No One Needs to Know How You Died

No One Needs to Know How You Died.

Z. Ignacio

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Oshawa always hated the idea of dying in a hospital bed. He… was selfish, but had every right to be. I mean, who would be around him to experience his last moments when he died? Well, nobody, obviously. 

Though the sun was gracious and eager to greet him through the window, Oshawa’s eyes creaked with a tiresome labour (similar to the sounds of his bed’s rotting wooden foundation) to meet its face too. His parents were dead. Detroit-as it always was-was in poverty, neglected from economic assistance and availability. He had nothing. Even his home was crumbling. It wasn’t even a place he owned, obviously. It’s one of many abandoned buildings he could take shelter in in the year 2050. He had to get around all the time. Luckily, most people didn’t pay attention to a homeless person. Nobody even bothers to help out a begar, so why help them out at all? Besides, what good would a couple coins do? Maybe buy some mouthwash to get drunk from. He didn’t need the money, but he still wanted something.

Oshawa tried to get up, but the pressure of his body on the bed caused it to surrender to its final limits. It broke, letting Oshawa’s body sink like he was going down into a whirlpool. He sat there, embellishing a groan expressive of the inconvenience.

He got out the house in rags. He was like, what, thirty? Yeah, thirty. His parents were Gen-Z. He grew up in poverty, obviously. And now they were dead. He’s quit the weed, the cocaine, the heroine and all the other things. At least that’s what he believes. Oshawa still has withdrawals though. And he wishes he didn’t have to. Today was another day of dumpster diving-which, of course, was illegal-but luckily he didn’t even have a phone to get tracked on. The entire world’s been in a stalemate; The entire world’s a surveillance state; And technology is your greatest tracking point. All he had to do was break cameras that struggled to be financed in this shitty, crumbling economy, in the places where he needed to, or otherwise keep out of camera’s view, or covering up under his rags. Down another alleyway, he pulled out a shank and chased down the first rat he’d seen.

After a good meal by a fire he stoked-hazardousely-in an abandoned building, he went by to a lake in a swamp (not the most sanitary source of water), bathed, found some random poor bloke, dragged him into an alleyway, stabbed him and put on his clothes. You didn’t have to be really careful anymore with who you killed. Most people tried to defend the system but to no avail. You’re not important till you have a lot of money. So, yeah, he was dead, and now Oshawa had a fresh set of clothes-a hoodie and jeans-which would be perfect enough to get back into the library.

He liked to go there a lot and spend time at his 9-5 applying for jobs on indeed. He… of course, like anyone else in this economy, got fucking nothing. Until he saw a specific news posting. (He also liked to study geopolitics as a hobby). “Ukraine war [yada yada yada]”, doesn’t matter, it’s all the same news at the end of the day. However, at that point, Oshawa was really contemplating. What did this world give him? Nothing. No hard work got him anywhere. You had to play the game, and to beat it, you had to cheat. But… he wasn’t so sure if he was ready to take on this kind of thing.

“Uhh… hey, Roland?”

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“Can I be honest with you about something?” Oshawa told him. They were talking in a shitty, rusting Toyota echo wreck that was one of their favourite hangout spots. He was in rags too.

“What is it you wanna be honest about?” Roland also shared in Oshawa’s interest in geopolitics. In fact, he knew more than him. Actually, he was a convert to the Islamic religion, though he was really shitty at being religious.

“I’m thinking about going to Ukraine.” … I think you could imagine this to be a heavy moment. I mean, Roland was like the only person who understood him, who understood how much their parents-and the people of the previous generation-were stupid; How little they cared in bringing any meaning into their lives at all.

“No-”

“It’s just that-”

“What? What is it? You just wanna throw away your goddamn life to be a trench rat in a corporate war that was never even yours?”

“What other FUCKING CHOICE DO I HAVE!” Oshawa yelled amongst the rising commotion of increasingly screeching rusted metal parts in their seats, as both of them banged on the wreckage with their hands, and both of their voices rising like the sounds of soldiers screaming at each other in a warzone. “What other choice do I have?”

“There are better ways-”

“There aren’t better ways! There’s just nothing-”

“God fucking damnit! Are you kidding me? Do you have any idea what you’re saying? The kind of war you’re going into?”...

…

The rain… as it were already present as they were sheltering in the car, increased its flood all the more. The silent moment filled with the voice of droplets bombarding the rusted chassis of cars in the junkyard.

“Why do you wanna go?” Roland asked him.

“I don’t know, I… there’s just nothing here.”

… “There’s just nothing better out there either, just… more violence. Louder too.”

… “How much do you think a soldier gets paid?-”

“Stop thinking about money.”

“I can only ever think about money-”

“Stop FUCKING thinking about that!”... … … “You’re a slave to it.”

“Aren’t we all?”

“You as well should just get used to living poor. Why should you sell your life to it?”

…

….

….. And then Oshawa said: “I’m not doing it for money.”

The war kept getting supplemented by fake printed American dollars. It didn’t matter how much money the dollar lost, as long as it was backed by blood. And Oshawa was already there. He woke up from the dream he had at home, wondering exactly why he came here. I didn’t do it for money. Then what was it for? He wasn’t even Ukrainian. His parents were Filipino immigrants, and that country was already ravaged by wars. It’s like he thought he had to experience it again. Why?

