Soon a man will stand over you, gowned and hooded. In time the man will take up a knife and crack open your flesh like a ripe melon. Fingers will rummage among your viscera. Parts of you will be cut out. Blood will run free. Your blood. All the night before you have turned with the presentiment of death upon you. You have attended your funeral, wept with your mourners. You think, “I should never have had surgery in the springtime.” It is too cruel.
Now it is time. You are wheeled in and moved to the table. An injection is given. “Let yourself go,” I say, “It’s a pleasant sensation.” “Give in,” I say, “It’s a pleasant sensation.”
Let go? Give in? When you know that you are being tricked into the hereafter, that you will end when consciousness ends? As the monstrous silence of anesthesia falls discourteously across your brain, you watch your soul drift off.