Many depictions feature death as some sort of pain, or at least as painful. And that immediately makes it frightening. Adding to that fear is the ambiguity surrounding not just the cause of death, but also its effect. What does death do? Where does it put the person who dies? When considering such questions, I often feel the impulse to put them out of my head, to let them remain unanswered. I must ask myself what I would do with the answers if I happened upon them? It stands to reason that I would let myself be consumed by hubris. Consider the Greek gods, sitting on Olympus, above death, above humanity. From that type of standpoint life becomes a thing of sport; a bet to be levied in a grand yet ultimately pointless wager. Whether or not I am aware of their lofty control, whether or not I find the answers I seek, I’m ultimately nothing more than a pawn. Perhaps death’s doom and mystery are its own koans, ensuring the fidelity of my humility.

Day three. I am still typing. Megan is still dying. I finish entering the last line of text and note that I have considered and reconsidered everything I can grasp in my wary review of death: still no definitive conclusions, only more questions. I go to Megan’s bedside to tell her I am finished. She raises her wavering head and the skin around her eyes seems too tired to show emotion. Is she relieved? Is she happy? Her cheeks display small, spidery purple bruises from the weak blood vessels burst beneath the indent of the oxygen hose stretched ear to ear across her face. She beckons me in to where she can whisper next to my ear. Nobody can ever be ready, honey, she says. How can they be ready for something they don’t know? she asks, somewhat vacantly. I suddenly see that the enemy is not the question of death, rather it is the demand for an answer: the sense of entitlement to controlling the ephemeral.

With the inflation in popularity over the years of such societal focal points as mass-provided news, crime and medical dramas, and vapid, materialistic “reality television,” I feel that we’ve been given a ridiculously polar outlook on death and life. While evening news broadcasts, the newest iteration of serial murder, and personal bedside heartbreak provide our imagination with innumerable examples of the menace of oncoming passing, faux-candid scenes of richness, glamour, and meaningless sensory stimulation create a paradise of insouciance. There’s the potent, terrifying unavoidability of one’s end sitting quietly, unmoving, next to the intoxicating revelry of dramatized life.

And so we reach inside each other through the shroud of alcohol, the fog of narcotics, and the clumsiness of sex to feel something, anything permanent. The truth as it always has stood is that death is the one constant life has to offer. Religions and philosophies produce plenty of theories (guesses) concerning where the door of death may lead, but at the end of the day we’re left only with the question: what happens when we die? And I ask in return: who can know? The beauty of this mystery is that it is universal. Everyone and everything will eventually die. And in the same way that scarcity breeds value, we may all gain an increased level of worth in our finiteness, in our mortality, in our beautiful walk towards the end.

It has been nearly two weeks since my first visit. Megan slips into a coma in the early winds of a Saturday morning. The book is finished. I am at home. And death is still an absolute. By the next day Megan will have alighted from her perch in the body I recognize, and I will be left to envy her having learned the answer to the question of death, left to walk my own path toward that door, left to ponder.

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