Oh Death

It was a hot, hot summer when I turned sixteen. Not hot like it is these days of course, but still one of those summers where the humidity and the heat marry and conceive a life all its own.

Just like all 16-year olds, I was invincible. But I was especially invincible, because I learned to drive on old mountain roads: slithering, unpredictable black snakes through dense woods. It takes special skill to drive here: a skill that one isn’t born with, but one that’s earned. And I had paid the time in this old hollow to be truly invincible, not like the teens who learn to drive fancy, airbag-having cars in the flat, to and fro streets of suburbia.

Shiny new license in hand, off I went in an old beater. It wasn’t much, but it sliced through the wet Southern atmosphere just as well as any other, and it knew the backwoods curves better than any other.

Back in those woods, the trees always seemed to swallow you as you cut down those old curves, the musk in the air arresting you in the age of the mountains, a scent older than the dinosaurs themselves. Driving through there always gave the impression of an escape mission.

I ended up down at the bottom, where my boyfriend and I swore we saw the spirit of an old Confederate soldier sauntering across the road. We couldn’t have been crazy because we both saw it, an eternal mist refusing to die but unable to live, forever wallowing in the meadow of time in which he had taken the minie ball and fallen. How strikingly miserable the soldier had seemed in his purgatory.

Coming up out of the other side, I asked a little too much of that old beater, and the black snake its wheels had captured was able to wriggle out of hand. The trees faded into an icy hot fog, one that seemed to imprison a thousand suns trying their damnedest to shine through. In my ear I heard one of the revivalists wailing that old folk song, Oh Death.

Well what is this that I can't see?

With ice-cold hands taking hold of me

Well I am Death, none can excel

I'll open the door to Heaven or Hell

Oh Death, Ohhhh Death

Won’t you spare me over ‘til another year?

Who was it singing though? Whose lips were moving? I desperately searched for the revivalist but found none. My jaws slackened and tightened, unclenching teeth that had set in fear, and soon I realized it was through my own lips that the words escaped.

The trees came flying back, with the force of fire and brimstone, and I ducked in terror. But they placed themselves just where they had left, and I found myself sitting in that old beater, stopped right in the middle of the road at the end of that last curve. Somehow I had been spared, but yet I hadn’t. The invincible me was long dead and gone.

***

I wouldn’t meet Death again until a decade later. I was 36 weeks pregnant, with water-balloon ankles, a pounding heart, and an apathetic shithead unfortunately called my husband. The sweet boy, the one with whom I had seen the soldier, the boy whose dreams were as big as mine and could separate them too, had not been spared one dark, awful night on those old curves.

In defiance of my husband’s barking about my bellyaching, I dragged my whale of a body into the old beater and headed to the hospital anyway. A few vital signs later, the nurses flitted around me as one does a fragile figurine that could shatter with the slightest movement, one nurse placing the needle into my spine, another sterilizing my stomach where the doctor had marked for the incision. Preeclampsia would be fatal they said, so the baby would have to come now.

The epidural didn’t take, and I never felt pain like I did then, when my girl was ripped from my womb against both our wills, both of us screaming alone and for the other. As they finally set her to my chest, a new pain set in, one of blood pressing against my skull as if it were a swollen river trying to overwhelm its dam. I felt the crushing glare of the sterile, whitewashed walls of the hospital– or was it the eyes of my hateful, hopeful husband? Then all blurred into that familiar fog, the icy hot grey holding back a thousand suns.

But this time was different. A slender finger poked its way through, followed by its decrepit hand, skin wrapped around bone like dirty white sheets worn thin over a mattress so used, only metal remains. The crushing pain thrust me toward this reaching thing, and, clutching my infant to my chest with one hand, I reached out with the other. My girl’s newborn wails as its chorus, a familiar song drifted in:

Well what is this that I can see?

With age-old hand taking hold of me

Well I am Death, none can excel

I'll open the door to Heaven or Hell

Oh Death, Ohhhh Death

Won’t you spare me over ‘til another year?

A freezing fire sensation tore through me as our fingers grazed each other, a feeling repulsed only by the radiant warmth of the newborn at my chest. The hand, sickening and somehow loving, receded back into the fog, and suddenly the hospital walls came crashing down onto me. I awoke to a nurse wiping my forehead, speaking of luck and faith and all that.

I had been spared again, but I hadn’t. As I brushed rough, tired fingers against the silky tautness of my baby girl’s skin, I realized the wife-me, the me subservient to “traditional” gender roles, was long dead and gone.

***

It’s hard to remember now how many other times Death and I met. Three-quarters of a century of borrowed time will tire any mind, and while I now think of those meetings fondly, I can no longer count them. As I lay here, my hand clenched by that of my daughter, a women raised strong and independent by the grace of my many deaths, I wonder when I’ll ever get to see Her – Death – once again.

But there it is – that familiar fog rolls in, removing from my sight the sky blue walls of my bedroom and my daughter’s watery eyes. My eyes tear up, stung by the bittersweet salt of leaving and arriving, as the reach of that decrepit hand takes shape. Gently, with love and loss I leave the grasp of my daughter and send my hand to Hers. There is no longer any ice in Her touch, only the fire remains, but its warmth now is the same I felt between the skin of my baby girl and my own in that hospital so long ago. Death wraps her fingers around mine with shocking then unsurprising care, and I can’t help but smile when that familiar but new tune hits my ears – I, who have died so often, dying for the first time.

Well I am Death, none can excel

I'll open the door to Heaven or Hell

Oh Death, Ohhhh Death

I will go, Won’t you take me with you dear?