Dance of Life and Death

Chapter 3

After death, I didn't remember the names of the people I had loved. I barely even remembered my own, though my title and other names are lost to me. All I could remember was my death, the dress, and the name of the man who hurt me. I felt no fear or pain in being dead, no denial in my horrible end.

All I felt was a burning hatred when I first awoke, the name, "Lobelia" on my ghostly lips.

But I wasn't the only thing awake. 

Besides me, there was a weak cry. A baby, still red and unclean, was screaming on a metal table, and men and women in strange masks and gowns surrounded it. A sigh of relief seemed to pass through the room, and I couldn't help but be confused. Where was the child's mother? Why was she surrounded by these people?

I learned later, by observing the father who received the small baby, weeping pathetically, that the mother had not survived child birth and her daughter had almost followed her to the realm of the dead. I saw body in a room we passed, being covered by an impossibly white sheet, and her ghost looking at the strangely small body hidden underneath. She was crying, her head in her hands, but she looked up at me and the father and child as we passed, a gentle peace overcoming her features.

"Take care of her, will you?" she said, before ascending, an apparition of blinding white light. 

I was so confused.

I looked down at the little girl, feeling tied to her being, pulled along by invisible threads. I had wanted a child when I was still alive, I thought, the weird idea presenting itself to my mind. But it seemed so rushed, so empty. I hardly had any time to know what was happening before I was asked to do something undeniably important to the future of this child, and it seemed overwhelming. I didn't even know these people!

But as I stared down into the little container they had put her in, I felt a sort of affection for the pathetic thing so overpowering that I began to sob for her and her tragic beginning, for a future she wouldn't get to have because it was stolen from her.

And as I cried for her, I realized that I was also crying for myself.

And I wasn't angry anymore.