This is 1st draft excerpt from the introduction to my proposed Novel (Working title) 

I am dead. 

The “books” from this novel so far are: 

Sunday afternoons with Death (Intro) 

Missed Deadline

That time when I died

A time of Faust and Roses

Sunday afternoon with death.

Death and taxes. Inescapable. Formidable. Regrettable.

Death. It’s going to happen to all of us. There is no escape. Everyone we know. Our families. Our friends. Ourselves. We will all one day die. Pass from this plane of existence. (as it says in the Bible: “Sleep with Kings”) So, why can we not talk about it? Why can’t we lift the darkened vale just a bit to peer underneath?

Sometimes I think I should have been an undertaker.  “Undertaker,” now there’s an odd word, if ever.  Well, the reason I think I should have been one is my odd, nearly morbid….not obsession….more like, fascination (and that isn’t quite right, either) with the big D.  Anyone that has a real obsession with death should probably get some sort of help through a professional.  No, for me it’s that death, in all his personas and I have been….and not quite the word…. “acquaintances” since I was very young. 

Let’s get this part out of the way, right now.  No, I’m not a Wikken, Warlock or Satanist….or anything “ist.” I don’t sit around with skulls in my living room.  I’m not agnostic, nor atheist.  I’m a devoted follower of God and the Bible.  I believe that Jesus Christ is my savoir.  To me, it’s the only thing that makes sense, in a topic that has no sense.

I believe in heaven and hell…. However, that last part is a little tricky… and maybe we’ll get to that later.  Before anyone climbs on my back about any of this.. These are my beliefs.  They don’t require you to believe as I do, or even agree.  I’m just making a statement here, so as you know where I am coming from, religiously. 

Okay, where was I? Oh, yah…  young boy: 

My mutual acquaintances with death began at a very early age. I remember I was very young, but I think at least 9 or 10. My bedroom was just off from our kitchen area downstairs. I awoke to my father making terrible retching sounds in the other room. I rose from my warm bed and put on my rabbit slippers and shuffled into the kitchen.

There I saw my father bent over the sink and throwing up into the chrome kitchen sink. I can still hear the terrible sounds he made. He looked over and saw me looking at him (probably with wide saucer-eyes… because in them he was like Superman, Spiderman, Batman and Albert Einstein all wrapped into one) and he wiped his mouth with a handkerchief. Yes, men back then used those.

He spoke in a groggy voice that I shouldn’t be up and should get back to bed. I told him I was scared. He wiped his mouth again and I remember he smiled at me and then took me back to my bedroom and tucked me back into bed.

I asked him if he was going to die. “No, I’m not going to die. Well, someday I will. But not for a very very long time.”

That night I couldn’t sleep because I kept thinking my dad was going to die and leave me with my mother. You see my time with my dad was always short but nice. He was always doing stuff… fixing things; televisions, radios, the car in the back yard, the roof on the garage. But he was always away working. As you can tell, my dad was my favorite.

As things turned out he did die only a few years after this. I was 13.

And that year (my year of “death” as I called it, but it may have been more than one year) was a cruel one for sure. I had found our pet cat dead and frozen solid in our garage one of those cold winter mornings. My dog was run over by a truck while chasing me as I was crossing the busy main street in Reedsburg. And my pet hamster finally gave up the ghost after spinning in his wheel for 3 long (screeching) years.

After my dad, there was my Grandmother. Sweetest, gentlest, cooking-est, little Swedish lady you would have ever known. Then of course Danny. The very first close friend caught it coming home from a party in Loganville.  We were barely 16. He and another friend of mine hit the end of a bridge abutment on hilly highway 23 and nearly split the truck he was driving in half.  My other friend lived, but Danny did not.  I miss Danny even after all these years. 

Then it seems as if life sailed along, with me mostly involved in me. School.  Music. Guitars. Girls.  Marriage.  My son was born and then everything was all about him…and diapers… and formula…and babysitters….and toys…. And Christmas… 

We were all too busy growing up to worry about such life and death matters.  And it Seemed to me, that part passed by so fast.  As the old folks (such as myself) like to say, "in the wink of an eye."  

Then, invariably….  Death came knocking again. This time stronger. Closer. More insistent. Like an old wolf at the door, “I have left thee alone as thee hast wished… but now I must do my work.”

First there was Cindi… best friend of my wife (and if I were to be honest, one of mine too) lost in Mississippi, reportedly the victim of crime. I never could find out what happened to her. Then it was friends of friends. Then their parents. A car accident here. A little cancer there….

(To be continued)