“Tick, Tock. Tick, Tock.”

I wouldn’t believe it until I could see it. I couldn’t believe that we dressed in black to mourn. He wasn’t dead. It was much easier to believe that my parents had lied. He was still at his home, breathing through that tube he required, and my parents just thought we looked better in black. We were only going to the church to… no, I couldn’t think of a reason. We were not Christian by any means. But there had to be some other explanation. I wasn’t ready to let go, though I knew he was, and looking at that pale, wrinkled, unmoving body in the velvet bed of death made my lungs clench. My mind wouldn’t permit it. It wouldn’t permit the idea that he wouldn’t be here anymore to toss the baseball or tell me to tuck in my shirt or to lecture me on how to be a pleasant human being.

I didn’t want this to be over, even though I knew he asked for it. Breathing through that tube and staying frozen in place the past few weeks was not a life worth living if it could even be considered a life. He was ready to die. He told me. He’d lived life like he wanted, and he was ready to give it up and make room for one more person in the world. I knew he died peacefully. His body was relaxed and he looked genuinely pleasant. It was what he wanted, yet I didn’t want it. My selfishness and egotism wished him to be alive, in health or pain, whatever it took.

Life was on pause. How could it go on? For him, it was over. How could I live on without him? For everyone in black at that church that morning, time stood still. How could their lives go on either? They patiently waited, mourning the man who’d passed, while children played in the streets. My senses tuned into their joyous yelps and calls as they played soccer, or perhaps cops and robbers. No one else noticed. My senses were on edge. For some odd reason, I expected death to take a hold of me right then and there. I would not argue. I would not react. I would not stop myself from imminent death. The memories flashed as if I was having that “life flashing before your eyes” before I would supposedly died. I remembered the raccoon that seemed to think of my arm as a nice treat. He dragged me out of reach of the beast and surprisingly kicked it in the stomach. It merely hissed an irritated hiss and retreated to the hellhole it came from. The scar still was embedded on my right arm as an everlasting memory. The raccoon was back. This time, it attacked my heart, tearing it right out of my chest. I didn’t squirm an inch and was sure I no longer had a heart. It was a tasty meal for a rabid creature.