CW: grief, depression.

Some days I felt close to that line where awareness ends. Beyond that border I would become someone else’s memory. I knew eventually even that erratic existence would fade.

I knew you went through this, and I wondered what you saw and what you felt, lying there with your eyes closed. You hardly spoke those final few days. It wasn’t the goodbye we’d always imagined. Part of you had already traveled on to some other, unnamed place.

What I noticed most during those last months was your hands, insistently present there above the covers, the increasing shininess of the knuckles, the thin skin covering bone and tendon, how unsettling it was to see the dark shadows of veins so clearly defined. “Do you see? I’m becoming transparent,” you said.

When I was a young man, your hands might have appalled me. But their lovely fragility left me breathless. I don’t know when the exact moment happened. I sat with your body for hours before calling anyone. All I could do was hold your hands. I was waiting for something. I wasn’t sure for what, some sort of sign, something definitive.

You believed in an after. But I never did. I never imagined a heaven, even though I needed it. I refused to look for messages from beyond or assign meaning to coincidental events. I knew I would not find you in a butterfly or a flower. I would not believe the words I heard in random noise. Human beings are experts at making meaning, so why did I find nothing there?

But in those days after you were gone there was always a shadow in one corner of the bedroom. There was always a spot which never got warm. In the window screen, a stain had formed in the shape of what might have been a human face, but still I refused to believe.

I would wake up in the empty dark knowing what was to come yet still unable to believe. Did I think if I couldn’t imagine my death it wouldn’t happen? I remembered those who passed before me: mother, father, brother, wife, child, friends. So many every month. That’s what getting old means. I knew I couldn’t be exempt, but how do you imagine nothing? And yet every day, somewhere in my body, I manifested death.

That’s when I began accumulating. I’d never been one to throw things away. I’d buy something and I’d keep its box. You would fuss at me until I finally threw it away. We had this rule—it was mostly your doing—no bookcases in the kitchen and dining room, no bookcases in our bedroom. Every book had to find its way onto a shelf. No piles of books, not even on the floor of my study. No loose papers. Everything had to be filed. If not filed, then thrown away. They were good rules, and they kept peace in our marriage. And I admit they gave me a sense of order. They kept my head clear. Everything neatly in its place.

I wanted to be a writer someday. I appreciated the fact you never rolled your eyes. You never discouraged me, even though all I ever did was get ready. I collected reference materials. I made copious notes. I imagined all the books I would someday write if ever I could make the time. Thanks to you I kept it all neatly contained.

After you were gone I had no such constraints. I still hadn’t written anything, except for these letters to you. There were dozens, maybe a hundred or more. I should have kept better track. I never bothered to collect them in a box. I wrote them, and then I left them in various places around the house. As if I were absent-minded, but I was not.

I bought books on all aspects of world history, the sciences, psychology, and philosophy. I pored over those recommended lists you find on the internet—the hundred best books about this and that. I bought the Pulitzer Prize winners, the Bookers, and the Nobels. I quickly ran out of shelf space and started making stacks in my study, the living room, the bedrooms, and basement. I kept them out of your crafts room at first. I didn’t want to touch anything there, but finally I moved your things into a closet, carefully, and began filling that room as well.

At first I tried to keep the volumes segregated by genre and subject matter, but I eventually had to abandon all that. In some cases, the stacks were five or six feet high. Where possible, I left trails through the rooms to enable access, but if one of the book towers near the center of a room collapsed there was no way for me to rebuild it, so I had to let it be. When some of the rooms became impassable, I made these rough, hand-drawn maps of where I thought things might be. Sometimes I added books to those full rooms by opening the door and tossing the volumes inside. I thought someday I’d figure out a way to sort it all out.

I read very few of these books as I acquired them. I honestly tried, although of course it was impossible to keep up. But a strange thing happens when you own a lot of books. You look at the covers, you read the back cover copy. You handle them. You feel the weight of them across your palms. You smell them. The old ones smell old, and the newer ones smell like everything is possible. Both are sublime perfumes. After a period of owning them, somehow you imagine you know them. You feel like you’ve read them all, even though you haven’t.

It wasn’t just books filling the house. It rarely is, with collectors like me. There were all these printouts from the internet. Articles and such on all manner of topics. I would skim the contents before shoving the folders into shelves or onto piles. But accumulating, at least the way I did it, is a full-time job. There’s no time left for study.

I also collected old toys, of course, and a scattering of broken and cheap antiques. They were like pieces of the world, not just things I’d read about. Taxidermy, bottles, cigar wrappers, sports cards, odd greeting cards, a variety of inappropriate paraphernalia. It all kept me busy. It kept me occupied.

