The face of death

From the creepy files.

Please keep the DSM-4 on the book shelf. There is no disorder, just a couple of creepy episodes related to the blogster by a trusted friend.

We were at the funeral of the old neighbor, the one who would climb into his car at age 93 once a week and drive slowly to the nearest town to pick up a paper and do some shopping.
We were at the grave, forming the funeral U, the priest at the foot of the grave saying the things priests say on these occasions.
Then I turned around and flinched.
Manu, the wife of Bernard, was standing just a little to the side behind me. As I rotated and faced her, I saw something I had never seen before. For a split second, her face was not there -- there was a skull. And then it was gone. Manu was there.
I shook off the almost imperceptible moment of weirdness and completely forgot about it.
Then, about three months later, the phone rang in the evening. At the other end, a voice said, this is Michelle -- and I knew right then what would follow. I handed the phone over to my partner.
Manu had been killed in a car accident in the thick coastal fog.

Over a decade later, I came home from work, deep in thought, and I opened the garden door. There, in front of me, were four friends heading toward me. They had been visiting and were about to leave.
As I looked up from the ground, my gaze fell on Patrick, and I saw that skull I had seen once before.
I said to myself, I am crazy, work should not be getting at me like this.
That was that. 
And then, one bright Saturday morning about five months later, I was sitting in the yard talking to the cats, my friend Jack comes storming in, upset: Pat is dead, yesterday, an accident.

It has been several years, and I don't think of  Pat and Manu often but once in a while the events come back. I did compare the episodes and found only one common thing: both times, I was intensely focused on something else.  There were other events which did not have to do with someone's death but with danger to me, a four pound roof tile smashing a few inches in front of my feet, a truck losing cargo, and on both occasions I went into a sort of trance a few seconds before they occurred.And seconds later it was all over.

Oh, and it runs in the family.  A couple of years ago, I spoke to my mother and she talked about the death of an uncle in a traffic accident in the same terms. I was stunned.

No, I do not believe in anything supernatural. It may be coincidence, some short circuit in my brain. Or something else, but physical, maybe one day it can be measured.

The blogster had contemplated to make this a Halloween post, but we may not be writing any more when Halloween rolls around again.