Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer

by Cyrus Mistry

How quickly it becomes difficult to remember a person who is dead with any sort of clarity. No matter how I may long to believe otherwise, there are no signs or messages from her, from the beyond, that she’s still there. Or, if she is, that she has any interest at all in the fate of us living. . . The details are fading faster than I can hold on to them.

Dreams, reality, nightmares—are these, in fact, distinct planes of consciousness? Or merely different modalities for perceiving the one grand canvas of an indivisible reality? There have been moments

Hope, that palliative of every human suffering: in desperation, we cling to the flimsiest of straws.

Perhaps life is like that: slippery, elusive, impossible to get a hold on. The difference between this moment and the next is only one of awareness. . . Yet we drift from morn till night, from day through week through months and years distracted, inattentive, and completely unprepared for the ambush—the moment of our inevitable extinction.