Deathwish 009: Robin
“The body could have been a Pepsi can laying there”
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I have been on both ends of life.
I have given birth to life. Or more accurately, I was there when life came through my body. When my son was born, I caught him with my own hands. I grabbed him up to my chest and I looked into his new baby eyes. He took his first breath in, and there he was. He sparked on. Into being; the circle for him had just begun.
The first thing I said to him was, “Oh my God it’s You. I love you.” And that is exactly what I meant. God. That is who I saw. God. There in that tiny body.
God. In that first breath of life. I believe in God. That’s what childbirth did to me.
I also got to be on the other end of life. Death. I watched as life left a body behind. My grandmother. She was in the hospital unconscious and had been off of life support for 24 hours, the same amount of time I was in labor with my son.
I called the experience Birth in Reverse.
That last day with my grandmother was as emotionally exhausting as my physical labor was with my son. Hanging on her every trifling breath. Stroking her ancient soft skin and silver white hair. Kissing her cheeks and neck. Smelling her smell. Breathing in as much of her as I could hold in my lungs at a time. Her overbite, a shrine to the family, more pronounced with a jaw full, slacked back. The one I had forever hated about my own face, but now loved more than ever on her. Because it was hers and it was mine. And hers would soon be ash.
After hours of not knowing if she was going to breath in again or not, when she finally didn’t, I knew instantly. When she exhaled that last breath of life, more than breath left her body. All of her was dispensed. It was like her life force was dispersed out into everything around her endlessly. Free. She became unlimited in an instant. And her body in that same instant became disposable.
The body could have been a Pepsi can laying there on the bed. My only question left was trash or recycle.
I knew the answer was burn.
It was the same feeling I had when I met my son. The God feeling. The real thing of God happening right then. Recognizable and unmistakable in the moment she left her body behind. There was a threshold. A breath. It opened and she went through it.
Just as my son had come through breath into life when he breathed in for the first time, she went through breath into death when she let go of that last bit of air.
A perfect circle.
Life without death is incomplete.
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Robin was born in Venice Beach, CA, and lives in Portland, OR.