She always wondered what came after death. She wondered if maybe there would be a boundless white plane with rainbows and lollipops and puppies and big feasts with the Big Man. She thought that seemed a little implausible, and it seemed more tenable that there would be nothing, but she couldn’t quite wrap her head around that either. What color was nothing? Black? White? Did Nothing look like when you close your eyes? If death did look like nothing, what did Nothing look like?
It wasn’t something that consumed her every waking hour; more something she’d think occasionally about late at night, or having a heart-to-heart with her friends.
It was kind of a given; her parents would die long before her, and she didn’t quite know what to do with that fact. Sometimes it would bring her to tears in anticipatory stress, because she still relied on them. When no one else was there her parents were her rock. So if she had no one, and no fall back, what would she do then?
Everyone had anticipated that her parents would die before her, not in a pejorative way, but it was just the natural order of things. Then she got sepsis and that was no longer such a given. When she died, she found that there was Nothing after death, and that Nothing had no color or smell. It didn’t have those things, but she found that her thoughts persisted, and in that way she could hear her voice, and there was a kind of acrid flavor that filled her “mouth.”
She didn’t have a body either, but after she died she could still picture her body. It was a profound numbness that couldn’t even be described as pins and needles. The was no weight, no blood that had to flow anywhere. There was just Nothing.
When she’d been dead for a while and her mind rallied back, she realized she missed her family. She could picture them too, and she could imagine going in for a hug or having a Heart to Heart with them, but the weight and warmth of their bodies, their breath against her skin, was never there. Any conversation she had was in actuality just a rebuttal from her to herself, and eventually she ran out of thoughts to be had.
Eventually she would wait, an endless spacey buzz that would take the place of articulated thoughts, in hopes that eventually her mom and dad would show up.