Sickness Unto Death

Drawing by: Casey Arden

By Andrea Lingle

Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. John 11:25

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”

― Friedrich W. Nietzsche

He wobbles as the updraft carries him over the mountainside. Far below, his shadow stretches and morphs over the surface of rocks and Queen Anne’s Lace. Thread-like stems projecting the surface of the lace in perfect conformity. A deceptively nebulous doily. In the space of half a gasp, the shadow has moved on, leaving a tiny snag of shadow behind. A fly, washing its eyes, dabs its sextapedal way from stamen to pistil without blushing. A cycle of life cradled by a plateau of blossoms.

If the fly had thought to glance up, just as the shadow fell across its back, would it have assumed that the sun had been blotted out for good? Would the mighty wing-span have been enough to drown the fly’s solar-certainty? Would the mortality of the sun suddenly and rightly unfold before its complicated eye?

The sun burns, unscreened by cloud or canopy, but the bird does not give it a thought. Its wings embrace the air, defiantly still, while the shadow circumscribes the ground. This was a matter of focus. A matter of life and death. A matter of hunger. To ignore that which passes beneath to contemplate what hangs above is to risk starvation. Not being a builder of barns comes with its consequences.

The ground rushes away as he searches from hilltop to valley. Does he ever wish he were a fast flyer instead of a slow searcher? Does he envy the zip of the hummingbird or the brashness of the jay? His days of wandering are only punctuated by smells. He collects them all. The zing of the crushed lace, the nostalgia of wormy lake-flats, the stink of the carcass: he misses none of them. He cannot afford to.

Death, to him, is life.

We all have moments that divide our lives into befores and afters. Slivers of time that change who we are and what the world is. We have all been banished from our various gardens of contentment, and, sometimes, as we stare down from the great height of the abyssal edge, we wonder, unlike the fly or the flower or the Griffon vulture, what will this make of me…