By: Jehangir Saleh
Written: July 11, 2005

Sometimes people ask me what knowing that I’m going to die is like. It’s like something we’ve all experienced, except that there is no future for the dying. They can only look behind. Right now you’re reading these words which means you’re not looking behind you or directly in front of you. But if you kept reading these words, and then in the back of your mind start to think about what if there was someone behind you, who was about to put their hand on your shoulder. You start to get paranoid and start to imagine what it would feel like to have their sweaty palm hover over your shoulder while you’re reading these words. What if they were right behind you? If they were so close to the back of your neck you could feel the heat of their body in the surrounding air you as your read these lines. You begin to imagine that air getting warmer. Now you might be tempted to look back and make sure there is no one there. If you’d like to do this, please go ahead. But remember that if it was death that was right behind you, waiting patiently, you’d look up from reading this and you wouldn’t be able to see him. And you’d get paranoid and look back again. But again he wouldn’t be there. And you’d keep looking back to see nothing, only emptiness where you were expecting something to be. This is what it is like to know that you are going to die: there is no forward, only looking behind to see an empty space.
“The page is so white”
“So fill it up with words”
“But underneath it is still white”

————-

I had never spoken to him except for the occasional wave from across the hall. I remember talking to my wife on the while I watched the silent drama unfold from across the hall. I remembered a layman’s explanation of Einstien’s relativity theory from high school where…. The man’s daughter’s knew he was about to die and I watched their faces shift from pretend heroicism to a stark pain of grief, which slowly began to overwhelm them. I was observing the drama, hearing my wife’s breathing on the phone. Her breathing reminded me of life and of the forward flow of time. The characters around the dying man – the nurses, a resident doctor, silent tears of his family – their actions seemed much slower, like a rapidly freezing river, as if time relative to them was moving much slower, not in the same pattern as the life in my wife’s breathing on the telephone receiver that I pushed hard against my ear.
“I am watching him die”, I told her.
“I’m sorry you have to see this dear. Close the door. It will only make you feel worse.”
“I can’t. I knew him”, I said.
Even if his youngest daughter did not begin to sob, I would have known that he died. As I looked into the room, I knew there was emptiness where a presence had been. I felt something immense, strange, but I did not know what the feeling was. The movements of the nurses as they covered his body, of his daughters consoling each other, began to move a bit less slowly, more in time with the breathing of my wife that had become calmer, gentle, but remained at the pace of life.
“Are you still watching?” There was a hint of disapproval in her usually soothing voice.
“He’s dead”.
“I’m sorry dear”, she said. “You shouldn’t have watched. How are you feeling?”
I didn’t say anything for a long time, just listening to the pace of her breath. It was selfish, my ear pressed hard against the phone until her breath seemed to be apart of the air in my hospital room.
“Your breathing is very shallow,” she said. “I know you are there, but I can barely hear you. I am worried. Maybe you should call the nurse. How do you feel?”
“There is nothing I can say,” I said. “Nothing that will be able to communicate to you what that was like. I know he died, probably his lungs finally failed, but it was like nothing happened. It’s so strange. An event that can only be marked by the presence before and the lack of presence after; the actual death I can’t understand. It was like nothing at all. I feel something, but I don’t think this language has developed words able to communicate it.
“Do you feel sad”, she asked.
“Maybe. I’m not sure.”
“It’s ok dear. Don’t be sad. I’m here for you.”
I closed the door of my hospital room. I didn’t want to see them bring the body out. I didn’t want to see his malfunctioning family, crying on and off, on and off. Seeing those things was sad. But what I just saw wasn’t sad. It was something to which I was having a lot of trouble deciding whether it fit into the categories of good or bad. Maybe value judgements were useless. Maybe it was free.