They’ve all been to see me today. My ‘family’, for what they are. The daughters who don’t seem to care too much. The sister who hovers around me. Fidgets as she talks. Babbles. Annoys me. The drippy husband. Talks about going for a pint. And that woman – the deviant my daughter is with. I can barely look at her, never mind tolerate her faux sympathy.
All these conversations take place that mean nothing but seem to teeter close to the edge of something else.
The day has been painfully long. Bookmarked with the times when I’m allowed to take medication to make everything go fuzzy again for a while.
I’ve tried to read a little, but my eyes won’t focus for long enough – and I’m finding myself having to read and reread the same passage over and over again. None of it making sense.
Every now and again I hear raised voices. The cry of that baby. A phone ringing. Doors closing and opening. A whole world carrying on within earshot, but excluding me all the same.
The rain is getting heavier outside. I can hear it batter against the windowpanes. It’s a noise I used to find comforting. But not now. Now, I can hear that there is a storm brewing.
I take my medication. Feel it numb me and lull me to sleep, only to wake with a jolt. With a feeling of pressure. Choking me. Making me gag.
It’s said your life flashes before your eyes in the moments before your death. That your electrical synapses fire, pulling memories from the innermost depths of your brain and flooding your senses with them.
There are no flashbacks now, but I know that I am dying.
I know there is no way out.
There are no visions of long-lost relatives reaching out to me between dimensions.
There is no angel of death to help me move between worlds, either. There is someone here, of course, but this person is no angel. They’re not guiding me towards a soft beam of light. There is no sense of peace.
No sense of forgiveness or redemption.
There is just fear. Disappointment.
Grief that it has all come to this.
I fight, even though I’m weak. I had been sleeping, but now I feel the weight of something on my face. A pillow, perhaps. It’s soft but it’s not malleable. There’s no give in it. No matter how I turn my head, it is there and it won’t move.
There is a fierce, unquenchable burning in my lungs and a pressure on my chest. Is someone kneeling on me? Has someone placed a weight on me? I’m pinned down. Is there more than one person in this room? I’m trying my hardest to orientate myself to the space around me, but I can’t. I try to cry out but I can’t. I can’t breathe. I can’t make a sound. I hear a voice I can’t place, muffled, almost drowned out by the increasingly loud thumping of my heart. I can’t tell if it is man, woman or beast. It feels as if my chest will open, my lungs explode or burst into flames.
The Devil, I think, the Devil is in this room and I can feel his flames threaten to engulf me. I know where I’m going and all those years of kneeling at the altar rails haven’t made a difference.
‘Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out,’ the Bible says. Maybe God knew what I wouldn’t admit – the sin was always in me.
I want to breathe. I need to breathe. I need oxygen. I need to live.
I am trying, thrashing. My hands are fisting the bed sheets trying to gain purchase on something, on anything, on this life. The voice again, indistinct, muttering words I cannot hear. But they are not words of love. I know that much.
This person is weighing me down, I realise, jabbing their bony knee into my chest, close to a wound that’s not yet healed, that I can feel start to pull and strain against the pressure. Everything is tearing. Everything is burning and still they don’t stop. They keep going. I try to suck air in, even the smallest amount. Just enough. I just want enough. I don’t need more. I just want to live.
But I can feel it all slipping away. A dizziness washes over me, tingling. A sensation, almost as if I’m floating, as if I could just drift away. And the pain stops, you see. My lungs stop burning. I stop needing to breathe in. There is a moment of relief.
Of false hope.
There is a moment where I’m between this world and the judgement that awaits me.
Then the darkness stretches out in front of me.