The Final Journey

fictionspawn Aak, ,

The Final Journey

He saw his mother come running towards the body on the ground. Others followed. Shouting. Screaming.

The body was his.

The men started pushing his chest, blowing into his mouth. They seemed to be drifting further and further away, yet neither them or him was moving. Some kind of fog was separating them. They became diffuse. Their voices sounded like something far away, deep in a dream.

He heard someone calling. He turned around. Someone was waiting for him in the shadows. There was a light. A silhouette of a figure. The scene of his death did no longer seem important.

The world was left behind. The real world, no longer real to him. He walked through a wall of shadows, a veil of mist. A hooded character took form, standing in a river boat. Dark, still water.

Come. It is time.

Hank looked back towards where he’d come from. There was nothing there. He had vague memories of laughter and sorrow, fun and fears. It was over. It didn’t matter any more. Like a dream, a insignificant chapter in an eternal book.

I guess it is. He stepped into the boat.

The hooded one pushed it out on the water, into the mist. They didn’t speak. They didn’t exchange looks. Nothing mattered any more. Nothing at all.

Soon he was gone forever.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the-science-of-near-death-experiences/386231/

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/08/12/211324316/brains-of-dying-rats-yield-clues-about-near-death-experiences

https://www.livescience.com/50389-cardiac-arrest-dying-brain-signals.html

The Strings of the Puppet Master

Published by fictionspawn Aak

Norwegian trilingual writer and illustrator. Contact information in my Gallery.

29 Comments

  2. The line “The body was him.” – this takes away the out of body experience too quickly for the reader.
    In my humble view, if you had your character standing watching and wondering how unreal this was, and knowing the efforts to save the body were futile. Why were they doing this to him, can’t they leave him alone – can’t they see I am dead….

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  10. Quite intriguing piece, reminds me of something similar I wrote, “A prisoner of Hope”. I always love the bird’s eye view, thrilling perspective. Good Job

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  15. When I write about death, I have a hard time writing that it’s the end end. My Dad died last April and especially soon afterward, my Mom said she kept feeling his presence. My wife is Jewish and in Judaism, it is sometimes believed that a departed loved one remains nearby temporarily until they are ready to take the final journey (I even wrote about recently this relative to the death of a child). If your dead person is on a boat (River Styx?), he must be going somewhere.

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    1. I can easily imagine a boat going nowhere as well, though, so not necessarily. I believe anything personal about us disappear with death, simply because it seems to be explainable by biology. Things like memory and personality can be explained by neuroscience and the brain, so I find lot more reasonable that it disappears with its destruction, but hey, everyone has the right to believe what they want 🙂 Of course, reality does continue, and what kind of relationship there is between consciousness and reality I do not know, maybe we never will. Buddha had some interesting ideas, though 😉

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