Crossing over is typically a gentle experience,
so says The New York Times.
For, the body is kind, in ways that simplicity of the mind
favors the newly born, and the nearly dead.
(What details must we shed to make moving
from earth to air, less frightening?)
My grandmother said, as she was dying,
that our world and the spirit world are mostly the same,
except that the spirit world is a world of black and white,
and our world is a world of color.
(I would have preferred that she turn that comparison
the other way around, for my benefit.)
Obachan[1]’s life was a hymn to a Fauvist painting,
that kind that you’d feel from the gut – all Kaminsky-esque,
with no muted tones, or variances of shade –
just slashes and deep blobs of intense color,
the most violent of pigments.
(which is why, I worried for her when she died.)
I imagined her soul, slipping into muted sleep,
slowing its swirl, dimming its spectrum of colors –
until like a photo, darkening to monochrome,
she would become the very depth
and quiet of her own shadow.
(and, as red fades to blue, in the absence of light,
so twilight might start to become her.)
Fire slowly dims,
coal blackens, into night.
***
[1] Japanese, for ‘Grandmother’
Photo by Teddy Thornton on Unsplash
