Where Is Thy Sting?

I am going to die.

I've intellectually accepted this since I was a small child; I can even remember the first time I played with the idea. I had just stolen some candy from Mock's Variety Store in my home town, and as I ate it outside, sitting on a bike, the thought of my own death came uninvited upon me in a distant, vague way.

I am going to die and I hope it won't hurt.

One day, I'll be like the cat that Dad backed the car over, slowly, snapping its spine audibly. What violence! Thrashing in the gravel, the furry beast turned its head and looked its last on the boy who stood slack-jawed nearby, and as its pupils gaped wide and its fanged gums bleached white, as it stared at and then through me, drowning in an ocean of inarticulate fear, part of me slipped away down with it into the void. Gone, gone...gone. Then so still, a cooling thing. And after we had gathered around and showed the proper familial remorse, Dad asked me to throw deadkitty across the road. I put out my hand and clutched the tail. It was heavier far than it had ever been, heavier than I ever had dreamed a housecat could be. I could hear my blood. Dread coated my tongue. Horror giggled like an imbecile in my head as I walked the thousand miles to the old country road. When I clumsily threw it, an affront to its tiny dignity, it flipped end over end to stop with a thudding swish, out of sight in the tall grass.

One day, I'll be thrown in the grass. Time's a-wastin', boy. I hope it won't hurt.

Here is a dying thing.

I happened upon a man in a ditch once. He had upended his Jeep after hitting a culvert, the impact flinging him far from the wreckage. It was winter, the snow red around him. He was screaming through his beard into the slush, his body broken. I covered him with my coat, ran to the nearest house, called 911, and ran back. Then, because I-don't-know-why, I knelt and watched. And as I watched him loudly dying, wreathed in pain, all of the familiar horror-tang in me welled up and fell out onto the ground with his blood, and I was left emptied, a vessel, a dumb recorder, a slate whose chalk cuts clean through the black. His one good eye flickered and fluttered up (please, please don't look up!) and there was the hole in the sky. NO! There I stayed transfixed until hands pulled me back from the brink, strange mouths babbling questions, questions, the world pulsing with deathray lights. And so much more than the cat, he knew he was dying. Oh, we both knew. I never again wore that coat in quite the same way.

Now, I don't merely know I will die. I feel it. The Eternal Footman is holding my coat, snickering, and kindly stopping for me. I curse, bless you now, with my fierce tears! I hope it won't hurt. Oh my God, I hope it won't hurt.