The life support systems blared sounds of warning coupled with red alarms going off at once. Red had been my favorite color growing up; it signified warmth, comfort and love. I guess lying in the dark with a distinct red air being the last sight I would see on Earth was a good way to go. Going. Most people don’t know when that will happen and waste their entire lives worrying about what will happen at that infinitesimal eternity of a time. But I didn’t have that curse upon me. I had the luxury of knowing when I’d be going, and how exactly it would come about.
Growing up I dreamed of accomplishing a great many things. Firstly, I wanted to be the best cricketer on the planet, rivaling if not eclipsing the achievements of my favorite wicket-keeper batsman, that remarkable man for the big occasion Adam Gilchrist. Slowly, however, I discovered a plethora of interests which occupied me intellectually: Marx, Shakespeare and Freud being the most important of those interests. Life was good.
Speaking of life, I had been thinking long and hard about life and death. I never believed those bullshit stories of there being life after death and the whole heaven and hell fiasco. For me, death was this point of termination, a chasm in which you fall and you keep falling until you reach the bottom. But where was this bottom? A simple thought experiment gave me the answer: for the person facing death the chasm has no end. The very cause of our thoughts and perception is the innate life that we have in us; when life inside us ceases, our thought processes cease with it. We’ll never know when we strike face first into the bottom of the chasm. We will spend an eternity passing through the void. But for the people around us, it’ll be different. They will watch us hit the bottom of that chasm once the life leaves our bodies. Maybe this is why it is the living who come up with mystical places like heaven and hell and not the dead – they experience it firsthand.
Thus having been armed with this stunning piece of information, the blow that accompanied knowing that I was going to die was cushioned, just a bit. It all started when I had a sudden pain in the chest after a walkabout with the bicycle, one of my favorite contraptions in this world. After visiting the doctor, taking tests and finally resting in the hospital bed inside the doctor’s quarters, he appeared inside. Never before had I seen anybody look so somber. He approached me with care and caution evident in the tiniest movements of his body. I looked at him knowingly as he told me softly, “I’m sorry sir. Your condition is very serious, a rare ailment of the heart for which we, unfortunately, have no viable treatment. Only three weeks at maximum.”
As he proceeded to explain to me my available options, my life flashed before my eyes. My dreams would remain dreams. All the valuable resources that had been used up in nurturing me would be laid a waste in a fraction of the time it took to make them. Even knowing this day was inevitable wasn’t a strong enough cushion. I felt guilty, I was going to waste everything. More hurtful was the feeling that I would leave everything behind forever. When the doctor finished, he just walked out of the room. I didn’t utter a word for hours.
I thought about my family, what great aspirations they must have had for me. I thought about my friends, oh what great adventures they must have wanted to undertake with me by their sides. I even thought about my local milkman, would he notice my absence? It was a gut-wrenching feeling. Alas, I came to terms with it. I was going to die, and I wanted to go out with a bang. But I didn’t want anyone to know. I’m sorry guys that this is how you had to find out. Trust me, it is better this way.
I spent the next two weeks traveling and meeting people from different parts of England. It was a wonderful experience. My aches would be recurring every-time I traveled, but I was determined to enjoy my final days on Earth. I traveled to the Stonehenge, a remarkable old collection of rocks from the past. I also traveled to France and laid a wreath at Calais, the site of unnecessary feuds that led to the countless loss of so many undeserving. This was my last chance at looking at the world. I wasn’t going to waste it.
As my day approached, I had no other option but to stay at the hospital. I told my parents I was down in Brighton with my mates. I didn’t want anybody by my side: like I said before, the living experience death much more poignantly than the dead. The doctors told me that there was going to be a nasty bout of final pain before I died. I told them I was prepared. But the pain was unbearable.
This is it. All I have to say before I take the plunge down that chasm and as Buzz Lightyear would say, to infinity and bey…
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