The Catfish

I saw it from a distance on Tivives Beach, something completely white against the black volcanic sand. For a second, I thought it might be alive, some kind of pale fish that had washed up and was still moving, still breathing. It wasn't until I got closer that I understood what I was actually looking at.

It was a skeleton. Whatever fish this had been, the sand and the water had already stripped it down to something exact, almost surgical, every bone visible, every structure exposed. And it was beautiful. I remember thinking that it could have ended up in a less beautiful shape, that decomposition doesn't usually arrange itself this well, and this one had.

Standing there, I thought about the fact that this will happen to all of us eventually. Not just the dying, but the part after, the part where whatever we were gets stripped down to something else entirely. I'm turning 57 in a few weeks, so when I say all of us, I mean myself too, not as an abstract idea but as something with a date getting closer.

I don't think that's a grim thought. The skeleton wasn't ugly. It had completed something, and there was a kind of precision to it that felt closer to a conclusion than to a tragedy. Death rarely looks this detailed, this deliberate. Most of the time we don't get to see it clearly enough to notice.