Memento Mori

A piece that briefly explores my personal musings on death.

I.

Death-rattle.

The words lingered curiously in the imagination- vivid as they are in their visceral aspect.

They did not sit well with me. How could a human

being- one so gifted and endowed-

produce so ignoble and hideous a sound?

They call to mind visions of serpentine scales

Congested roads, and the bright plastic

Of a child’s plaything

Quivering in the dim temerity of its grip

Clutching the now still palm of my grandfather-

Our own Methuselah-

A sturdy edifice

A bastion of virtue in a sea of complacent vice

I witnessed firsthand

That final, shuddering gasp- (I understand now, why they call it that)

then-

A departure.

And yes- the curtain remained unripped.

II.

Mourning.

My grandfather served as a minister, in his time

An aged priest of ninety

Partook of the unsanctified wine

And

Issuing forth from his lips, the words:

For Fernando.

I was told once-

One does not truly know a man until

one has seen him drunk

I disavow this notion-

Why ascribe truth and objectivity

To a raving state

Borne of the spirits of fermented grapes?

Simple: one does not.

Man wears many faces

Janus-like we wander, never truly being

Always exchanging one farce

For another

And then we die.

And yet

upon one’s deathbed there is

Reunion.

Fragmented

as the image might be

There is remarkable persistence

In good character.

The testimonies of men assure this.

The great man’s works are indelible.

He who has supped deeply from the wellspring of Life-

He alone welcomes the beat of Death’s wings.