The Eyeless Mask

A death, a dream, and feeling lucky

In the dream, I died. It wasn’t like the fade-to-black at the end of an old movie, the sudden snapping off of a light switch, or even Annie Dillard’s “eyeless mask.” It was more like stepping into a painting at the museum - “The Starry Night” by Vincent van Gogh or Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte“ and not being surprised that you did that.

(“The Starry Night” by Vincent van Gogh 1889, Museum of Modern Art)

The dream descended as I fell asleep on the deck of the Little Dipper on hot day anchored in a quiet cove, a lifejacket for a pillow and the slow sloshing of the waves.

It is not hard to think about death out here in the islands - fish bones like tiny ladders to nowhere in the shallows, insects whose lifespans are measured in hours not years caught in pools of black pond water, a pile of feathers each like a tiny exclamation point where a merlin took a flicker apart on the beach. There are bones in the forest green with moss and age. A black-robed raven flaps overhead and calls just once, a syllable of your name.

I think about death as much as anyone my age I suppose, which is to say a lot. Like most of us, I carry the shadows of loss on my shoulders - parents, grandparents, friends, a brother. Mostly, their memories are lit with the grace of shared time but all things have their shadows. You cannot know life without knowing death. You cannot know death without occasionally feeling the chill of its shadow, even on sunny days.

Maybe it was the chill of a passing cloud that woke me that day, I don’t know, but I shivered as I sat up on the deck, still tangled in my dream. There was none of the white winged, harp-plucking halo kind of thing in that dream of death, more like something seen moving just at the corner of your vision or in slightly slow motion. Look directly at it and it vanishes. It wasn’t cold or scary or lonely. None of that. It was just different. That’s all. Just, different.

“[T]o die is different from what any one / supposed,” Walt Whitman wrote, “and luckier.” I don’t know what death will be like. None of us do. But I do know that as the sun came back out from behind its cloud again, it was like a rebirth. The dream faded, the raven fell silent, the sun warmed my shoulders again. Birds sang. A flicker flicked through the trees. I felt the blood moving in my limbs and the rise and fall of my own breathing. I was alive, adrift on the waters of our short-lived consciousness while the wide blue-green world of life swirled around me. And I felt, there is no other word for it, lucky.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted)