Musings of a Dying God
Today was a day much like any other. It began with a sunrise and a weather report, ended with a sunset and the evening news. There was nothing remarkable about the traffic or work. No disasters or shootings either. The only thing separating today from tomorrow was a small number and title on a calendar, and the passing of a God.
This god was, as it turns out, not particularly unusual either; at least no more so than the day had proven itself to be. He had come into being very slowly at first. The product of a single life and belief. Yet with each passing moment the faith grew, as did the followers, until there stood a being composed of trillions. Sparks which coalesced into a raging fire of existence and a consciousness unfathomable to any of whom were part of it. His will was both grand and absolute, and his path was The Path. His parents called him Joeseph.
Joeseph Mina was, however, quite unaware of his own divinity. The world around him seemed to be quite unaware as well. He went to school with all the other boys his age. And fell asleep with gum in his hair on the long drive home from a vacation. He got sick, got better, got married, and got a degree. He was of course an inquisitive God, and science had long proven itself to be his specialty. As gods go, he was quite content.
But today Joeseph lies in a bed. The bed lies in a room, which lies in a hospital, which lies on 6th and Francias. The cause was not some grand accident, or anything very sudden. Instead it was his body itself; an auto-immune disease is what the doctors had called it. It seems that while Joeseph had lived his life quite contently, his followers had not: They quarreled amongst themselves, both violent and blind. His own blood attacked his flesh, swelling his skin and decimating his organs. While Joeseph thought he had a cold, his lungs were scarring and swelling. By the time he was correctly diagnosed, the damage had been done. His white cells could be killed, but it wouldn’t save his failing organs. Nor would such a war-torn vessel survive surgery. It was enough to simply state that God was terminal.
It was while he lay in a bed full of time and lost promise that Joeseph became truly aware: where before he had seen only one he now saw many, that through those many he was able to become one. Each cell in his body was a life of its own, a life that had entrusted itself to a greater whole for its own survival. It had no thought to speak of, no will to move it. And yet it lived and moved, bonded and multiplied, changed itself countless times until it became flesh and bone -- until it became Joeseph. They created their own god, a bonfire of invested directive, a blaze of life and thought. Joeseph imagined how they must have reacted to a wound, sending in relief and patching a cut. Telling themselves it was all part of God’s plan, never to know Joeseph had merely stumbled. And now here he lies hemorrhaging his way to the end, the victim of his personal civil unrest.
He’d never know what caused the war which ended him, whether it was lost faith or a misplaced protein. Perhaps a neuron with a tall hat had declared all cells equal, or another had blamed the current slump on inferior organs. Maybe his very first follower made a simple mistake when dividing, and their fated ruin imprinted itself in his genome. But it all became very unimportant as Joeseph’s family gathered around him. One by one each spring wound down and each gear ground to a silent halt. The rise and fall of his chest grew shallow and the steady rhythm of his heart gave way to silence. His breathe became air as a man became a body. And Joeseph Mina, son and father, Life and Mechanism, Man and God, Died.
