Island of the Dead 1880 – Arnold Böcklin (Swiss)

He died four hours ago in bed at home. I don’t know how such little time has passed because enough thoughts have passed through my head to last me days of contemplation and analyzation. This happens while the moments replay in my head. Nothing really happened, but each moment I thought of was like a repeated still life picture.

In the morning, my husband woke up feeling warmer than usual for a September morning. He expressed this to me over tea and breakfast and I asked him how he slept. He said not very well. I told him to get more rest and he was reluctant to take my advice, doing that thing where he wants to be dominant and always right and a manly man, but he gave in after I promised I could do the Sunday’s work for him to help him out.

I went in and checked on him an hour or so later and he was sound asleep. So at rest that he was absolutely still aside from his rising and falling stomach with deep inhales and exhales. Another hour later, beads of sweat had formed scattered on his forehead and upper lip. I went in with a damp cloth and laid it over his eyes. Yet another hour past and the pillow had been dampened and his hair was clinging to his face, yet his breathing remained constant. I went along doing the housework but I was bothered and so I rang the doctor.

He arrived in forty minutes and went in the bedroom to see my husband. He took his temperature and conducted some other tests. (I am not familiar with doctors and checkups and patients. I usually rely on home remedies or time to heal but today I had a strange feeling of extreme nervousness and anxiety.) He exited the room about twenty minutes later and escorted me out as I was standing in the threshold looking in, my heart beating. The doctor told me nothing was wrong, he was probably just overworked and I could not argue because he worked hard to sustain our family lifestyle and I did not always supervise the amount of energy he exerted. The doctor left with his medical kit and I sat down at the kitchen table with my head in my hands.

I awoke some time later to a faint grunting sound with rustling noises and I remembered my husband. I walked briskly into the bedroom and saw him moving around in the bedsheets, still sleeping, yet with an uncomfortable expression. A moment later he stopped, but he was not calm as he was before. It was dark outside and I felt so peculiar as to believe that the darkness had come in through the window and seeped into my husband there in his bed. Then I realized he was completely still and had stopped breathing. I went into a state of shock because I didn’t know what was real or true but I knew that it had happened and I had to move quickly.

I quickly wrapped him in the white sheet he was laying on and lugged him out into the canoe in our backyard through the back door, that we kept there when any of our family member’s time had come. The transport to the lake was a blur but I made it in a cold sweat and with mindless muscle strain. I never thought it would be me doing the burial at this historical and generational plot, in fact, I never thought about who it would be at all, I never thought about death and dying. I rowed the boat as the orange mountainous island gradually grew from a hill into a massive mound. I don’t know why but all the nervousness had faded from me. I knew exactly where to go, what to do, and how to conduct the burial and mourning ceremony. When it was all done, I sat in the boat ashore with my feet in the shallow water thinking about how one day, more likely soon, I would be lying next to my husband on the Island of the Dead.