His brain played a trick on him in his slumber. The rain wasn’t rain, but bullets and bombs blasting dirt around in the trenches. And he wasn’t really sleeping, he was unconscious. Already, he heard English, Ukrainian, and Russian screams in the trenches as his position was being stormed. It was like World War 1 all over again, with trench charges-just now with drones. He dug his bleeding leg out of dirt. He couldn’t feel the pain, but the limb was flayed by shrapnel; not even the squeeze of a tourniquet (as he applied it like muscle memory) could stark his nerves again. He got up, limping, wielding a Russian’s black Ak-74m. He picked it up off of the severed arm that was still grasping it. The arm was wrapped in the sleeve of green Russian camouflage, whose cloth was also stained by the blood of his own body. A grenade probably blew him and Oshawa up during a close-quarters altercation. The rifle had a bayonet on it.

Oshawa was alone, limping against the crumbling dirt walls for support. He didn’t know where his side was-or where the enemy was-all he knew was to shoot at who the hell was shooting him; and if it was somebody green, shoot them again. His rifle set to single-fire, he laid lines of waning hate down the lanes of trenches to suppress any potential adversaries; like that would lend him any hope at this point. He kept going. He kept going till he ran out of magazines. He kept going till every last bullet ran out. He kept going in the same exact location until his leg literally gave out, physically crumbling like dust, like a house of cards, completely severing from his body… He couldn’t hear anything anymore. The last voice he heard was of his own friend’s. The last voice he heard was only in his head. He could only feel the recoil; his ears fainted the bark of the bullets. His comrades probably advanced way past his trench. He now remembered he was one of the first to enter the entrenchment on a charge that was offensive against these Russian defences. He didn’t hear the voices at all of English, Russian, or Ukrainian. He only felt their vocal vibrations. Was this a good place to die?

Oshawa already had a bad leg. It suffered from infection, from a really bad rat bite he got from living in Detroit. He knew he was gonna die anyway, he just wanted a good place to die in. But this wasn’t a good place, but at least here he had some degree of autonomy. At least here he wasn’t a slave to money. At least here he was… a slave to orders. But not anymore. In death, he was not a slave anymore.

He did it. He was gonna die in a place where nobody would grieve him. He was gonna die in a place where he would cause no pain to anybody, like how his parents had as their lives slipped away in hospitals that neglected him. He showed up to his father’s first, but could not bear to show up to his mother’s. The deaths disgusted him anyways; to die in a place that didn’t give you anything no matter how hard you worked.

Oshawa didn’t wanna die in Detroit anyways. That wasn’t a good place for him to die anyways. But you know what? At least he had some kind of liberty here, especially with the adrenaline. If he were to be frank, I think he’d tell you that he genuinely enjoyed the war. He loved geopolitics. He loved history. He loved violence because to him, it genuinely felt like he was free to be without anybody stopping him from being what he wanted to be just because people wanted to assimilate into this shitty society. He didn’t get to be the next Caesar, Napoleon, or any great figure at all-that’s not possible anymore-but at least he got to choose his death. So, even against his severe loss of blood and the weakness of the last leg he had left, his adrenaline kept him conscious and going past his limits. The world fell silent. The fighting left him. He crawled his way up onto the parapet and over into no-man’s-land to see a charcoal black, burned carcass of a tree. It was alone in this black field. He kept crawling. And eventually, he laid his back against the tree to see the view of this finally empty battlefield entirely. And he took a deep breath and understood something very important about life: Choose a good way to die. Either die in a place where you built a lot of things and you can be surrounded by to say goodbye-like a hospital bed with people you built and people who built this life alongside you-or by your ambitions-or at least a place that’s good to die. A warrior’s death is always noble, as is their purpose. But if you want me to be honest-speaking from the last words that Oshawa wrote in his journal- “The worst death is the one that people grieve combined with the pain of losing your body slowly to the withering of time.” Oshawa didn’t want to die slowly to an infection swallowing up and corrupting his leg without at least some kind of dignity-without some sense of rebelliosity. So to him, to die fighting was freedom. He especially didn’t want to burden Roland any longer as a man who was losing his life. He at least wanted to die without letting him cry. He never told him about his leg. One day, he left a note saying that he was taking a risk and that he was gonna journey out of Detroit-not that he made this explicit decision to enlist in the Ukrainian military as a foreign volunteer. To him, that was the best death: The one where no one cried. The one that no one had to bear. Cause even more painful than losing someone to disappearance, where you could hope that they were still alive blindly, it was better to die sooner and with grace and all of a sudden and without anyone knowing, than to let someone else watch you throughout the years as you inevitably withered away; and as the wounds of time showed their mark on you. Oshawa never agreed with the movie depiction of seeing someone dear die as their hand was held by those who loved them most. That is the most painful of grievances, especially in an early death of someone so young. Why let your body just wither away when you can give yourself some flair, right? As the last words of Oshawa’s journal said: “Find a good place to die, and go there, alone,” And he did so, as he wrote finally, “peacefully.”