It was a pie.

Coconut cream pie to be exact.

There I was, munching on another slice of sin and attempting to write another sonnet (Sonnet Attempt Number 456, when suddenly my head falls into the fattest slice of pie this side of the Mississippi.

The waiter, an 18-year-old college student from UW, dropped his tray of dirty dishes when he saw me. Poor thing. He was so shaken up. He even started to cry.

Amongst the panicked-stricken staff and rubbernecking patrons, I was somehow rushed to the hospital where they pronounced me dead. February 14, 2020, at 1AM.

Technically, I was dead by 12:15am. I know because that was the time on my phone. I know because I was about to check my phone when my body collapsed. I know because I didn’t collapse with my body.

I still thought I was alive. Or dreaming. Or half-day-dreaming-half-food-coma. I don’t know. I just knew that I was sitting in my body one moment, and the next I was out of most of it… I say most because the rest was slipped off my shoulders and slumped on the table like a wet overcoat while I sat where my butt still was.

Getting out wasn’t a problem. It was kind of like slipping off a wetsuit, just not as wet and not as clingy. I did have help — the waiter, the EMT, the doctors, etc. They all moved my body without me in it.

And I followed, not knowing where else to go. The ambulance was, of course, cramped so I had to float above my body.

Such a surreal experience never felt so … Real…

I watched as they tried to resuscitate me. CPR. Defibrillator. But by the second time my body jumped with electricity off the bed, the doctors had to call it.

The immediate cause of death was asphyxiation due to coconut cream pie. But what caused me to face plant the pie was an aneurism.

Always thought chocolate would do me in, but that’s life. Never know what you’re going to get.

For a while, after they placed my body in the county’s morgue, I just floated there… All alone in the morgue. Not knowing what to do with myself.

As in life, as in death, am I right?

Twenty-nine years of life behind me, an eternity of death ahead of me, and I still cannot make up my mind what to do. Wasn’t there supposed to be light? A tunnel? A voice? A skeleton with a gardening tool? Or something?

No. There was nothing except my dead body in a metal freezer and me floating around. I don’t know how many days passed as I watched the mortician come and go, sometimes with files, sometimes with more bodies. There was no rush to contact relatives. All of mine have passed on long before me. Should I go looking for them in this after life? How do you find other dead people? Is there a Google maps for the dead?

As I floated, lost in thought (How would you even have host a site for the non-living?), my body was taken to be cremated, as per my last Will and Testament. I watched as the funeral director, the same man who walked me through my mother’s passing, lifted my body into the cremation casket, a simple light brown box with no metal handles and no cushions.

TO BE CONTINUED…