Death
Death is the final question (or the final answer) to life. The absence of life, of movement, of love; the great mystery.
I was raised by parents who courted death - military pilots. My father was a combat pilot who dealt out death in WWII, and afterwards he was part of the death machine poised to kill anything and everything. My father was a wing commander in California of Jet interceptors which were poised to defend the home land against attacks. He bailed out of an airplane that had a flame out, the engine quit, over Albuquerque. He experienced other death defying events in the war. My mother liked to fly loop de loops. She was always doing dangerous stuff. She used to pick up hitch-kickers including a bank robber.
In my youth I lived in Germany, and we visited the concentration camp of Dachau where I smelled death for the first time. God knows why my mother talked of lampshades made of human skin to me. She used to sing me lullabies about little soldiers going to sleep after playing soldier. We lived under the threat of a first strike; where ever we lived. We would be the first to be hit in a nuclear war. We lived with death.
Later in life I remember the first dead body I saw of a man drowned in the Rhine river. I watched my grandfather die.
I went into medicine where I had to carve up human cadavers. I studied life and death.
For our studies we visited the morgue where I saw a sex worker who had a red dot in the middle of her pretty face where a 22 had entered to end her life. I have watched operations, blood flowing out of live people, and watched surgeons operate on hearts. I have illustrated hundreds of surgical operations.
I am familiar with death. I have been close to death many times…
