Death

I have an idea for a scene, or a sequence. Danny comes to face death. Whether because he's in a coma, or because death is otherwise a presence in the family, I'm not sure. But he is brought to the door of death: the threshold beyond which he will come face-to-face with this greatest terror of all.

Needless to say, he is terrified. The fear is a living thing, a black wing around him, a night without stars or moon. A great hollow sound, the roar of an unseen and unimaginable creature.

It takes all his courage to agree to cross the threshold. But he does it, inspired perhaps by a fear even greater: a fear for his family, his mother and/or father, perhaps a sibling.

In the scene I've imagined thus far, he passes through this terrible door and finds himself in an ordinary room. A clock ticks on the mantlepiece. A table is laid ready for tea, flanked by two or three dining chairs. (I imagine it a rather Victorian or Edwardian room, but I couldn't say why.) There is sunlight at the windows. There are bookshelves filled with books waiting to be read. There's a side table with a lamp, and a single wooden chair against the wall.

He stands, terrified, waiting for death to arrive. Surely at any moment some slavering thing will burst into the room, or a silent, black-cloaked wraith will materialise before him?

Nothing happens.

Nothing happens.

"Where is it?" he asks. "Where's death?"

"It's here," says his companion, or guide (still got to figure that one out!)

"No, it's not. I can't see it. Where is it?"

He is pointed towards the chair by the wall. A chair so ordinary and dull you wouldn't notice if it was there, or if it disappeared. Danny stares at it, trying to divine what terrible mysterious force might be held within it. Perhaps if one sits on it, death comes screaming up from the underworld to claim your soul?

No: it's just a chair. Part of the furniture. Ever-present, but utterly ordinary. So unremarkable, in fact, that it's almost laughable how people allow it to overcome so much of their lives. In the whole room, which offers so many other interesting items – books, food and drink, comfort – why on earth would anyone obsess about this small, unremarkable thing; this irrelevance?

It is not death that is terrible, but the fear of death. It's not the chair that matters, it's the room. Life is the point, not death. It's something human beings have got wrong for so long – even to the point of creating entire religions focused on death. Danny is lucky: he is shown how wrong this is early in life.