· Chaos – The Arena That Eats Itself, Throws Up, Wipes Mouth, Winks At God & Karma.
· Adrenaline – To Each Their Own, The Seventh Sense The Best One.
· Hindsight – The Bully, Bitter Twin
· Foresight – The Illusive One, Free Twin, The One Hindsight Could Never Beat In A Race
· God – The Bartender [Or Kindergarten Teacher]
· Karma – The Bouncer/Owner [The Principal]
(These Two Are Always Dating But Never Really Talk About It)
· Humans – Debris, Minuscule, Meaningless Until They Mean It.
· Death – the front door to the arena, sometimes revolving, sometimes mirrored, sometimes locked. Big ugly key has one word scrawled on it in crayon hieroglyphs we don’t remember how to read. Pass.
The word chaos is one of my favorite words in whole world. Somehow in my nonlinear minuscule brain I jumped from Chaos to Adrenaline and a Good Death.
We’ve all heard the phrase “there are no atheists in foxholes.” It’s not a particular accurate phrase, I suspect, but it came to mind while reading this review of Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. The book is not specifically about religion on the frontlines, but it does raise some interesting points about the effect of the Civil War on the American understanding of the afterlife. From the review:
[Before the Civil War,] the faithful looked forward to what was called a Good Death, with time to see the end approaching, accept it and declare to friends and family members their belief in God and his promise of salvation. The battlefield brutally truncated that serene process, and soldiers and their families alike worried about what that might mean for their chances in the afterlife. Survivors tried to provide reassurance. When one Union soldier was killed during the siege of Richmond, a comrade told his mother that while her boy had died instantly and without the opportunity to declare his faith, he had told his fellow soldiers the previous summer that he “felt his sins were forgiven & that he was ready and resigned to the Lord’s will & while talking he was so much overjoyed that he could hardly suppress his feelings of delight.” But sometimes candor trumped comfort: one Georgia soldier worried in a letter home that while his dying brother had “said that he hoped he was prepared to meet his God in a better world than this,” he was also aware “he had been a bad, bad, very bad boy.”
What is a Good Death? I ask that now only because the notion of a good life has been drawn so sharply into focus in the last several weeks and more seriously so in the last few days. I live my life in a very contrary way to that of most of my peers. If you spend any time with us you will see how. Eventually I ask everyone close to me this question. What would be a Good Death for you? How would you like to die? If the answer is an instant “at home quietly in my sleep” I push a bit and narrow the parameters by asking what would a Good Death be if you had to pick a violent death. My sister-in-law believes that there are only so many types of particular deaths so she wanted to, if she had to be, she wanted to be burned alive. When I asked her why she said it was simple. She would suffer so that someone she loved would not. My daughter’s answer at the ripened age of eleven was both profound to me and elegant beyond her years. She said see would drown. She said it would for her be the least frightening, most appropriate since her father and I want to be returned to the sea and she had a long list of reasons but it seemed she had it worked out. This was coincidental to me, though I did not tell her, for all my young life I was certain I would accidentally drown. I lived at lake house most of my life and swam and water-skied almost every warm day. Taking risks like swimming at night and alone I was not afraid but certain. So her choice had a familiar sound but happily a smarter vocabulary.
If I love Chaos and my friends love Chaos then Chaos loves Adrenaline. Sometimes I cannot remember if I am married to Chaos and Adrenaline is my mistress or if I am married to Adrenaline and Chaos is my mistress. Of course my heart and body and on paper I am married for seventeen years in March to John. Either way in my Good Death I get to go to bed with both. If John could pick I would get to drift off into a dream but Karma is a bitch and I am probably over due so this is my Good Death. I would be driving as fast as whatever car I had could drive. Thunderstruck would be getting just three-quarters there because I would be redlining ever single gear, my mission would be racing my husband to get to my children who needed my. I would max out just before top speed, noticing some innocent person making a bad driving decision. I would change lanes from left to right never having had time to gear down into an intersection hitting the backend fully loaded concrete pump truck or 150 ton crane. I love concrete and I love cranes. Both would take a hit to the back without killing the drivers. I would be so jacked up by adrenaline and ACDC the plow of the crash would not even hurt. I would bump and swallow. Done. High on adrenaline. Metal, flesh, and if Chaos had a sense of humor the repeat button would on and the CD player would be the only thing left. Rubber, gas, piss, oil. Done. My girls would know I spent the last of myself trying as hard as could as fast as I could and the bonus point, swerving to miss.
My birthday is coming up in January. I could look back and pick many points that would have been fine to douse the light. So too on some of my friends at times when they were down in a hole. A foxhole of morality, depressions, demons all manner of war; personal and otherwise but what qualifies me other than Hindsight? Hindsight by the way is a cruel, narrow minded bitch with selective memory, her sister Foresight however whoa nelly. The notion that a Good Death died for America in the Civil War is bullshit. I think the birth of personal choice, of dignity may have been redefined. A young boy may have seen for the first time that he didn’t have to, was not required to make any declarations about his death, his faith beforehand. He may have spoken about this upon return and the sheer despair may have sparked the notion of choosing to be alone at the moment of death. Choosing to die a man apart as some veterans do, rather than burden their families or in their minds; shame themselves in their injured states as they pass, veterans have gone homeless sick and dying rather than be with loving families at their time of hospice. Why do they do it? I do not know.
How many of you have ever asked your children if they wanted to be buried or cremated or donated? Young children? Young children die. I don’t propose you scare them or give them nightmares. Would you feel guilty if they died and you didn’t know? I propose that most of grieving is unanswered questions. One unsaid thing; Chaos loves Adrenaline, they both have a crush on Coincidence. Until they all bump into to each other and I’m settled up, I intend to have a Good Life.
Kim
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