Death Walks With Me (WIP)

This is just the prologue.

He was there when my father died. I will never forget him because he wasn't supposed to be there. I didn't know who he was, but I felt that he wasn't welcomed, that people didn't want him in the hospital room. He was sharply dressed in a crisp black suit with a matching silky tie and shiny shoes; leaning against the entry way, a stark contrast with the clean white paint. My mother wouldn't listen to me when I told her about the man, I didn't blame her, six year olds have active imaginations. I watched him; he continued to stare at the hospital bed where my dying father lay connected to so many tubes that they criss crossed in an intricate pattern across his chest. The strange man looked over to me once, smiled, and then disappeared. My father left along with him.

Funerals don't make much sense to six year olds. I knew my father was gone but I didn't understand why they had put him in a wooden box and why that box was going into the ground. My mother had said that is where he belonged to so he could be with God, why couldn’t he be with God above ground? The man from the hospital room was at the funeral. I could feel him there; I turned in my seat as the priest read from his book and saw him standing at the back of the church. Not much had changed from our last meeting, his attire no different, and his chocolate brown eyes looking back into mine. The priest ended the prayer and I watched as he mouthed the ‘amen’ along with my other family. A new reciting started, once again in Japanese, and the looked away from me. He was not related to me, I could feel it, but he blended in with the others and no one said anything. He was there until the end, even putting a small bouquet of lillies and hemlock on my father’s coffin before the grave diggers lowered into the hole. I still didn't understand why he had to be down there.

Ten years later and I was back in a hospital room, waiting for another imminent end to someone who I loved dearly. My mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor four months earlier but it was too late, the doctors couldn't save her. I was more aware this time, I knew what it was to be devastated and not be able to stop crying. Her eyes were closed, asleep, so she could not see the endless streams of tears running down my cheeks as I held her hand. Through my blurry vision the black suit from my childhood came into view and I looked up, surprised and confused. His tan hands gripped onto the metal guard rail as his eyes swept over my mother’s sleeping face and blanketed body. He looked over to me, a sad mask disturbing his handsome face. He looked like he wanted to reach out for me, but his hands stayed firmly planted on the metal. A soft brush on lips to my mother’s forehead and he was gone, leaving a wake of blinking lights and flat lining machines.

Instead of being in the back of the church, he was in the front this time, a row behind me. My mother was resting in the coffin near the alter, the priest a little to the left reading scripture in Japanese. My aunt had her arm around my shoulders, holding me to her heaving body as she attempted to comfort me and herself at the same time. A mixture of sadness and confusion settled in my stomach as we rose from the pews and followed the coffin outside into the grave yard. I still did not know who he was, but he seemed to be a permanent fixture in my life as long as my family members continued to die.

For a long time, no else close to me died. I stopped seeing the man in the black suit and life continued on as normal. I finished off my high school education living with my aunt, working behind the counter at a local convience and drug store, and spending time in the library. My aunt thought that the deaths of my parents at such a young age had scarred me, I had become fascinated by death. I read as many books as I could on the subject. One particular view kept drawing me back to it, death was a man, a lonely, bitter man who wanted nothing more than to die himself. Being the parentless kid with the obsession for death didn’t gain me many friends at the beginning of college but I didn’t care, I never felt alone.