What does death mean?

It's not a question I get often. It's a weird question, usually put forward by unusual people.

Death herself says that death means equality. King and serf, president and prisoner, all come to an end. Not the end, but an end.

It's just a weird thing to ask.

******

Everyone simply called him The Mill. He demanded no title, fashioning himself as a humble servant…this while he sent young men to blow themselves to pieces in his name. He would guide his people to unerring truth, he claimed, as he shaped their reality to his benefit.

He was despised and worshipped in life. In my Civic, however, he would receive the same treatment as everyone else. That seemed to chafe him.

"It's not fair," Mill said. His voice dripped with the contempt of a man who felt he was owed the world.  He wasn't talking about dying, so much as the way he had died. Like his predecessors, he had been felled by Hellfire. An American drone, flying too high to be seen with the naked eye, had turned its demon gaze upon him and opened its talons.

In a way, it was flattering. It had taken a team of devils on the other side of the world and a multimillion dollar monstrosity to do him in.  Satan incarnate had deemed him a high enough threat to justify an assassination. Not a murder. The difference was profound.

But he was not just a fanatic. He was also a man, and the idea of dying without being able to put up a fight was repulsive. No God or devil could dispel the irritation at having been denied his only natural right.

So here he was, at the gates of the enemy. And then, inside the gates of the enemy. He beheld the perch from which the monsters took wing…

Which was to say, we were now sitting in the parking lot outside Creech AFB's flightline. It was empty; just nothing to do this weekend. Nothing moved, except a few enterprising scorpions and expanding tumbleweeds.

"It's not fair" meant "My enemy should be here so that I can spit in their face one last time." 

I had nothing to say to any of this. Hardly any of it was him. A childhood filled with borderline torture and all-encompassing indoctrination had erased him before he could come into his own.

And then he had carried on in that tradition.

He couldn't get out of the car. I don't mean that I kept him in here; I meant that this car was the last place he would ever be.

"They should be in this car with me," Mill said, scowling. His long beard wrinkled into itself.

"Everyone gets their own ride," I said.

"Then I hope they are your next passengers," He said hatefully.

"They may be."

"I wish I could have seen the ones I sent to you. Were they terrified?"

"Yes. But not of you."

This seemed to shock him. He stared at me for a few seconds too long, clearly bewildered and angry.

"What could they fear more than damnation?" He said, more loudly than he needed to.

"Most of them don't believe they're headed to damnation, to begin with," I replied.

"This I know. They rejected the true path."

I ignored this. It was a fool's errand to try to talk a fanatic out of a belief they held so deeply.

"So…what, then? What do they fear?" Mill asked.

"It's never exactly the same thing," I said, wiggling the knob for the air conditioner (it had to be in just the right position for the system to work), "But mostly, it's who or what they leave behind." This was a bad time to have a hot flash.

"Bah! Earthly treasures. Worth nothing, compared to what lies beyond."

He wanted me to ask. He wanted to share his joy. He wanted to tell me what he believed he'd earned.

I'd humor him; no harm in it.

"And what, pray tell, lies beyond?" I said, perfectly mimicking genuine curiosity, as if I didn't already know everything he had surrounded his mind with.

His grin was wide, like a child discovering he was being taken to a candy store.

"Riches. Glory. All the pleasures I denied myself to better serve God," He said. I glimpsed the specific pleasures he was referring to. They did not meet his definition of "pure," and he had definitely indulged in those pleasures in life. His station above the destitute villagers he ruled had come with its perks.

There was no point in explaining to him the difference between knowledge and belief. I had met plenty of men and women of faith over the years. Excusing the strokes that are far too broad, there are two brands of faith: the one that sees, and the one that blinds itself.

Those who practice faith that sees allow themselves to live in the world they exist in. The ancient texts and holy scrolls could be flawed and mistranslated, they realize. They humble themselves to acknowledge they can't fully know the mind of their god.

Those who practice the faith that blinds itself, on the other hand, see the sinful world around them as a test. There is only one path that they must follow. That all must follow. 

