Life. Death. The In-Betweens.

I let my thoughts take a sharp turn as I stare at the picture of this dead man I barely knew, while his wife, still alive, retells how things had gone last Sunday night – the night her husband left her.

It has been common knowledge that this old woman had been my grandmother’s close friend, but I had no idea that all these years that I knew her, she had a bedridden husband. Not until tonight. I stare at his blow-up photo a little bit longer and I wonder how he must’ve looked like, alive. Or how he must’ve been as a husband, sans his last few years of paralysis. Or how they spent their time together as young lovers.

I couldn’t think straight and singularly, as with a normal thinker could – one thought at a time. It was always several self-conversations at the same time.

Maybe it is because the second cup of coffee I just had an hour ago is starting to charge me up with more caffeine than I usually need. Or maybe, I am just too distracted by the grammatically incorrect message on the ribbon strapped around the flowers. Either way, I shouldn’t care which is true. Neither would change my attitude towards that moment. Besides, I feel a headache coming. Somebody makes a round to offer a bowl of greaseless peanuts. I hesitate, but dig my fingers into it to scoop a handful.

My eyes eventually resort to wandering all over the tiny room, darting from one sad bulb of flower to the next, as Pastor Nemuel’s exhortation on True Rest drones into my ear. The tiny holes on the metal seats in front of me are making me dizzy, I blink a few more times to rid of the headache building up, and I start to delve into obscure universal truths about life. Death. Some more life.

My thoughts get put on hold for a moment by the mere mention of more deaths. My mom and my boss initiate the small talk on today’s breaking news, according to social media – children poisoned after the nation-wide deworming. The funny feeling in my stomach begins crawling upward again. To my chest. To my throat, gagging me. If they truly have died, I think about how the children are not aware of the commotion they are causing back here in the land of the living. Images of limp, lifeless little bodies flash in my mind and I think about the end times, and this, probably being a part of the signs.

I am showing signs of mentally freaking out myself, but today I make sure to confirm with official news from official journalists, lest I fall into the gullible citizen category again. Three hundred children all over Western to Northern Mindanao are directly affected, as rumored, but nobody died after all, and it was, according to the Department of Health, only a side effect of taking the deworming pills when having worms more than an average child’s. My mother and I breathe a mental sigh of relief, and, mentally, knocking ourselves in the head for being paranoid for a moment. But in-between seconds, I still wonder how much of the truth they are covering up this time, and if this kind of truth could raise the dead, if there were any.

I go back to my thoughts; my eyes return to the picture of the grinning, toothless old man, against an edited sky background, as if assuring us, “I’m alright now. I’m resting.” I wonder if I’d look the same on a picture frame like that, when I’d have my turn.

It’s funny how living on earth is more of a pain than what comes after death in Christ. I think about the living mourning for their dead. Perhaps death* is more of life than life itself after all. I shake my head, smile, and look around, taking note of the faces. Perhaps it truly is.

*the kind of death one reaches while in Christ.