Is this the end?

So this is really it?

Everyone's worst nightmare turns out to be the truth. I died five days ago and my body, once a vehicle that transported me to every corner of this planet, now holds my mind and spirit hostage. I cannot escape the skin and bones that I find wrapped around my consciousness and no matter how hard I try to scream at the people who handle my body it would appear that nothing I am thinking can make its way through the muzzle of my pale flesh.

Dying did not hurt as much as I had expected. Snapping my spine as soon as the car hurdled the barrier on the motorway and plummeted into the trees probably saved me a lot of pain and feeling as I bled out. As the madness of the crash fizzled away I found myself in a peculiar, floaty state. Not quite awake but not quite unconscious either. I could see my body snapped and twisted around the similarly battered branches of the tree but I could not feel a thing, if that makes sense. Attempting to move my arms and legs proved futile. Any efforts to manoeuvre my mouth and call for help were pointless. It became clear to me remarkably quickly that I was immobile, an invalid, a pile of bones performing a poor impression of the human previously known as Jude. However it was not until the paramedics showed up that I realised that I was, in fact, dead.

I heard them first. Sparks flew like fireworks and licked my blood-soaked skin as the crew tried to sever me from the vehicle, but it was the mechanical scream of the saw that pierced my ears before I could see anything they were doing. Their words were crystal-clear; somehow the dying process had improved my hearing, focusing my senses in a way I had longed for since my mid-twenties and the beginning of my physical decline. Each instruction the paramedics barked at one another was like a symphony in my mind but every time I tried to sing my own accompanying verse I found myself totally incapable of moving any part of my body. Even my chest and stomach did not rise and fall with the expected rhythm of a person who was breathing. So, I naturally assumed I was not breathing. And yet I was aware of every single thing that occurred around me in this tapestry of chaos that my car had inflicted on this particular stretch of roadside woodland.

‘Can you hear me, Sir? I am a paramedic and I am here to help you, just hang in there!’

‘I’m over here!’ my mind howled as my lips remained closed and dripping with scarlet red. I wrestled tirelessly with my body but it would not yield and so I remained idle and wrapped around a combination of the mighty oak tree and my steering wheel, as if nature and technology were fighting for ownership of my increasingly rigid body. The paramedic's face finally appeared in my periphery. Her skin was plump and I could practically smell the blood pumping around her veins as my senses longed for the signs of life that were now absent from my own body. She, Clair as I would later hear her be called, had angular cheekbones and bright, determined blue eyes that appeared to reflect more light than was available to them in the dreary scene of the car crash. Clair slid her powerful frame through the maze of debris and eventually came to within a foot of my face. After adjusting her helmet and wiping some dirt from her sweat-laden forehead Clair stared right into my eyes and I thought everything was going to be okay.

But then she started to sob.

I could not make sense of her reaction. I was right there in front of her, she just needed to help me unclip my belt and then slide me out of what remained of the car. Something, however, was preventing her from doing that as she fought back the tears long enough to call for ‘the bag’ on her radio. I glared at her, straining all twenty of my craniofacial muscles that refused to cooperate with my wishes. Not once did Clair make eye contact with me. She looked around me as she prepared to cut me free from my seat, she looked under me for any signs of my wallet and ID, and she looked through me as she tried to regain her composure as a new wave of tears threatened to spill out of her face. Not once, to my horror, did she look me in the eye and provide the connection I felt I needed at this terrible time.

Her colleague appeared outside the recently-removed car door. He frantically poked his head through a mangled gap in the metal, looked at my gnarled body, and immediately took on the same despondent look as Clair. It was a look of deflation. A look that suggested the small fragments of hope and optimism these people had held when locating me were gone, in an instant, with one look at my body.

Clair and the man placed an arm on each other's shoulders, a brief exchange of empathy and understanding, before sliding a plastic sheet underneath my torso and beginning to pull me out of the car. I was delighted. Not that I could feel the plastic against my skin, or the torn fabric of the seats against my tattered arms and legs, but at least they were removing me from the confines of the car. Dragging me so roughly seemed uncouth to me. As a living creature it felt degrading to be pulled out of the wreckage like a butchered pig. Crunching over the glass in the passenger seat, I was pulled past the dislodged rear view mirror.

That was when I saw it. 

I looked at my reflection in the shattered mirror-glass. When I say I looked at my reflection I should say that I saw my reflection because the image that reflected back at me was of a gruesome, disfigured face. Eyes closed. Tongue hanging lazily down at one side of a black and blue chin. It was me, and I was dead as a doornail. The reaction of the paramedics now made complete sense, but my awareness of everything that was going on around me made absolutely none.

I still haven’t figured out how this all works. My eyes are closed. My body is drained of all of the life force that my heart once pumped around to all of my organs and yet I am still aware. Still aware of everything around me. And it is not like I am floating above my body, looking down on it as so many films and television shows might have you believe is the case as your spirit ascends to the heavens. I can still see as if doing so with my own eyes, looking out from my skull at the things right in front of my face.

This made things especially hard at the morgue. Sitting there whilst a stranger in bleach-stained overalls cracked open my ribcage like a fortune cookie and plucked each one of my organs out was rather unpleasant, truth be told. Again, I did not feel the snapping of my bones or the scratching around inside my chest and stomach but we as humans never expect to have such a grossly opportune viewing angle of such things when we are alive and well. The doctor finished defiling my body and then zipped me up inside a rustley plastic bag. I tried counting the seconds between being stashed away on the sliding tray in the wall at the morgue and the moment I was hauled back out again and blinded by the artificial lights above the surgery table. I was beginning to lose my mind around eighty-thousand and so stopped counting but it cannot have been too many more hours later that my bag was unzipped and I saw my mother and father looming over me. Thank God they had cleaned me up a bit since the butchering. The thick stitching across my chest and torso were the most obvious signs of trauma to my body, which Dad spotted immediately and gasped at with a prang of grief. Mum held his hand and sobbed gently to herself, but all I could think was ‘You should have seen me just after the crash, guys. This is the best I have looked for several days.’

My parents could only bear to look at me for a few minutes, before they gave the nod for me to be shoved back into the wall of bodies. Over the next eighty-thousand seconds all I could think about was whether any of the other corpses in this room were experiencing the same as me. Does this happen to everyone? Am I special in some way, or is this a punishment for the low level sinning that a deity might have decided I had committed across my life? Funnily enough, as I continue to lay trapped in a, now decomposing, husk of a body I find myself not giving a damn why I have ended up like this. I only feel an intense and horrified anger that this appears to be how I will live out the rest of my days. Maybe it will stop after a certain amount of days or weeks or months. Maybe when I am finally buried and the dozen or so people who care enough to be at my funeral lower me into the ground the lights will finally go out on my life and I can rest, as it should be.

I had always been terrified of dying. The prospect of my entire existence being snuffed out in an instant had always made me feel incredibly small and powerless. My memories and my emotions were always so precious in my mind and I always found comfort in the thought that I might upload my consciousness to a computer one day and live on, in some capacity at least, forever.

Now, I am counting the seconds until I die, die for real. This, whatever it is, is no way to die.