‘Hide nothing, for Time which sees all, exposes all.’
Sophocles
My death comes as a surprise. Not because I find myself in the afterlife – I knew there would be one – but the problem is I’ve always expected my passing to be a kind of ‘Aha’ moment where everything finally makes sense … Instead nothing does.
I don’t look any different, nor do I have any fear. I’m still Melissa Windsor, my twenty-eight-year-old self, even wearing my favourite white lace top and dark Levi jeans, yet I know with certainty that I’m dead. This is no vivid dream, no astral-travel experience; it’s too real for that.
I don’t know why, when or how I’ve died. There’s no spinning tunnel, no angel voices, no welcoming light like the near-death stories we hear about – nothing but a mountain of mist, ebbing and flowing all around.
The jigsaw of life, with its misty memories, does flash past. I suppose it has to because we live so fast, so superficially. ‘It goes so fast we don’t have time to look at one another,’ Thornton Wilder wrote, and he was right; most of us pass each other by while trapped in self-obsession, indifference and mediocrity. That is until Time snatches us away and throws us to the stars.
But where are these stars? I close my eyes and will the mist to give me the answers that I crave …