Holding On
“...passed away peacefully” the obituary reassures, though
it never reports, “passed away terrified of what happens next.”
The night before he died, Jim told me his spirit was an airplane,
that his crossing, like his life, would be turbulent but that he’d
land just fine with battered wings. So far, my own demise
has been only hypothetical: near-misses on country roads,
the staph infection that almost got out of control. If I die
like I’ve lived, it will be with a sense of disbelief.
I’ll be so unsure of my own death, I might not even die.
Maybe that’s the way to keep on kicking—to deny
the undeniable, to stare at the flatline and refuse to acquiesce.
Surely, to disbelieve one death can’t be too much an aberration
for the cosmic scales, well within the universe’s margin of error
for me to hold on with a death grip to this one dear precious life.
