Gma is dying. She lies there in the bed with her knees pulled up so the blanket will cover the whole of her from toes to chin. Meanwhile, her skin is falling off. It falls and falls until her bed is surrounded in ... petals.

The cancer she has is rare and enigmatic. The way it looks to me, the mutated cells undermine the integrity of the organ until the skin’s structure collapses. If it keeps going like this, she won’t have any left. Each day she looks more and more like a burn victim. Already, large bare patches of flesh siphon life’s liquid from her. She’s drying up.

Every family member I encounter says that no one deserves to die like this and each time I hear it I fail to understand deserving, earning, or the implication of any kind of control over death. I want to reply each time, "This is what death looks like." But I don’t. We all have self-denial. It’s hard enough dealing with my shit: not wanting her to go, not wanting her to suffer another minute. Setting her free means never seeing her again. I expect she’s about in the same spot: wanting out, not wanting to say goodbye. That’s what it looks like anyway.

While gma was using the bathroom, I went to the lounge to eat the salad I bought on the way in. A wheelchaired man rolled into the kitchen and I turned to notice him at the sound of a pear dropping onto the floor. A fresh amputation scar stared back at me from the blunt end of his thigh. The other leg, purple and fleshy, looked about ready to go, too. I suddenly wanted to vomit, so I looked away and tried not to imagine that the taste of the salad was the same taste as the skin swollen around that scar. I forced my head to stay down, avoiding not even contact but mere acknowledgment as he pulled up to the table next to mine and ate something he had managed to extract from the kitchen.

I never have to see it; I never have to see the acute symptoms of her deterioration; I never have to incorporate it into my daily work, my routine, my muscle memory. My body remains uninoculated with death.

Life burgeons as death contracts. The disparity strains and aches.

When someone shows signs of the human condition, we lock them away to veil ourselves from the ineluctable slide toward the same end. We live blindly surrounded and mirrored by ... fake plastic trees (that song).

But don’t we all know all of that already?