10 Minutes 38 Seconds towards the unknown
— A collection of spiraling thoughts about death in a near-death fictional scenario.
In 2017, Doctors in a Canadian intensive care unit reported that when life support was turned off for four terminal patients, one of the patients showed evidence of delta wave bursts (the same brain waves we got during deep sleep) for 10 minutes and 38 seconds after their heart had stopped (Crew, 2018).
I can feel my body shutting down
The flesh and skin that stuck to my ruptured bones
Heavy, sluggish, and cold
I feel the temperature drop and I wish the cells in my brain were dead
My eyelids, and mouth are stitched, and I don’t have any force to control them again
I feel people rushing, my mom — my mom, her howl was striking out loud, pleading with god to take her life instead
I feel tears raining on my freezing skin, I can feel them slowly slip into my blocked pores
It has already stopped to absorb and I’m waiting for my time to decompose,
it’s a natural law anyway
Is this a part of natural law now that my brain is still active?
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Dear life,
what message are you trying to confide now in the minutes and seconds to my last breath?
10 minutes
Okay, think what sins I have done
Sins I made from the moment I opened my eyes,
to just a second before the machine beeped, and I saw vaguely a flatline appeared
a line that verdict the end of my life
Okay, I lied several times,
I didn’t pray religiously,
I wasn’t even that religious,
but I brought a smile to a mother once when I helped her with her baggage,
or twice when I waved my hands towards her baby
Friends hugged me and told me that I was a good friend, a good person
Am I? What does a good person even mean?
Would it matter to be a good person when I can’t mention the name of god, prophet, or angels that reaped my soul out?
Munkar Nakeer,
Don’t forget the name of the almighty,
In the name of god, I spell your name out
After countless times I forgot to worship you, is this what you want?
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5 minutes
Can I ask for the last time to see the world?
my life, and trying to absorb all?
I want a glimpse even if my memories won’t last
I want to see how the leaves are slowly fall onto the ground,
how the sun touched the wrinkled skin of an elder I saw in the park
I want to see the gleaming smile of a pack of friends on the street, laughing immensely as if the night was there to witness them unite
I want to see the bitterness in the eyes of a disappointed soul who sat on the pavement that years ago, paved his dream
Take my soul out of this body, and let me fly around to see for the last time, the beauty in which I celebrated daily
Glorious life that I sometimes hate, but in each breakdown I saw faith.
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38 seconds
Do I need more time to live?
until when? in a few days? months? or even, eternity?
Would I want to live for eternity?
or is it all enough?
is there such thing as being enough?
is there more to see than what I’ve seen up until now?
The life that I have led up until now, is it all enough?
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28 seconds
But I think I have extracted all the essence of life that I lived
I have explored every possible emotion that I’m able to feel
the straightforward one, the obscure one, the one I cherished gleefully
the one that made a permanent hole inward which I wished to exchange with a physical wound instead,
because it cut too deep,
and I want people to see how heavily I bled
I remember the feeling of placing my feet on the savanna of a mountain two miles away from the ground, where I kept my eyes wide open for the first time
tremendous feeling, I felt like my life was completed,
My life has been completed.
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18 seconds
Dear life, if to feel complete is the goal of life,
What would happen after this?
Will all my senses just immediately vanish, and I can’t even know I’m gone?
or even, I wouldn’t know that I’ve ever lived before
or will my soul drift away from this body, pulled by the cosmic light into the unknown we called it, the afterlife?
Where my sins weighed and I’ll be in line to experience how the broth of hell cleansed my soul repeatedly until it left blisters throughout my soul-body
asking for my god’s remorse,
hoping that He could still see a spark of goodness inside of me
or the true punishment is actually: the soul must wander in the periphery of the abyss and life,
like life, the greatest punishment is to sit still under uncertainties
waiting for my next chance to live, pledging to the creator of life and universe that I won’t redo all the foul choices and sins
or there’s no such thing as sin?
That sin is just a man-made tale, initially created to organize life’s chaos
that aside, to give a sense of direction and purpose to life: it is to avoid sins, pursue god’s gift, and secure a place in heaven
or to be granted another life to live,
reincarnate as a person or a thing that serves a definite character of the creator’s scenario
cause our life is never ours to begin with.
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10 seconds
Hey,
Am I talking to someone? something? or just...
..A void?
Hold on, I can’t hear my voice turned back
it echoes absent, a complete silence
Okay, now I’m talking to a void
and all I can see is the blackest black or I’m not sure, what if my eyes deceived me?
it may be a speck of multicolor, technicolor instead, I don’t know!
what if all my remaining senses are also deceiving me?
and none of these I experience now can I truly believe in
Now I lost to the self that I’ve been relying upon throughout my life
In this limbo between life and death,
I have to let go
to the inch of life that has inhibited my body more than I can even remember,
I have to let go.
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8 seconds
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7 seconds
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6 seconds
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5 seconds
To life, and everything in it,
I’m grateful to be granted a chance to live on this planet I call home
I know I’m in an inch facing death, funny still, I can’t even decipher any
May it remain a mystery, no one able to unveil
So then our imagination flourishes, although it may remain a taboo to be talked to
Let it still be a topic to debate on
Let it be there, as a question with a nonexistent answer
a question to live by
a question of a lifetime.
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4 seconds
If I could still wish in the near end of my life
3 seconds
Unbeknownst to the truth, I wish I could end with peace
2 seconds
And I hope it’d bloomed within me
1 seconds
In front of the unknown, I want to be wrapped in peace.
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Source:
- This piece’s writing concept was greatly inspired by the book, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in the Strange Life- Elif Shafak, reimagining all the possibilities that could happen after death in nearly time facing death, which the author can think of.
- Putih-Efek Rumah Kaca has mediated the transfiguration of the author’s spiraling thoughts onto each word spilled here.
- Crew, Beb. 2018. ‘Brain Activity Has Been Recorded as Much as 10 Minutes After Death’. Science Alert. 05 October. accessed May 2024.<https://www.sciencealert.com/brain-activity-recorded-as-much-as-10-minutes-after-death-human-science>.
- Norton, L., Gibson, R. M., Gofton, T., Benson, C., Dhanani, S., Shemie, S. D., Hornby, L., Ward, R., & Young, G. B. (2017). Electroencephalographic Recordings During Withdrawal of Life-Sustaining Therapy Until 30 Minutes After Declaration of Death. The Canadian journal of neurological sciences. Le journal canadien des sciences neurologiques, 44(2), 139–145. https://doi.org/10.1017/cjn.2016.309.
