 Life. It is such a challenge and yet it is also a vehicle in which one travels through not just the unknown terrain of knowledge yet unbared and yet to be explored, but Life holds joy and happiness and beauty beyond the eye's beholding - holds out gifts of friendship, the simplicity of children, wordless communication from Nature, music, art and literature - media of creativity in which the mind and heart find private expression of the inmost soul. Ah! Life. It has become a transparency placing the templates of its experiences on the lighted plate to shine them on the screen of memory and present day reality. Viewing one by one a captured scene, a vivid sight, a 3-D presentation of a long forgotten time, events, people and the march of Time. Most recently I have been forced by illness to the horizontal state of bed reflection - pondering a myriad facets of my life - and placing gingerly, one template after another, hand unsteady in its holding of the remote control. Flipping back and forth, stopping here and stopping there, skipping flashes of scenes I am not ready yet to look at. I've lain abed with spinning head, (Mmmm- I'm as much of a poet as a sheep is like a goet!), seeking to search out reasons for my terror linked to dying. Not a fear of dying and transitioning into eternal eons for I am not a believer in a heaven and a hell and I hold no fear to pass on to the other side - but terror of the physical last struggle that seperates the mortal from its frail mortality. Some hand from my subconscious level placed the right transparency onto the light and on the screen appeared a picture of a young Chinese - lying on the grassy bank beside a winding river, small girl drinking in the warmth of sunshine hoping that the warmth might somehow melt her frozen heart. Slide 1. Meadow in the countryside, river flowing merrily and freely in its whim to wind a path as far as eye can follow. Little girl in simple flowered dress lies gazing up at clouds, listening to a meadow lark and feeling the softness of the earth's grass coverlet beneath her. Peace, however temporary, from her world of racial war. Slide 2. Three teenage boys standing on the road and looking over the bridge along the river bed, espying on the bank the dreaming girl. Slide 3. The boys have slung the girl between them as they step into the river, laughing at her feeble struggles to be free. Slide 4. Holding her under and pulling her up, time and time again, each time a little longer in the water, each time a little shorter time to breathe above the surface. ( they do not feel the terror and the pain of suffocation, the fighting to keep sight of the sun shining through the bubbles; not lose its saving light. Feeling the implacable strength of teenage muscle gripping flailing arms and legs of one small girl body. They do not hear their laughter, jeering comments that come more dimly through the water as her strength begins to fade). Slide 5. Body getting limper - fun diminishes and appearing on the bridge, a man out walking, heading for the river path. Slide 6. Three teenage boys running off, unnoticed by the man. Girl's body flung into the grass, unnoticed by the man out for his walk, Enjoying the sunshine and feeling its warmth. Thinking his thoughts and listening to the river sounds of freedom and carefree wandering. Slide 7. Little girl slowly finds her life is still within her, but diminished in the shame of its unfitness and unworthiness to live. There is a shame connected to a trodden race that cannot be described. Born from the womb of rejected, unwanted, despised position, a cringing from the knowledge that there is no one who would stand beside one with unashamed delight in presence of another. There is no shame that covers the belief in ones unworthiness as that which has been soddered in by constant denigration of ones sense of Self. Self-conviction that the due allotted one of Chinese origin can only be whatever hate and prejudice and arrogance decides is neccessary to keep such in their place. Death is not a crime - for what is riddance of a worm to the keepers of the Garden of Society where coloured persons do but litter up the lawns and defile the purity of white eliteness? Thus, the bed muse of my death encounter brings enlightenment of a previous wondering why my terror of the act of dying. A short slide show, Life's transparencies connecting the chest complication in my illness and the wheeze to breathe today with long ago event - and now I know the root of terror and my fear of suffocating. NOW I know why I fear to ever have my head go under water and I cannot swim. There are other links to this physical part of death - my witness of a hundred, yea, hundreds of patients I have watched in their last struggles in the throes of dying - all coming to the bottom line - I have to breathe. I cannot breathe. But my eye witness of their suffering does not touch myself, it reaches my emotions in relation to their battle, but what reaches ME can only come from personal understanding of my dance with death. NOT to be copied in any form   
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