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Sand in the wind (I)

             Dave asked the doctor that same question the last time he came to visit Sara. After examining the moribund woman, both of them went downstairs to the kitchen, in complete silence... broken only by the creak in the wooden stairs with every step. It was a dark morning; only a dense grey light crossed the large window, and they had to switch on the fluorescent lights in the ceiling. Then they sat down, opposite one another, by the steel table in the middle of the kitchen which, albeit old-fashioned, was neat and clean. An intense smell, like damp, was floating around the house. In an even tone, the doctor said that the disease was in its last stages. Sara would be alive only for a few days longer. He wanted to cheer Dave up with a few words of encouragement , but when he saw his dour expression, he hesitated... and proceeded to inform him about the funeral proceedings. First of all, he told Dave to call him when the moment arrived. He would then go to his house to certify the death. And then...

             Dave was staring at the doctor without blinking, but he had stopped listening to him. His mind was busy with only one thought: a doubt that had wanted to emerge to the surface a few months ago already. Sara would be dead very soon. Her body would be preserved exactly like it had been only a second before, with every cell still doing its duties in the same places. But she would be dead. It's true that her heart wouldn't beat anymore, and her brain would have stopped sending electrical impulses, but that wasn't the essential problem: even forcing her heart to beat again, even making her brain work once more, wouldn't revive her. So what was that slight difference between a failing body that was still alive, and another one that was still warm but had just died? When the doctor paused, his eyes blinked for a while and then he asked him: “Doctor, what is death?”

             A few days later, with Sara's corpse turning colder in the bedroom, Dave pondered the answer. Standing at the edge of the cliff, looking over the horizon with the same spiritless face that the doctor had seen, he turned his back on the house. The sky was still dull, the wind biting his skin. At such a high altitude, good weather was not the norm. On the other side of the forest that ran behind the house, down in the valley, in the city, there was no sunlight either, but at least the valley was protected from the clamminess of the sea and the gusty winds. Here, however, the wind swept the land continuously, tumbling the rocks and causing the waves to crash against the base of the cliff. Dave, his body as motionless as his expression, seemed to be the only little protuberance sticking out from the cliff. Sara had died that morning, just three days after the doctor's visit.

             He was awoken by Sarah’s soft moans, as she tried to muster up her strength to call him. It was still early in the morning. Dave left the couch where he had been sleeping for months, when he had needed to transform their bedroom into a hospital room. He rushed upstairs. Sara was lying on their bed, throwing up on herself. Dave slowly helped her to sit up on the bed. When her nausea had gone, he cleaned everything carefully and changed her pyjamas. Then he lay down in the bed with her, hugging her skinny, fragile body. Before falling asleep, with a faint whisper, Sara murmured her best attempt at an apology for spoiling the bed linen.

             Dave didn't sleep at all. Time passed while he was softly stroking her skin... until he put his hand on her chest. Sara wasn't breathing. He couldn't know when it had happened exactly, but she was dead. No longer alive. Maybe she had died immediately after falling asleep, or perhaps her heart had stopped right then. There was no way to find that out. He kissed her on her lips before leaving their bedroom. Sunrise was starting to change the sky from black to grey. He slowly walked down the stairs, with the acrid smell of vomit clinging to his pyjamas. His stiff body seemed to be stumbling over every step. The doctor had explained, at the moment that the body dies, neurons start to lose touch with one another. The tissue is still there, still alive, but the brain structure starts to collapse, and all the information is lost forever. The body is still the same, but all those hundreds of thousands of millions of nervous connections that gives you your sight and voice, cease to work. And there's no way to make them work again or to rebuild the whole system. It's like throwing a handful of sand into the wind, and then trying to rebuild the same handful grain by grain, trying to make it identical to what it was before. Ridiculous. Simply ridiculous.