What’s it like to die?
When death carried my grandfather away from the Midst, I wondered for the first time in my life what that finality felt like. I was a girl of eight summers, and much too curious for my own good, I asked my mother.
“Cadda!” she admonished, then shushed me. My grandfather burned on the pyre and my village keened his death song. Obviously, I had chosen the wrong time. I asked again anyway. She shared a hesitant look with my father and pulled me aside. Crouching to meet my eyes, she took her pendant from around her neck and placed it around mine. I thumbed the translucent stone, filled with an orange liquid. All healers possessed one. “Do not worry yourself with such things,” she said.
Only I did. But mother would hear no more from me and returned to listen to her father’s death song. She sobbed and wouldn’t join in. A part of me knew it was because she hadn’t been able to save him.
The next day, I went to my father.
Bluntly, while he hammered away at molten iron, he described the agony and pain one must go through, the loosening of the bowels, the sobbing for one’s mother, the prayers for the end to come.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I’ve seen it, darling, on the battlefield, in the village, everywhere.”
“But you have not felt it, so how do you know?”
Pausing, he set aside his hammer and shrugged. “No one knows, really.”
He never was one to sugarcoat the stark realities of life.
Unsatisfied, I braved the village matron’s stern glare and put my question to her. She studied me wearily. My grandfather’s death had hit her hard, for a reason I could not fathom. After a long moment, she sighed.
“Death is something that should trouble only the old,” she said.
“Oh it does not trouble me, Matron Brogia,” I lied. “I only want to know what to expect.”
The matron raised a brow and tilted her oaken staff toward me. “When you leave the Midst, blessed Ientu will guide you to either the Light or the Darkness. Most go to the Darkness, where Aiia awaits, but a few will be carried to the Light by the Mother Creator.”
“I know this,” I said, childish frustration taking hold of me. I couldn’t see why it was so difficult for them to come up with an answer. “I want to know what it feels like when you die. Does it hurt?”
“Why do you concern yourself with pain, child?” The matron beckoned me closer and I stepped forward. She lifted my chin and cast her gaze downward, warmth emanating from her blue eyes.
“Your grandfather suffered not when he passed from the Midst. All his pain was ended and wherever he went, it will not follow him.”
Tears welled in Brogia’s eyes and she let me go, tapping me with her staff and waving me away. I still wasn’t satisfied, but I left the matron’s presence. I found my friend Iliatos by the river and asked him.
“Croaking toads, but why would you want to know that?” He dropped the rock he’d been about to toss.
I wasn’t about to admit to my fears, so I shrugged. “No one will give me a straight answer.”
“Maybe because there is no answer.”
“Well, what do you think?”
Iliatos scratched his head, a pained look on his face. I regretted asking him, for his mother had died not long before my grandfather and he was left an orphan. “I hope it doesn’t hurt.”
Silently agreeing, I picked up the rock he’d dropped and placed it in his palm. Then I left him alone. Perhaps he was right and no answer existed.
Summers passed much too quickly, winters stayed far too long. I grew older and concerned myself with things of the present, much like any other girl. Though, I must say, no other girl in my village took up bow and arrow as part of their womanly training. That was my father’s influence and no matter my mother’s dislike of it, I practiced and hunted to my heart’s content. And I forgot about death, but death did not forget about me.
Six summers after I first asked, men from the south came and brought the answer with them. They set my village aflame, took captives, and put to the sword all who stood in their way, including my father.
And me.
The invaders took orders from one man. Kenric, my father had called him before being killed by him. Like a fool, I held to my father’s lifeless body when I should have run, like he’d told me to. One of the invaders pried me away from my father. They threatened to leave with my pregnant mother and perhaps with me. Bloodied, snot nosed, and bleary eyed, I resisted, kicking and thrashing like a rabid wolf. Kenric remounted his horse, gave me a long look, and I him.
“She’s not worth anything,” he said in his harsh tongue of the south. Kenric gave a signal and turned his horse around.
And I felt it then – what it’s like to die – as a dagger pierced through my side, tearing through flesh, scraping against bone. Pain embraced me, stinging and throbbing and blood gushed out, warm and unstoppable. It was like my father described, like the matron had said. And like nothing at all.
What’s it like to die?
The answer finally came in the middle of a burning village, on bloody ground, on a grey afternoon. Like falling asleep, you are simply unaware that it has happened. No more pain, no more thoughts, there is just unending oblivion. At least that was how I experienced it. It is the waking part that hurts, if you should be so cursed.
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