James Reuben Napier | Registered Nurse / Singer / Visual Artist
Dear Tina—
Thank you so much for inviting me to be a part of your Death Letter Project. I’m honoured. Death has been a prominent part of my career as a Registered Nurse, and I’ve been privileged to have witnessed this rite of passage many times.
Some deaths have been brutal and undignified (and when I say this, I’m referring to the desperate bone-crunching attempts doctors and nurses commit to bring someone from the life/death threshold), while others have been what the pall-care literature calls “good deaths”.
The following is based on a piece of prose I wrote after my beautiful mum died. Here ’tis…
“Traversing this grief… this shock… this loss… this heartache. Valiant efforts not to get smacked, slapped and bones cracked on these outgrowths of emotional sea stacks. Keep it together my boy! Show your fortitude, your stoicism in the face of this absolute FUCKERY you find yourself in… vacillating emotions… it all feels so schizoid. A murmuration of memory particles… of her, with her… flutter in, out and around… her famous red scarf… the ghostly smell of Shalimar and menthol cigarettes… the click and clack, click and clack of her high-heeled shoes. She infiltrates my dreams like Madame George… I reach out to catch her, but she is mercury, she is smoke.
Where are you my darling? Where did you go? Mummy? Wild, bewitching, fascinating, glamorous, flirtatious, Marianne Faithfull-ish, at-times-infuriating, at-times-histrionic mother instantly transmogrifies into… crinkled baby bird. Bones of twigs, bald head… the blonde lioness’s pride and joy shaved off and trashed (the final humiliation).
As I hold you, my eyes are microscopes scanning this new previously unseen terrain of skin… creases, wrinkles, moles… anomalies… your hair kept its secrets, I whisper to you. Your skin lucent. The sharp edges of your mandible and zygomatic bones push through gossamer… all death camp… bruised and starved… If I held a light beneath your little body I think I might see your heart glow… I would see the fluorescent organ pumping your fading life-juice limply and erratically into the purple-red filaments of your veins… A specimen in a petri-dish.
“Where’s my mummy? I want my mummy!!” you howl at us from your hospital bed… diminished, angry, confused, frightened, overwhelmed. Terminal agitation. I’m watching a death in slow motion… Are we lucky? I’m not so sure… This is some kind of hell watching this fucking SHIT! Jesus Christ…
Then your breathing slows, the confusion gives way to a startling lucidity. You sit up, swing your legs out of bed, grab my cold cup of coffee and down it like an old sea dog guzzling rum. You smack your lips, slap your thigh and smile wryly at us. We’re shocked. You speak of wild, cryptic things… quoting Kahlil Gibran and Rimbaud… you have revelations about your life and the importance, the significance of certain special people you’ve met. Secrets revealed… your beloved guru… Adi da Samraj. Unwavering faith in him, til the end. The final rally, the moment of clarity… your final gift to us.
And then, as quickly as it came… it vanishes. Your steady submersion into the morphine and midazolam coma… the hideous gasp and gurgle of Cheyne-Stokes respiration… you’re drowning in your secretions. This looks like a fight now… a struggle to transition from our world to the next… to let go…
Your drive is strong to hold tight to this temporal plane as your presence is commanded to be in the next one… pulled by spiritual magnets… pushed by invisible hands. A mad reversal of birth. As above, so below…
Did you hear a fly buzz when you died, mama? Did you see the King? Did you dematerialise into a fractal space-time void flooded with dimethyltriptamine?
I hope you’re ok. I LOVE YOU. I MISS YOU.”
Much love (always),
Reuben/Reuby/James
—James Reuben Napier (2025)
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