I used to be a smoker— that is until I saw what death looked like. And I don’t mean a fatality, I had seen those before, I’m talking about putrid, decaying illness that consumes you from the inside out. It happened to my uncle. Sepsis.
When someone is ill to the brink of death, their appearance begins to embody the reaper himself. The sickness sucked the life right off his bones. He had been a sturdy man with thick, calloused hands that God designed for labor. But at one point, there was nothing more to those hands than bulbous knuckles and tendons draped in a layer of wrinkling skin. There were also these sores, these festering holes that leaked a hellish fluid. Mamma said they looked like, “kisses from the devil”. On top of it all was the smell. It wasn’t the most pungent, nor was it the foulest stench, but Lord was it eerie. A mixture of hospital soap, chemicals, and what I’m sure was his bedpan concocted into a wreathing, empty smell that caressed the butterflies in my stomach even long after they rolled him away for good.
The worst part about my uncle rotting away to nothing was the fact that we had to watch. My aunt, my cousin, Mamma, and me, we had to see him lay there deeply entangled with death. We watched a once thoughtful, charismatic man turn into a shell of himself, getting all the more hollow until one day there was nothing left. That killed us too. Out of it all, I realized something that hit me hard enough to change my own malignant habit. Death isn’t just about the person who’s dying. Mothers and fathers, lovers, doctors, nurses- when you dance with death they all have to take a turn too. That’s it, dying is selfish.