Lies Beyond - Staring Back At Death

Do you remember the first time Death pointed his bony finger at you?

I’m not talking merely about feeling the chill of his shadow as he drifts by to take your mailman, or your fourth cousin five times removed, or your great-great grandma’s neighbor’s best friend; I’m talking about direct eye contact, about knowing that he is there, that he is real, and that one day—probably far sooner than you’d like or expect—he’s coming for you.

I first really saw the cold, blue fire of Death’s stare on the twenty-fifth day of March, in the year 2014, when I was seventeen years old. He was there in the sky that morning, bringing a gray bleakness to the cold, late-March day. He was there during first period, hiding behind a feeling that something was off that I simply couldn’t shake. He was there behind Ms. A. as she called me out of sixth period, his cold smile beginning to spread as my heart dropped into my stomach (my first thought was that he had taken my father; after all, though chemistry wasn’t exactly my strong suit, getting called out of any class unexpectedly is almost never a good thing). He was there behind the school counselor as she, tears falling silently from her eyes, shared with me and a few other assembled friends that my childhood best friend, a kid with whom I had walked home countless times, with whom I had played hours of halo, with whom I had shot (and missed) thousands of baskets, had passed away last night. I didn’t see his eyes just then; no, for a moment I was in a daze, and couldn’t believe what I was looking at. It took a few minutes before the temporary veil of self-delusion and shock fell, and as my mother escorted me out of the building, telling me that everything would be alright, I slammed my binder into the front door in my exit, screaming that everything wouldn’t be okay, that everything couldn’t be okay, because it was then that I saw Death, capital D; not death that we hear about on the news, not death that we see from a distance as a relative we hardly know passes, but Death that was real, that was present, and that was moving ever closer to me and those I held dearest.

All the more horrible, all the harder to process was the way that my friend died. It wasn’t an accident; it wasn’t drugs or fast driving or even suicide: no, it was an aneurism, one of the more quiet, unassuming weapons in Death’s endless arsenal. One day, he was there, healthy, happy. The next, BOOM, gone without a trace, a mini-explosion in the brain leaving behind the mere shell of the kid I had known and completely altering the course of his family’s story (and, in a far less visceral, but still very real way, mine, as well) forever.

There hasn’t been a day since that Death hasn’t, in some way, been on my mind.

I can remember sitting at my kitchen table one night shortly after the funeral, talking about my friend’s death with my mom and collapsing into an uncontrollable fit of shaking and weeping as I understood in a real, meaningful, existential way for the first time in my short life that anyone can go at any time. I realized in that moment that there is no circle around me and my closest loved ones that death could not penetrate; that we were not the main characters in a movie who simply couldn’t die, and that, unlike a movie, there was often no detectable rhyme or reason to such tragedies, no long train of interconnected events that, one day, we could all hold hands and look upon as we shed brave, quiet tears because we found out, as the credits rolled, that my childhood best friend’s organs had saved the life of the man who was to some day cure cancer, thus saving the lives of millions more, or that his younger brother was motivated by his death to invent some new screening machine that could detect aneurysms before they became a problem.

His death rocked my world, but such stories are far from rare or monumental among mankind. Even more common are stories of deaths that come by more “honestly,” if you want to put it that way—those by heart attack, cancer, disease, natural disaster, poisoning, et cetera—all those ones that you hear about, all those ones that you expect. Death is the common denominator of all living things, the great equalizer, that one nasty habit that we who live simply cannot seem to kick; thus, if we are to live life fully, we must do so en coram mortis, before the face of death. Or, I guess I should say, we must acknowledge that we are doing so, as all of us are, anyway, regardless of acknowledgment.

Writing stories like the ones in Lies Beyond is one of the ways I acknowledge death. To me, writing (and reading) such things in the light of loss is akin to the light prodding your tongue does after a rotted tooth has been removed; simply getting used to the gap, the presence of absence where something importance once was, seeing if it still stings. It does… but less than when I was simply trying to ignore it or run from it by means of all earthly distraction.

Simply put, Lies Beyond is a collection of stories that deal, in some regard, with Death, that old, faithful foe of mankind.

Some of the stories are about facing it; some are about fighting it; some are about accepting it; and some are about transgressing it. But all of them are, ultimately, if you want to put it bluntly, exactly what the second meaning of the title implies: lies. One of the main reasons that death has captivated us as a species is not only its prevalence and constancy, but its mystery. People have been to outer space. We’ve been the ocean’s depths and back. We’ve seen pretty much all of the land there is to see on this old earth. But no one has gone beyond the wall of death and come back, proof in hand, of what lies beyond. We have no footage, no flag waving proudly in that over-populated wasteland, no travelers sharing their experience on social media; all we have are stories, like the ones you will find in this collection.

So won’t you join me and stare back at Death a little? Won’t you look past that pointing bone of a finger and into those cold, black holes of his eyes, and see what they might betray? Won’t you take a journey with me and see what lies beyond?

This collection will be released in late November, and I hope you’re ready for it.

I know I’m dying for you to dig in.

Josiah Furcinitti