I have thought long and hard about death

I have thought long and hard about death.

Death has been almost an integral part of my life. It has shaped my personality, my beliefs, fears and faith. One of the initial axioms that formed the basis of my existence was that “daddy” ran away and now is DEAD, spoken in much the same breath as ‘these are your fingers and those are your toes.’

I never considered it morbid; I just accepted it as fact. After all, a child is born without the capacity to doubt, especially where its parents are concerned.

The people charged with my care were in no position to impart what they could not understand, so differentiating between fact and fantasy was a luxury I fought to sort out in my jumbled mind when the time came for my conscious rebirth.

Death was a constant companion of mine, one who could not lie or deceive but one whose causes and effects were certain, among very few things in life one could count on.

Like a terribly beautiful wraith, she appeared to me as a dark angel of relief and release from a realm of bondage that enslaves the soul to a lifetime of ignorant blindness. Her presence drove some to commit terrible acts in her name, but I was a clairvoyant, not some loony who heard voices.

For me, she was an illuminator who never failed to grace me with her presence and enlighten my darkened psyche whenever I was crushed in spirit by the loss of a life dear to me.

In hindsight, I often wonder if our relationship grew as a result of my many brushes with death or if it was the other way around. The thought chilled me for a long time, but the grim edges of her light spirit eventually gut-wrenching and repulsive until the vision of her celestial presence became welcomed, enjoyed, and even desired.

In her eyes, I saw not only the love of my life but the true eternal nature of my past and the fantastic astral potential for the future.

Her archetypal splendour was a beacon for my faith and a catalyst for the hope that anchored me from losing touch with reality completely when those around me either died or lost their battle in the soul prison they inhabited.

My grandparents both died the year I finished high school: my grandmother died of terminal lung cancer, and my grandfather, within a few months of her passing, succumbed to the spread of a malignant skin tumour to the prostate and then the stomach.

Watching two people so close to me wither away so quickly impacted my life dramatically, and following their departure, my life began to unravel very quickly. The loss was not as debilitating to me as I once feared; this was a crucial time for my personal growth and the birth of my self-awareness.

With them died their confining control system that they had me locked in, with the release of their souls, I could feel a huge psychic weight disappear as if a spell were dissolved. My angel of death appeared to me on both occasions and led me to them to be present at their moment of release, and later, she was present to accompany me to both funerals.

She and I had met when I was much younger; I first remember her when my Jack Russell terrier, Momo, got off his leash and barreled across a busy parkway and was struck dead before my horrified young eyes. I, like Momo, stupidly ran across the road oblivious to imminent danger, driven by my terrified, stopped heart that put me in tunnel vision toward my fatally wounded little pet.

I very nearly got run over myself, running futilely to attempt to save the dog, who gave his final twitches in my arms as I laid him on the grass by the side of the road. I stayed in shock for days, unable to believe what had transpired, but I couldn’t ignore the angel’s presence, who returned to comfort me after she noticed me staring at her.

I asked my mother later if she had seen this mysterious female figure, but of course, only I had seen it, so I never mentioned it again.

A few years later, I had just gotten a new mountain bike while speeding up my street toward my grandparents, who were walking. A neighbour backed out of his driveway and struck the bike just below my leg, sending me in what seemed to be slow motion through the air toward my smiling angel. I crashed to the ground; she blew me a kiss and then disappeared, leaving me lying on the road with a near-fatal broken neck.

I miraculously recovered fully within a few agonizing weeks, but the sight of her ethereal beauty sustained hope while I lay bedridden. It occurred to me years later that bicycle accidents were a recurrence in my family: both my mother and grandmother had experienced serious scrapes when they were approximately my age. As a matter of disturbing fact, many patterns began to emerge after much contemplation of the roots of my depressive symptoms, all stemming from the hereditary line from whence I came.

In addition to mental maladies, chronic sicknesses, and physical ailments, my family also seemed to be very frail concerning romantic and familial bonds. I grew up with a very negative opinion of love, having experienced it primarily in destructive and divisive manifestations.

This pessimistic view has never entirely been erased. Still, I have endeavoured to alter this rampaging downward pattern that has characterized my family’s behavioural lineage for as long as I can tell.

[A memoir written backward, forward, inside out, upside down – an outside piecing together of dream journals, poetic diary compiled and edited to make some semblance of sense by X. Mercurio]

My earliest glimpse of my elusive mistress was when I was a small child. The gate leading to my grandparents’ backyard was made of red and white corrugated metal and would swing in the wind, slamming closed with a hollow clang. I was too small to open the gate then, so I decided to race the wind to get out of the yard as it closed. The wind won, and the gate sliced open my right heel.

The incident very nearly incapacitated my Achilles tendon and caused profuse bleeding. This sight was doubly traumatizing because of the plastic milk bag that my grandparents used to collect the blood. The vision of this makes me feel ill to this day, a trauma that could have been lessened by the “common” sense first aid practice of wrapping a wound with a dark towel.

Unbeknownst to me, this angel was assigned to me for unclear reasons, but her presence would forever be a catalyst for my destiny’s unfolding.

Father figures are seen as broken men disfigured by war trauma as a child, guilt and oppressive mental disorders, multiple personalities, kind and generous as one, cruel and controlling from insecure powerlessness in the other.

The ideal father figure, someone idealized, mythologized in the character’s mind and dreams as a spirit guide – the man Xander aspires to become.

earliest glimpse of my elusive mistress