Or at least, that was how Death described it. She always was a bit dramatic like that.

There was some truth to what she said, though I wouldn't have described people like Mill as having blinded themselves. They clearly saw the world; they had to see it, so that they could beat their followers into denying it.

It was more accurate to call that path "separation." They know how alienated they were from the world; it was intentional, and a source of pride. Even as they indulged themselves in the sin that they decried, they declared themselves forgiven. Their favor and forgiveness from God practically entitled them to such pleasures.

Which meant that Mill and I wouldn't be having a conversation. We'd talk, sure, but you can't connect with someone who demands that the whole of existence be filtered through something that completely controls their life, not unless that thing controls you too.

******

He stared at the empty runway for a long time. The glorious rage that had thrilled him into a twisted ecstasy had tapered, but just as it had in life, it didn't completely go away.

I could have stayed quiet like this until he disappeared. Silence didn't bother me. He was not so content to sit still, however. He needed to be bringing people to God, one way or the other, but that wouldn't happen here. And since that was his life, his one and only aim, when the whole faith was precluded, only dead time remained.

There was plenty we could have talked about. We could have discussed the pain of the branding his father had given him when he had been discovered pleasuring himself as a teenager. I could have brought him to a place where he could revel in the joy of his first child: a son, whom he had called God's greatest Earthly gift. We could have returned to the simple, profound comfort of being among friends, the relief that finally came with being in the company of equals, rather than beneath a domineering superior. 

Even killers, rapists and thieves who stole everything people had, had their moments of humanity. They may have never offered that humanity to others in kindness when they had the power to do so, but there were always threads that connected them to the people they mistreated. They were human, even if they denied that part of themselves. It could never be entirely purged.

But it could be suppressed, made to hibernate until the end.

"I wish I could see the beasts fly," Mill said. He didn't say, "...so I could pick up one of the stones beneath me and hurl it into its engine."

"Not today," I said, feigning sympathetic disappointment.

Even here, in the heart of the dragon's lair that he longed to spit upon, he couldn't be happy. There was no true pleasure in anything he had done in his adult life. He had been a ruler, a prophet, or an abusive father for nearly every moment of his life, and had considered any deviation on his part to be an anomaly. Everything, from the mundane to the massacre, was duty.

He had fooled himself into thinking the tension in his heart was the true joy. He had worked for that. The things that came naturally were distractions.

******

Mill didn't know that he didn't want to die. 

Without knowing it, he had forbidden himself from experiencing either the fear of - or the desire for - death. Such a thing wasn't even possible, but like he did for so many other human thoughts and emotions, he had translated them through the language of the holy commands.

Truth be told, there were attractive qualities to a life of such fervent faith. One never had to worry if the whole world seemed to be spinning out of control. God had a plan, and you "knew" you were part of it. Uncertainty was unpleasant, and the opposite was also true. When the world was so small and so narrow, when what you were commanded to feel was what you couldn't help but feel anyhow, what was there to fear? What was there to grieve?

The fearlessness was a facade, of course, but it was durable. How did I know?

Well, if he really did want to die, he wouldn't still be here, for one. Everyone finished the ride when they were ready.

******

Mill. Aged 50, killed by a pinpoint Hellfire missile strike from an MQ-9 Reaper. His two wives and nine children were unharmed.

In the end, there really was nothing to say. Me and my Civic hadn't been part of his god's plan. When he couldn't force his mind to make it so that I was, I became nothing to him. It was the only thing left for me to be. 

I would have pitied him, but I knew that wasn't what he wanted, or what he would respond to. So I just let him be, as long as he would be.

What does death mean?

For Mill, it meant completion. Death had been a finish line. On the other side, he would no longer struggle beneath his god's demands. Death meant that he could leave a world he had been taught to view as nothing more than a pit of forbidden debauchery. God was finished with him here, and to Mill, that was how it was supposed to happen.

Only the true believers are capable of viewing their lives this way. Everyone else would live in the shadow of doubt.

But shade wasn't always a bad thing.