The Sympathetic Reaper

I had died. I knew very well. I had felt, like the quiet ebb of a slackening tide sighing up a beach at dusk, my life slip easily and finally away. How gently life slid away in the end - as though it had always been fragile, never anything more than a whisper, so easily lost. As my eyes closed, though, one final flicker of life held me firm. Fear, perhaps, dread of the yawning mystery before, coursed through my veins and for a moment my progress towards death was halted. The age old scythe ho...