What Are Death's Harbingers? Poem by Denis Mair

(for a question posed by Galina Italyanskaya*)
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I wrote a poem inspired by a picture of a man plunging down among falling leaves.**

I couched my take on mortality in terms of fading pigments and objective markers of passing.

Galina's comment gently calls for an answer in the native language of the heart:

She wrote: *'I wonder how people determine that their time is running out. Is this really some kind of inner knowledge, or just a suggestion caused by the usual course of things around (us) ? '

I think this knowledge is parallel to appetite. There are many clocks and cues that announce hunger:

sensors of glucose in the hindbrain, nerves to feel the empty flex of peristalsis, but also some that aren't so visceral.

The comfort of ingestion brings a warm glow because we link it to care and nurturance,

such that when it tapers off, we feel the specter of cold isolation, like a bell prompting us to call for more.

For some infants, cold abandonment may be a baseline state, which lends piercing urgency to calls for nourishment.

We learn to desensitize the baseline, but the urgent twinge to call for care through food remains.

The sense of our span dwindling may also come from visceral cues: encroaching weakness feels like a dark shadow-body growing within.

On top of that are reports of death freighted with horror, and our time spent with loved ones who are surrendering to death.

These things soak in to become assumptions applied to our own story. Philosophers say our very sense of existence is constituted by a looming encounter with nothingness.

The emotional beatings we take may crumple us, to the point that we extrapolate a mental picture of a burnt-out cinder

But most inward of all is our aversion to small and large states of loneliness. The small loneliness of not receiving care is a trauma known to all.

Our restless minds are good at heaping up small states; in reflection we rehearse the things we hope to avoid..

Little bricks of loneliness build up fear of an inferred big loneliness. Yet there are those who master fear of loneliness.

If we enter death with fear, we feel ourselves forever being cut off from giving and receiving care.