I still thought about you. How could I not? But I didn’t dwell. I didn’t become lost in my feelings. I had all my things to become lost in.

Eventually there was no more room in the house, so I moved into the old shed in the backyard, the one you used to do pottery in. I stored all the medical equipment from your last illness there: the crutches and the wheelchair, the shower chair, all those empty medicine bottles. They made me feel closer to you. I bought an old cot in a thrift store to sleep on, piled it with blankets and quilts and slept in my clothes. And sleep I did. For hours, every day. My bedding absorbed me.

You would have been horrified. But the dead, I’m sorry to tell you, get no vote on how those of us still living choose to conduct our affairs. I gathered an entire world around me, and even if I wanted to, I couldn’t exactly get rid of an entire world. That was the appeal. With all that stuff, how could I die?

Not that I didn’t imagine it. What I imagined was when the right time arrived—and I was sure I would recognize it—I would set fire to this world of things with me inside. Everything would go up in flames, and I would rise into the sky with all the other ashes.

In my solitary confinement I used to wonder if I would smell death coming, something beyond those associated scents of a souring, unwashed body, or the grainy stench of an intravenous feeding solution. A hint of the corruption to come, a suggestion of rotting meat or fruit. A change in the light accompanied by a staleness in the air suggestive of entropy.

But when it finally happened, I wasn’t aware. I was sleeping, or simply lost in a daydream. I really have no idea. One moment I was thinking about you and the next, well, there was no next. This was the time to say goodbye. This was when the spirit peels away. This was the nothing that goes on forever.

• • • •

I never believed in an afterlife, yet here I am. I am the ectoplasm painfully leaving the body. I make the ceiling lights flash off and on. I am the glare in the photo people forgot they have taken. I am a light going into light.

Two police officers found me out in the shed. Someone, maybe one of the neighbors, must have called for a welfare check. I’d like to know who it was. Not to thank them or to blame them. Certainly not to haunt them. I’d just like to know who noticed.

I know this is how my body was discovered because I was there, huddled in the corner, watching. The dead love corners. I don’t know why. Something about the coziness of the geometry. Death is an instability. We are drawn to points which feel secure.

I watched as people wearing protective gear reassembled my body and laid it out on a stretcher and carried it away. I didn’t follow. I’d lost all interest in the proceedings. They no longer had anything to do with me. I remained behind with all my things. I wandered through the house, easier now that I had no physical form. I took my time because, of course, I had all the time in the world.

It was hardly recognizable as a house. It was no more than a garbage dump, really. You would have been ashamed.

Still, I waited there. I didn’t know what else to do. Maybe I was guarding the property, although I have no idea how I could have prevented a theft. Any such concerns were unnecessary. Even thieves would have thought twice before entering that teetering mess.

I waited through the inspection, and I watched as they posted the notice of condemnation. In time, the trucks and bulldozers arrived, and the entire plot was scraped, leaving it all in emptiness, as if our lives had never been.

Was this a dream, a memory, a vision, or what? It has become difficult to tell them apart. Dreams were things which couldn’t have happened, and memories were things which may have occurred, but probably not exactly as I remembered them. Visions were for saints and lunatics. But here all these events are much the same.

It’s the end of the day and everyone else has gone home, called in by their parents, but there’s always someone who goes home mad. I don’t know when I’ll see any of my friends again. In the years to come this will mean nothing, but for now it means everything.

Despite all my doubts I still expected I would see you again. Didn’t they say dying people see their dead relatives? Weren’t you supposed to take me by the hand and guide me into the light?

Here in the land of the dead you see no one. There are no friendly faces, and everything has lost its name.

The sky is full of this vast swarm of starlings, millions of them engaged in murmuration, teardrop shapes and wing shapes and the most abstract of vector shapes evolving one into the other.

They hold my attention for hours, sometimes days, until they leave in search of someplace to sleep. I, who no longer require sleep, look down into the city below, a world of disintegration: paper, cloth, leather, asphalt, the fire-destroyed neighborhoods, fallen high-rises of concrete and steel, the monuments to our self-glorification dissolving in our absence. Our great cities have ended as ossuaries for all our forgotten bodies.

When night falls, the darkness is complete and the wildness is everywhere. Proliferating snakes and rodents, the swarms of prowling insects, an invasion of plants and animals and dust taking it all down.

The earth buries who we were and moves on. All this after you closed your eyes.