Words From the Dead to the Living

12: Names From the Wind

I was once living, like yourself. I once tastes the air of all those before me on my tongue; I once shared my breath with the trees. I drank from the rivers you drink from - the very same rivers your ancestors drank from millennia ago. I slept on the same earth, the soft golden ground, that now lays under metal and stone. The metal and stone that was placed upon it by the people you believe so right; so pure.

You see, I was once the same as you: I once believed that life was all there was, that Death had no place in the world. I thought that life was beauty, and that beauty was living. There is beauty in life. And yet, there is beauty in death, too.

One gray day I walked among the blades of grass that furnished my home. My toes tickled the tiny swaying dancers, as they sang the song of the wind. I lifted my head up to the clouds and waited for it to whisper the next name into my ear.

Mary Alison June. Alaska.

So I went to Alaska, and I unhooked Ms. June's oxygen tank. She had been alive, then, but she had not really been living for years.

Then there was George Stanton, an archaeologist who'd had half his body squashed in a rockslide in Egypt. I stopped his heart.

After that, little Lucie Charles from Paris slipped on the ice and cracked her skull. Her brain was swelling. I took away her pain.

Then Anne Darling finally passed from lung cancer. Then 110-year-old Charlie Manchester slipped away in his sleep. Then Aliyah Kabir fell down the stairs and broke her fall on a well-placed knife. Then John, then Linda, then Phillip and Mason and Martha --

And then, one day, the wind whispered my name.

I was scared. But I knew what had to be done, and I did it.

They were all living once, the people whose names were whispered by the wind, but none had much of a life ahead of them. So, I gave them a new chance, in the wonderful world they were so scared of passing into - that I was so scared of. They may not be alive now, but at least they are not suffering. At least we are not suffering.

So yes, I am obsessed with breeding death. And you? You are obsessed with preventing it.

But, as I sit in the shadows of this beautiful new world, I wonder which is truly the worse evil.