Jolted by Lightning Bolts
Jolted by lightning bolts in your chest, you pass it off as indigestion. You think If you’re having a heart attack, it is not the worst way to go. You feel as if a metronome is working inside your skull. That same uneasiness sticks in your throat like a Polish sausage. You try to speak, but have no sound. What if — as Fred Sanford used to say with his hand over his heart — this turns out to be the big one? You want someone — anyone — to hear your last words and you want them to be memorable.
You think of last words of famous people like artist Frida Kahlo: I hope the exit is joyful — and I hope never to return. Too cynical.
Suffragist and abolitionist Lucy Stone, the first female college graduate in Massachussetts, says Make the world a better place. Too cliché.
Mid-century Jamaican philosopher Bob Marley says, Money can’t buy life. Too obvious.
You recall Mozart’s lyrical final words: The taste of death is on my lips. I feel something that is not of this earth. You wish he would have elaborated.
You wished the same when Steve Jobs uttered, Oh, wow, oh wow, oh wow!
As a writer, you might echo Parnassian poet Olavo Bilac, who said, Give me coffee. I’m going to write
You unfurrow your brow to erase creases from your forehead that make you look older than your three score and twelve. You are not old but concede you do not have as long as you did — only a minute ago — to live. Time shrivels with each tick of the clock and you relate it to a river that smoothes rocks with its steady flow, moves by currents, swallowed at its confluence by a wider body of water.
Time shelters secrets beneath its surface. You know this, you the graying one with the lived-in face and plaited hair, you who stands on the bank watching dragonflies flitter around pussy willows. Overhead, the sky darkens; the fireball that is the sun sinks below eye level at the horizon, streaked with shards of mauve and purple — a bruise of a sunset that forecasts you’re near the end of the day.
For a moment, or longer, you acknowledge a connection to all things alive under the sky, and wish to capture whatever links you to all other living beings. And then you know: You are alive…and you are dying. The incongruity of the reality does not escape you. To live means you also die. Everyone alive is an old-person-in-training.
You practice healthy habits to play first chair in life’s orchestra. You exercise mind and body, engage in social and mind-expanding activities: take up the bass fiddle, travel, forgive, write poems. Laugh.
You see pity or impatience in faces around you. Others know you’re dying even as they deny they are, too. You shut your eyes against death and hear marching bands, see baton twirlers, smell a storm coming, and know it’s coming, this parade of death. You know so already passed; others strut on by to fiddle through life — play their music — a while longer. You wonder if you are sorrier for the dead…or for the living. You ask yourself which is more artful…living or dying?
No matter a person’s religious or spiritual leanings, one thing is true: living is terminal; death is not. You don’t talk about dying — or living, for that matter — as much as you ponder it.
More than half of the human body, sixty percent, is composed of water; a world population of eight billion people are warned of a water shortage lurking just beyond our life spans, and you calculate that life’s very essence is likely to be the death of us. What are you to do with a realization of such magnitude, or one so blatantly obvious?
You’re a list maker. You have a bucket list sired early in your life by the ilk of a Sears Roebuck Wish Book. Your list is short and almost common. You want your adult children to laugh readily. You want them to know the wisdom of ancestors that bobs in and out of your consciousness. After a lifetime of repetitive activities, the redundant becomes ordinary, no matter how satisfying, so you do as you’ve always done — view happiness, like death, not in the present, but off in the future
Thoughts bubble up like hot springs and then take off like Huskies in the Iditarod when they hear the starting gun for what Alaskans call “The Last Great Race on Earth.” The irony is not lost on you.
You determine the world needs profundity. You need profundity…you want to see it, be reminded of it again and again like the faces of your beloved people and pets, trees and sunrises, art and the sounds of birdsong….and laughter –images whose existence exude profundity and afford oxygen for the breathing and respiration for the dying. Incongruities.
Your best bet is at the page. You linger there, trusting the synapses to ignite profound thoughts. The world is overrun with overused words. You scoop up entrails of others’ words to harvest profundity for yourself.
Audacious, impertinent, presumptuous are neither characteristics nor words you wish to claim as your own. Giving life to the profound is more elusive than discovering it. Maybe you are more of an adventurer on a quest to the rainbow’s end.You must climb higher.
Wordkeepers, literary paleontologists, you must not abandon your quest for the profound. In the time of abbreviated texts and acronyms, scratchings that look more like hieroglyphics than Charles Dickens or Edna Ferber, more chickens-in-the-dirt than Stephen King or Edith Wharton, you have a responsibility to the page, to words that, without your continued diligent attention, might lay dormant in Noah Webster’s fossil beds.
Like flotsam carried along by the river current, heavier debris — detritus of the mind — clouds the profound, half-buried in silt, unable to take root, unable to be carried out to sea, waits with jagged edges to slash a foot or a memory, allowing you to bleed into the water, onto the page, until the liquid turns crimson like simmering cranberries, or swaths across the sky as the swiftest of paint strokes.
The incongruities of life, of mortality, are more opaque than transparent, lying beneath murky waters, trapped in river beds and hidden like cold flint along its banks. Mammoth incongruity of it all lies in the waterways of words where you can swim free, soothe, motivate, problem-solve.
You can fly.
Bonnie Omer Johnson is a fiction writer and memoirist who, along with Kimberly Crum, produced and curated The BOOM Project: Voices of a Generation. She currently lives. She teaches at Bellarmine University, and operates The Write Place, where she coaches writing projects. A few of her favorite things— aging, birds, chocolate, dogs, grandchildren, holidays, laughter, living, reading, and wording.
