The Painful Truth

A Story by T. Greyman

Understanding the only absolution.

Death...Death is an absolute.

That little five-letter word that strikes up a million emotions at once, some you don't think occur until you have a long think about it. And sometimes, I have a long, long time to think about it. Sometimes, Death would invade my normal, mundane thoughts and drag them down into an abyss of spiralling emotions and ideas and perspectives that I didn't think I was capable of until that very second.

There's fear, disgust, sadness, renewed sorrow from memories of indirect encounters, puzzlement, fascination, curiosity, a whole mix of contradicting and sometimes full-on paradoxical mess of emotions and questions.

All over this little five-letter word.

Death is an absolute, it will happen. It's the only thing that is certain. You could say the same thing about Life, but we know Life must end at some rate. Trees die, cities die, continents perish, even galaxies will hang up their hat and call it a day. Time to clock out, Death says, but don't worry, after everything's all said and done I'll put the chairs on the table, turn out the lights and close the door behind me when I leave.

Many greet Death as an old friend who they were expecting a visit from, or someone saying "Hey, you've done a good job, but it's time to clock out."

Death is comforting for them.

But there are the other times, when Death becomes a malicious entity and steals you away from everything you have and steals others away from you.

Death will drag you or a loved one away, kicking and screaming. And no matter how much you, beg, weep, scream and shout and bang your fists and head on the floor until your blood stains the tiles, it can't be bargained with. It WILL happen. That's when Death lets itself be known as an absolute. It's emotionless. No empathy, no sadness and no regret as it drags you away from your life that had so much potential, so much going for it, through those double doors that leads to who knows where.

Then you get the people who actively seek Death, the ones who want the unknown end to the cruel, unending chaos of their own attempt at Life. The direct people with the noose around their neck or playing Russian Roulette with a full cartridge and the passive who walk across the road and hope the drunkard behind the wheel of the speeding car might knock them down and spill their innards all over the street.

They've had it, they want out. They treat Death like a fairy tale hero, hoping it'll take them away to a better place beyond the horizon. Quitters, they've given up. A lot of people have no sympathy for the people who take their own life, but I can relate. Hell, I've been down the path as well and I've found the end and it's not as comforting as I had once hoped, and even now as I type this I'm walking along the sidelines of the path.

There is a real person typing this out at home, behind his computer to go right before your eyes with a 35p energy drink and a 20 pack of B&H Gold. And this man has danced with Death, but he didn't let it take the lead.

I didn't leave the dance unfinished out of a sense of bravery or valour or some form of obligation to stay behind for others. I left the dance because I was scared, scared of that great unknown beyond that Death leads you to.

This is where religion comes in, it's obscured in moral standards about how to live your life as you go through it, but ultimately, each religion is just there to provide a theory or a self-proclaimed answer to that great mystery of Beyond Death. The painful truth is no-one can possibly know what lies after Death, not a self-proclaimed Holy man, not the greatest of philosophers, not the most adventurous of psychonauts, and oh-most-certainly not this man sitting behind his computer with a 35p energy drink and pack of cigarettes.

We perpetually creep ever closer towards it, and sometimes we find the path surprisingly short or arduously long, but in reality we're terrified of the end of the path, we're scared of the absolute, we're scared of the unknown. Sometimes so much so that we miss the journey along the path, that beautiful journey along the path called Life that's so compelling that when you greet Death at the end you walk up to it and say "Have I got a story for you!".

And that's the harsh reality of it all.

Death is the painful truth to Life's beautiful lie.