Story Stopper

Part VIII: Dying: what comes naturally

Death is part of gods plan. Whether it be the guy who dies old and feeble in his bed, the person who suffers through debilitating cancer or simply: the man who was in the "wrong" place at the "wrong" time and got his chead guillotined off by a serpentine garage door, God intends to carry these souls to the afterlife.

In the latter case, God wants the soul and gives the order but it's not exactly their time yet. That's where I come in. Most simply, I could make souls like this have a heart attack: a lot of places around the world don't have access to adequate healthcare so there's rarely any question when someone dies of a heart attack. In the United States, it's surprising not everyone dies of a heart attack.

In any case, the heart attack is the way I'd usually go because it's easy, it does not cause much pain and it doesn't stand out from any other person's death. After seeing the artwork of the archangel Samael, however, I was dying (pun intended) to make some gruesome art of my own.

As stated before, I do not revel in the death. Death is painful beyond the immediate people who die. It affects the living more than the dead even, but God is the Alpha and Omega and he does have a plan, however screwed up it may be sometimes. In this way, Samael and I have a job to do that is morose, vicious and sometimes straight cruel but we are ultimately still here to pass the will of god on in the form of death. For him it's mass death and he sets those things in motion like a child would play with dominoes and for me, and consequently my reapers, it's individual death plan that in certain cases, I get to make up.

In all fairness to the man whose head I all but cut off with the garage door, he should have lived for another 20-30 years had his death been natural, but the order form said his name to be ferried unto god's domain in heaven.  Therefore, it is my duty to cause his death.

Mind you, I'm not allowed to kill him in the way a hitman would or even the heroic and clandestine Nordsman. For me, the death has to come as a result of natural events that lead to his death.

Many people think I can just touch something and it dies but contrary to the Hollywood view of death: I am not a skeleton, the death touch exists and causes cardiac arrest but it's an ability which is actively summoned not something that happens to everything living that I touch.  I picked up the cat, I brought him to the front of the garage. I put that "something in the air" that disoriented and caused this man paranoia and delusions of grandeur but he was the one who followed every step I laid out for him.

When the garage door snapped and gravity (a natural force) pulled it crashing down on his neck, I was merely there to collect the soul. The beauty of it was in how natural it really was: this man was a writer and he was paranoid in general. He gorged himself on Stephen King and E.A. Poe as many American's do. He was obsessed with the cynical and morose view of other American writers and charmed with the possibility of a naturally occurring, gruesome death.  The irony that his life would end this way was poetic. Not to mention the fact that death by garage door was unique and bizarre. The newspapers would have to report on this even if he hasn't been a well known writer in the human realm. 

The way he was laid out left him with a look of shock on his face that reminded me of a child on Christmas realizing that he'd finally gotten that shiny toy train that he wanted so badly, or whatever kids get excited about these days. He was indeed dead but the way the body was sprawled out exuded such life in an innocuous, to humans a least, vibrancy. This man died fighting with the last few signals his brain could send through his spinal column and was stopped, quite literally, only because he was pinned down by forces too great to overcome. When you're the Grim Reaper or even someone with an eye for the beauty of a well planned machine, this is art.

When he looked at me with that stupid face of shock, awe and fear, he had already realized he was dead. In this way, this was also beautiful because death did not come as a questionable thing for him. When that garage door slammed down on his neck, he knew and accepted immediately that he was dead.

When prompted, all I had to do was confirm what he already knew.  He began as most people do when they're surprised and swore.  After I had confirmed what he already knew, we both stood over the scene and admired the poetry of irony I had laid out in front of us.

When he finally spoke, he said, "what comes now?"

"I am to convince you to accept your death and then to imbibe your soul to carry it to the afterlife."

"What? You mean like eat me?

There was another long moment where he looked around at his surroundings and then up as he smiled.

"I always knew I'd be telling death to eat me when he told me I was dead but I never expected this kind of irony," he said.

He laughed for a bit and then surprised me with his last request.

"Do I get to ask for a last request? I mean if you're here to take me to the other side to a fate inevitable, do I get a last cigarette or something? The same as a man tied to a stake in front of the firing squad? Or do we even have the time for something like that?"

I laughed out loud when I thought of time and death existing in the same instance but realizing the man was serious, I told him, "Of course. We exist outside of time now. If you've ever heard of the echo: a ghostly Repeat of events that happened in the past cast in real time like a hologram, that happens because souls exist outside of time so that death can reoccur at any moment in time..."

"I don't need a science lesson but that's interesting to know. Thanks. I just want to see my wife again. She was a nut and we didn't always see eye to eye but she was my wife and I loved her in my own way."

The two personalities were polar opposites. He was a personality filled with darkness, violence and personal torment and she was made of such light that she almost shimered like an angel when her car arrived.

I had the power to exist outside of time so I could certainly speed up time to the moment she got home to see the scene.  Here in the Phoenix sun, you'd think one person would have passed the body and called it in but in the two hours that were two seconds in our time, no one had noticed the body at all. When she got out of the car, she reminded me of Deviel with her shimmering ora that looked like the pure blue light of heaven.

This was my charge's first time seeing an ora as they are not truly visible to the human realm. Most nuts who say they see oras are either victims of near death, hence part of them are trapped in the afterlife until they die, or tripping on psychedelic drugs.

When the wife saw her husband's head hanging on by flaps of skin and a crushed spinal column, she fell to her knees and began to cry in gasps and inaudible screams. It wasn't that we wouldn't be able to hear them she was just to frightened and hurt to make any sound.

My charge, for all his toughness and talent for mimicking and profiling psychopaths and sociopaths, was actually softer and warmer on the inside than anyone in his life might have known. He reached out for her with such passion, his heart broke simultaneously with his acceptance of death.

The spirit orb floated around in circles where the wife lay face down on the pavement sobbing like a wounded dog. Opening my mouth it slowly floated into me and my wings stretched alive, tearing a hole in the fabric of space-time and making a doorway to the vortex that lead to the beyond.

As I felt the great pain in his soul floating inside of me and vomiting the residual emotion that permeates off of every soul, I thought about the irony that this soul whose evil thoughts were so poignant that they emulated and rivaled E.A. Poe, was on its way to heaven.

A man who had felt lost his whole life still accepted the glory of god in his soul enough to ascend to the great and colorful planes of Elysium. As I neared heaven, I opened my mouth and he went forward through the "long tunnel" that leads to "the light at the end of the long hallway" at the opening to my mouth.

It all seems a bit rediculous when I say it out loud but seeing heaven, I didn't feel like entering it for the first time. I didn't even laugh at the rediculousness of the situation because layed out before me were fields of green that went on forever and bubbles that represented different worlds that belonged to the spirits of all time; their colors flashing like TV screen echoes on the walls of American dens across the nation.

I turned and floated back into the vortex feeling the wind on my wings and watching the floating reapers without any wings but with the ability to move in any direction  on any plane of existence because of their title.

Life for any human is hard but dying is what comes naturally. Never dying is hard but we find ways to make it. Always being the one to set up the dominoes but being forced to let the human knock them down wasn't even satisfying because being the Grim, I get to see death in every form but what does it mean to die? Or to give death by your own hand?