Worst Fear - Craig Kirchner
My granddaughter, in the 8th grade, said she needed to ask me a question as part of a school project. What are your three worst fears? My mind jumped immediately to rats. I’m freaked out by rats, but seconds later I realized that Grandma dying first was my worst fear. For the purposes of the school project, and my granddaughter’s peace of mind, I stuck with the rats and heights, etc. - but I am struck by the dynamic of alone and the realization that I’ve never been there. I should have realized that mortality had also become a serious issue with her when we started spending hours filling trash bags inspired by the Swedish Death Cleaning obsession. Who would I touch, who would touch me, talk to me, care? Fifty years of mind-meld gone. The debacle could be around the next corner, at the next stop sign. The real grief is not having anyone to grieve with.
Turns out, not long after all these grueling epiphanies, the situation is resolved. I go first. First and fast, trying to play golf in 95-degree heat, A-fib says let’s explode. I was hitting a seven iron in the 10th fairway and then I wasn’t.
I did the tunnel to the bright light thing and then woke up here without a body. It’s not like opening eyes, it’s going from a dark coma to acute awareness. In fact, it appears there is no body, just ashes and dust in an urn on a table next to dozens of pictures, flashbacks of family, friends, having hair, and first car, ‘Dreamboat’. This had been conveyed for years - cremation, no religious service, no mourning, just a gathering, a celebration of sorts. The event is magnificent, as is the vantage point, lounging on the chandelier, gazing at the group below; interestingly not caring what they’re saying but being amused by some of the better stories.
Hovering here, as the party winds down, there is an increasingly tentative curiosity about what happens when the final attendee leaves and they lock the doors. When I first woke there didn’t seem to be any affiliation between this new consciousness and the urn. The privilege to serve as investigative reporter at my wake and the ashes (the only physical remains) did not seem connected. But now there is this realization that the urn and the table of remembrances are directly below my station here on the chandelier. Maybe there is a total association and when the urn goes home with Dee, this mindfulness placed carefully on the mantelpiece becomes a hovering guardian angel which could have easily been a last wish. Of course, and this would be disastrous, there is the possibility she puts it in the top of the linen closet with her father’s dust.
A more likely probability is being spread under a large, healthy tree somewhere. That is when the “What’s next?” question would really begin to be answered. Perhaps at that point purgatory is over. There is ascension or descension, as it were, or a dissolving into the soil and osmosed by the xylem of the tree of choice to be reincarnated as an acorn, eaten by a squirrel or ultimately to become a tall oak. It could be too that anywhere along the way there is a recall; this cognizance would certainly be easy to find.
There is about an hour to go, and no one has touched the urn or mentioned the ashes except the former priest at the local parish, now married to one of the neighborhood girls. He was like a father, no pun intended, to all the guys through the teen years. He was expressing his curiosity about whether I requested the cremation, suggesting that burial of the body is the best way “to express faith and hope in the resurrection of the body.” He’s not telling this to Dee but whispering it to his wife. As he continues with the story, the Church’s viewpoint, there is a terrible realization that if there is a box instead of an urn planted in Holy Redeemer with my father and grandfather, this awareness could be wafting in the dark damp confines of a mid-priced casket. Would these extra innings then be an eternal confinement in dirt? A quick recall of the worst fears interview included Dee going first, a savage attack by rats and being buried alive.
The whole concept of Heaven and Hell never resonated much with me and hasn’t been cleared up just yet, but the locked up six-feet-under-cognition for as long as one can imagine is a scenario that seems to qualify as well as any, as the latter.
Originally published by Moria, May 2024
Craig Kirchner loves the aesthetics of writing, has a book of poetry, Roomful of Navels, and has been nominated three times for a Pushcart. He has been published in Chiron Review, Abraxas, Bulb Culture, Main Street Rag and more than 100 others. He houses 500 books in his office and about 400 poems on a laptop; these words help keep him straight. Craig can be found at Bluesky
