Birth

Rather than almost instantly going to sleep last night as I generally do (with the help of Xanax), I lay awake in the dark (despite the Xanax) thinking about the birth process. How terrifying it must be! Here you have been in your warm, cozy, quiet world, floating about, casually becoming, sprouting arms and legs and fingers and so on, and then suddenly something untoward is happening, suddenly you are being rudely expelled from the only world you know, jostled and pushed and forced. You cannot comprehend the thing. Are you dying? Certainly some disaster is occurring and you are suddenly quite unsafe, quite insecure. The next thing you know, you are surrounded, penetrated by blinding light and deafening noise, thrust into an immense, unnatural, chaotic, painful, incomprehensible unknown. And yet, you find that you have been received, cradled in careful hands, and then laid ever so tenderly on your mother's breast. You hear the heartbeat you have always heard, and this warmth on the outside is rather like the warmth you knew on the inside. And you breathe.

I wonder if death is something like this--not death at all, but something new, a transference from one world to another. It is a trip you make just as unwillingly as at birth. You simply find it happening, and there you are, traversing a suffocating tunnel, struggling through this relentless process by which you have been captured, by which you are helplessly compelled. Will there be hands to receive you? You came once from the dark, with no knowledge of its darkness, and now you have reentered darkness through light, leaving behind the only world you have ever known. Nor did you ever know the world you came from, for no one remembers the womb. Are you dying? Is this the end? Or will there be another light, another incomprehensible realm. Will you fall upon a living warmth? Will you hear the sound of a familiar heart?

Will there be hands to receive you?