Death is inevitable. Common knowledge. Obvious. No amount of “ilmu kebal”, vampirism, or god-like immortality exists to stray the individual from inevitability. Death is certain. As certain as the day dissolving into night. Death is loss. And what’s lost is permanent.

Death is excruciating. The pain, unbearable. When you lose someone, you mourn. For someone you care, you’d mourn for weeks, months, years, decades. The idea of losing someone is scary. When you think about it, you and everyone close to you is embedded to a certain time, and when that time is up? Death is a countdown of a clock we’d never bear to watch.

Do you know you can see death before it happens? The body starts to cool, too cool. Fingernails of a reddish pink hue gradually become bluish-purple. Soft supple that lips used to be, now chapped a million pieces. No drink quenches the terrible thirst, while hunger is no longer felt. The body would find itself resting, without realising.

The body wilts, eerily into a low power state, never needing any more energy than to keep the eyelids moving up, down, up, down. Speech becomes irrelevant. The mind starts to wander without compliance. Flashes of the past, the present and the future accompanies the body’s statue-like being. The eyes can see, but not of this world’s reality. Everything is a state of mind, an idea, an imagination, a glimpse of where you would end up after your eyelids won’t open.

Darkness would fill the ironic void of a body that was once mobile, light on its feet. Now rigid, incapable of movement. Certain people would describe a light shining at the end of that tunnel, but no testimony is confirmed as of date. This is the part where stories were made up, to cheer the family of constant mourning. To put that frown, halfway upside down. This, is where and when, you leave this place.