Death,
I have come, not to love the word,
But to accept it as part of my being,
Part of every creature’s life.
The last days before it’s coming,
The sense of anticipation before its life-drawing exercise,
The breath, the last one it takes away, isn’t Death.
It is time going slowly,
Time to remember our life.
It becomes a blur,
A fading dream,
As we remember the things that have brought us to death.
Our creator doesn’t kill His creations,
We bring ourselves to death.
Either we kill ourselves,
Or someone kills us.
But, it is usually a combination of the two
That brings us to the point of death.
All the energy we have spent on life
Has taken its toll at the last dying breath.
It has to happen.
The world has to suck the life out of us.
Then we finally see it in hazes.
Words of people seem irrelevant,
And we behold this nostalgic feeling
Of our life, and the days we have passed by.
It is a surreal feeling of a mixture of various thoughts.
Our life has become a story,
Like a book you have been reading,
Wondering its meaning, thinking of the characters, and anticipating the end.
The people, the things, the feelings. Oh!
It is indescribable.
It is as though your whole being is fixed
In the past days of the glory of life,
With another of never going back to it for death is near.
That is the point when you become afraid.
Afraid of the uncertainly of your life after death,
But also, life for the living after you are gone.
Then there is the chilling knowledge that life goes on,
And Death is a threshold. To what?
The nostalgia continues,
The dreadful fright continues.
And all that has been said, written, done, told in
The past, the present, and even the future
Lies at the tip of the man’s dying breath.
But, if you survive, if you live
You still die – at least, a part of you.
Adaudo Anyiam-Osigwe from her book of poems A Little Understanding: Poems from the End of Childhood to the Beginning of Adulthood