So, around 1:20 of this afternoon was I at a hospital where I held the hand of man who was rapidly passing away.

Sometime after 1:30 was when he officially passed away. His wife was there, as were a few other members of the Church. My mom and I came by to visit, although we really didn’t expect our visit to end with us witnessing another person dying in a hospital bed.

They sang songs, godly songs, good songs. I didn’t really join in.

A lot of random thoughts and feelings flooded through me during that long period of time where, if I wasn’t holding the his hand, I was also trying to make the moment feel light by talking to a man on a life-support system about my intentions to work on the railroad, or about how I’m learning Piano, or about how much I disliked my Co-workers. REALLY leaned in on that one. I wanted to get away from Tosca, I said. And not have to deal with the pair of idiots who can’t get anything in their lives working right. Either because they are incredibly stupid and careless, or because their negligence in handling their business robs any justification over their grief about the system screwing them over.

Or how I’m watching a talking head on youtube vivisecting the Bible, you know, things like that. That doesn’t make me Atheist. I’m not really sure where I am spiritually. His Youtube handle is Mindshift. He’s very casually and graphically pummeling that book, every contradiction, every inconsistency, every falsity, rendering the entire point this belief system was built on to be garbage. Reality is here, Ron is gone, and we just deal with it. People die all the time.

I’m sad.

But, hey, if no afterlife then that just means’ good ol’ Ron is just wormfood now; he’s not alive, and he isn’t suffering anymore, he’s gone, after a decent grieving period, we just have to move on. But I’m delusional and would like to think there was somewhere after this life to go, so I could meet him again and say, “Hey! I learned piano! Wanna dance as I play? We could have fun.” All casual, as if he never really went away.

70-year-old Ron is as much a mystery to me as were many geriatrics at my church who’ve been around since I was just a toddler. I have been through this entire event 3 times in my life. I still can’t properly process the idea of death. I don’t know how to react to it properly.

After he died, I went back home with my mother, said “see you later” to my pastor and some of the other geriatrics from my church, and pondered dinner plans. Shrimp, Fish, and Tater Tots. Game plans: Apollo Justice Trilogy, I’m on the 2nd case. I sat on my parents bed, and after a few minutes, I started to cry a little, because I thought back to what it felt like holding Ron’s hand in his dying hour, as it rapidly lost much of its warmth. As he lay there, dying in front of me.

The fuck am I doing with my empty existence.