — too late — it is a knife, unsheathed. the messenger of my first death.
iv. “the first of many,” he asserts. was that a prediction, or a promise? better not to ask; knowledge itself, is its own kind of death.
v. father was right.
dying is the same as anything else: you get better at it with experience.
vi. but it doesn’t get any easier, crawling and clawing your way out of the dirt. not the kind you can see or smell,
but oh, you can feel it. it’s impossible not to drag up grave soil with you when your body is a cemetery.
vii. eventually you learn life is made of little deaths, like a burden, growing.
viii. death doesn’t scare humanity; it’s life — living, that terrifies us and we turned it into a rehearsal, a stage.
practice makes permanent. // m.a.w
