Popular belief has it that Death is an old crone, carrying a scythe. She scythes people and snatches away their soul. Or she sips their breath and again, snatches their soul. Or simply touches them lightly but cruelly with her frozen wing. And snatches their soul. As a child who spent each and every holiday in the countryside, where days are slower and there is time to think about what is next to come, I had the opportunity to hear stories, to observe customs, to ponder over the whereabouts of the snatched souls, to shed a tear for those who had passed away, to shelter an inner, secret smile because I was still alive.When I first encountered my Death, I was about two years old. I had swallowed a coin that simply stuck into my throat. I was lucky I had a resourceful nanny who used to pass her time crocheting. So, here is the one thing that I still remember very clearly: she laid me on the kitchen table and took out with her hooked needle the foul piece of metal that stood between my Death and a bright, live future, bringing back to its place the poor, little, about-to-be-snatched soul. It is then that I must have become intuitively aware of the truth that would reveal itself into words two decades later, while reading a book by Janice Galloway: well, the trick is to keep breathing. Literally and figuratively. To go on. Whenever, wherever, whoever, whatever happens. Ever since that death-like experience, I have had some more and all related to choking, strangling, inability to breathe. All of them undergone on various sunny days, while playing or having fun, as if a supreme power ironically showed me the glory of a world that I, as many of us, have considered every now and then, a bit too much, a bit too little, a bit too absurd for me. Just the thought of running into that scythe again was enough to make me come back to my senses and ask God not to take away anything he had presented me with. Later, after having grown up, it has been the death of the others that has kept reminding me we are all dust in the wind, therefore we should try to make the best of every breath we take. It was the death of my grandmother that shattered my twenties into pieces, cracked open my ivory tower, chased away the vain thought that me and my folks, of all people, were immune to any hard times. As frivolous as it may seem, it is again then that I found out that when people die and they are mourned, it is not only the good, tear-inducing things that are told at the death-watch, but also the funny, the waggish stories that you didn't know, that show you a new, live side of the late person. This is how I found out, for example, that good old S. (who, throughout my early years, had taken the place of a wise grandfather I had never known, and done a great job at it), had been a guy much inclined to the pleasures of the flesh, as he used to love booze, cigarettes and women. It is on a similar occasion that it was disclosed to me that mild M., another character that populated my childhood, had once chased her husband with a bat in order to cure him of drinking. Gossip? Foul language? Disrespect? There were moments when I thought it ignoble to defile the tears of pain by mixing them with the vulgar shrieks of laughter. Unfortunately, since then many good, nice folks I used to know and who enchanted my springtime with jokes, presents, songs and advice have bid their fare-well and are no longer to be found in their shabby houses. The stories got more and more numerous and it is only now that I am beginning to believe that this is one valid way the living can keep breathing and preserving their sanity: to tell stories in which the dear dead ones unwillingly, but hilariously are to reveal their weaknesses, and therefore their liveliness, by doing so. So even to this day, whenever me and my family get together to commemorate something, or to celebrate something, for that matter, in the middle of our sorrows or joys, out of nowhere, their snatched souls still pop up, as large as life.
by Fabiola Popa
