Suspended Animation

I once knew a man who had traveled a very long way in order to die.

It wasn't his idea, of course. He didn't just wake up one day and decide to die. It wasn't even his idea to go where he went in the first place, though in his line of work, personal desire is an irrelevancy. They ask, you go, and it is as simple as that.

Time is a relative thing; Einstein tells us that. But if it is a relative thing, then it can have no objective meaning, for it depends on something else to provide it a frame of reference. Time exists and yet it doesn't exist, and for most of us, we never really notice it until it runs out. And all we are left with are frozen tableaus, ethereal things we call memories, events we can recall but never alter, a universe of things left unsaid or better never said at all.

He traveled a long way to die, so it seemed only fitting that I travel a long way to bid him farewell. But funerals aren't for the dead, they are for the living, and what is there really to say? Out of place, out of time, there is nothing that the living can say that the dead would wish to hear.

We are born alone, and we live alone, only fooling ourselves that we don't. We most certainly die alone, whether we are here, at home, or in the bitter mountains of a faraway land. What did you think of in those last moments, as your life ebbed away beyond recall? The desire to see a loved one's face just one more time? Regret over harsh words spoken heedlessly in a moment of anger? Bemusement at the encroaching darkness consuming you? The wish for just a little more time? I had the questions, he had the answers, and who is to say which one of us was the luckier.

His death wasn't fair, but in it perversely lay the ultimate fairness of it all, for time runs out for all of us and we come to our ends. We pretend that we are in control, that we can impose order on our lives, but in the end nothing but random chance really matters. Turn right at the corner, and you live; turn left, and you die. Rolling the cosmic dice, a momentary lapse of reason, life itself is a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

He was, and then he was not, and the world took no note of his passing. A memory as soon as he left home, with no time left except for the time to die. The dead have a lesson to teach us, so I traveled to say one last goodbye, to try and divine the message. But there was nothing left to ponder, save for the silence.