Ashes, Ashley Hand [books to read for beginners .TXT] 📗

Death leaves the lingering scent of nothing—of sterility, and plastic and iodine. It is a noisy silence echoing through the blank hallways of the mind. It feels like cold, clammy hands clasping yours as you brace yourself for the next bit of news, like weary, creaky joints that have been poised in the same tense position for long, tedious hours of suspense. It assumes the acrid taste of stagnant coffee and salty tears and the rancid remains of last night’s half-eaten, processed, pureed hospital food, all mingling together on waves of stale breath.

There is something about hospitals, this feeling of community brought about by the convergence of a common suffering. Families become families in hospitals, just like they become families at weddings and births and holidays. They are artificially constructed in a moment. Death strips away pretense and petty differences. Perhaps it is because an aura of uncertainty, a vague suggestion of awful finality, hovers over the place, permeating like the chill of a fog, coating the floor and walls and tables and chairs and plants with a thin varnish of grief. It whispers a reminder that this world is fleeting, that we could lose this—all of this—with the intake of a breath.

People you wouldn’t normally see, except maybe at Christmas or Easter, are suddenly beside you, gripping your hand, agonizing over the possibility of loss. And even if only by virtue of your mutual blood, these people are important. Even if you haven’t spoken for ages, it is vital that they are there. Your very DNA seems to resonate, inspiring closeness at a cellular, almost animalistic, level.

All huddled together in uncomfortable waiting room chairs, some stare blankly at the TV, others at the Styrofoam cup of crappy coffee they hold in their hands. Everyone is knit together by the suspenseful silence. It is a sort of holy hush that could go for hours undisturbed. No one sleeps. No one reads. We just stare and think and pray and drink our coffee and delude ourselves into believing that it will be alright, even when the prospect is impossible.

And suddenly, we all love each other. No one has to voice it, but it is tangible—the air is thick with it, and it is fed by a sense of desperation as we wait.

Our priorities seem to fall into place the exact moment that reality is shattered into jagged little pieces. Life assumes a certain clarity, and the only thing that matters is family. We forget that anything else even existed.

Because one of the links is about to be broken.

That is the thing about hospitals—they breed this spectrum of emotions only because so much is hanging in the balance. The gravity of the situation seems to slow even the second hand on the clock, the trickling of the fountain in the foyer, the beat of your own heart, the surge of blood in your veins.

To be suspended on the cusp of death is to be stirred from the monotony of the human experience.

The bitter, gut-wrenching part of this is that she wasn’t supposed to die yet. She was supposed to venture out, to live.

Most people make very narrow tracks in the earth. They travel from home to the grocery store or to school or to work or to church, and back. Always the same routine, always living within the same restricted radius.

It is a pagan practice to cast a circle around yourself using a wand made of hazelwood, enlisting a sort of superstitious protection from external danger.

Perhaps we are all pagans, because we draw circles around ourselves and rarely cross them.

But she was different.

She was meant to stand barefoot in a rain forest just to sift her toes through the damp dark earth and look up through the open parachutes of sunlight in the canopy of treetops above her, meant to breathe the sweet jasmine air of an open market as dusky-skinned women danced along the line of tents and linen awnings, beating tambourines and swaying their hips to the rhythm of a thousand jangling copper coins, meant to smoke pipes on roofs at dusk as the red sun poured itself into the ocean, meant to feel the wind sting her cheeks as she rode on the back of a motorbike through cobblestone cities, meant to listen to the lullaby of foreign languages tumbling across thick Middle Eastern lips, meant to write sonnets on scraps of paper crinkled from the salty air misting up from the Mediterranean Sea, meant to pound nails into a schoolhouse built on the cold, dry plains below craggy Afghan mountains, meant to dangle her legs over the ledge of a rickety old train as the open desert landscape blurred past her bare, dusty feet, meant to walk down an empty London street in the middle of the night uttering poetry under her breath.

It was all very raw, and went against everything that felt instinctively right. Like a flower robbed of its petals the moment it blooms.

Perhaps it is sadistic, but people need this. We need to be a part of this heightened consciousness of our humanity. We hang onto the sweet ecstasy, and try not to feel guilty that the possibility of another’s death makes us feel that much more alive.

A small part of us feasts on the magnitude of being huddled in a room with so much at stake, everyone important to us within reach. It weaves a new texture into the fabric of time, makes it feel much more vital and poignant. Man is meant to experience joy and sorrow, a staccato of cataclysmic circumstances that make this life an epic rather than a children’s book.

But it is better when the enormity of it all can be experienced as more of an oblique pain. When you’re removed from what’s at stake—in the case of a third-cousin or a great-aunt or a friend’s friend—you get the good feelings without all the anguish. You feel like your presence is somehow very vital, but you are not sick with anxiety for all that you could lose. It is like peering in through a side window on a grief that is not your own.

That is how it feels to experience this from the other side, when you are the one hanging in the balance between life and death. When the grief and anxiety is centered around you, and the fragility of your life.

And I knew that what would kill my mother, my brother, my sister, my father, was the fact that I was the youngest, that the bulk of the pages in my story had been mercilessly ripped out, that there was a wealth of unrealized potential that would be burnt to cinder, and soon the ashes of my body would be scattered to the wind, like dandelion seeds drifting into oblivion on currents of God’s very breath.

Publication Date: 02-06-2010

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