Death Occupies My Mind

when a deadline looms and you can't rid your mind of it

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Hello Red Cabbage People,

I have written a lot of death based poetry recently. And death certainly has been weighing on my mind. For two reasons.

photo by me, the author.

a) my mother, pictured above, died suddenly at the age of 59, rather too young really. I was only 35 and my youngest wasn’t even 2 years old. It was unexpected and hard to deal with and for some reason that I consider silly I have always thought I would die at the same age. Why, I have no idea really. Both my Granny and my Grandma lived to 99. But, as is its wont, my brain it does like to take the scenic route. I am now 58. Death looms large, trying to get to the foreground, and is perpetually beaten back by me.

b) living with a chronic health condition does put your own mortality at the fore. You just never know what one day to the next will be like, you never know if you are shortening your life by overdoing it, you cannot imagine being worse AND even older. It’s tough.

I am, however, trying to move beyond my own obsession with death, though my brain has now decided that goblins and sprites are going to take the place of moribund thoughts. I suffer with sleep paralysis. There is a genetic component and both my father and my brother also had/have them. Sleep paralysis is a waking nightmare - you are dreaming but you are awake but you are paralysed. I have had these nightmares since I was around 6. They can be terrifying. Most of these waking dreams centre around a sense of danger. When I was 6 it was a man living under my bed and his gnarled and wrinkled hand would reach under the bed clothes and grab my ankle in order to pull me down and under the bed to the place where he lived. When I was older my main dream started, a tall masked man standing either by the door or the side of my bed clutching a dagger ready to plunge it into my chest, most recently it’s been hearing goblins cackle and smile toothily into my face their breathe hot and vile. The only way to break out of the break is to move. Difficult when you are paralysed. I can blink but that doesn’t stop the dream. I need to move a finger or a foot. I have to concentrate very hard whilst terrified to try to move one of my fingers. Most often it’s the little finger on my left hand. It can take quite a long time for movement to happened. I have to try, and try, and try again, all the while still seeing the vision in front of me, waiting for the killing blow etc. Once I manage to move, the dream is gone, but not the thumping heart. I’m calling these fairly frequent goblin visitors ghosts, somehow it makes them seem less horrifying. This is the link to my previous article about this ghostly phenomenon. It is tiring though. I dream of the dead, they invade my sleep, grasping at me as I struggle to scream, waking with a pathetic whimper. I hear ghosts again, they whisper at me, calling in the dark hours, their ghostly touches barely brushing skin, their ghostly breath tickling my cheek, moving my hair, brushing my lips. I wake so often with heart thundering.

So death is my obsession, and it seems my dreams are conveying that to me, or letting my subconscious out to play. And so I’ve written 5 poems featuring death in the last 2 months, and one about murder (3 of which have been accepted for publishing). I’m hoping that writing it all out will help, but I think once I get passed 59 years and 6 months I will begin to relax again.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

So there we are, a somber ‘essay’, (are these even essays?). Till next time my dears. I’ll try to be more cheery too. Ta-ra Tamsin

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