“There’s a lesion on your cervix,”
she hears, in a PAP smear detached reverie.

“A lesion?” she says. “That’s not good.”
And, flashes on thoughts of Gilda Radner.

Oddly enough, sitting in the waiting room,
she had seen, on TV, a breakthrough
in cervical cancer research.

She thinks of how painful dying
from cancer is, and she cringes,
inwardly,
away from the lesion, but,
where is she going to go?

When she was a girl, she died a thousand deaths,
through the characters in her books, and movies
and imagination. Clean deaths, hero’s deaths…

As she became educated in death, she became
determined to die peacefully.

Now, she doesn’t know how she will die.

She got to thinking, as she lie awake on her bed,
as she tried to nap, how often she had thought in her life
of dying, not of living, of dying. And, how others do too.
Of a sudden, it seemed to her, we know something
about death, those of us who think about it; something
calming, something – elusive.

What she thinks is we know death is another ‘life’,
just as life is another ‘death’. A continuous circle,
which, until triangulated, never ceases, it’s real name
is Repetition…

She is not afraid of death, anymore,
but, she is afraid of Repetition.

She is afraid of Eternal Pain.

She is afraid
of Hell.

Erin Elizabeth Kelly-Moen
© Copyright 10/6/05