You see, I could have done it in the winter, only I was worried about the cold. I might not have been able to get back at all. But it was too warm when I chose to do it. I should have known better. I've read a lot about keeping things. You can't preserve them in the hot weather; that's why the doctors put those dead soldiers in ice chests, but I didn't think about it enough. I made some other mistakes, too, but I couldn't have known.
I guess what started it all was something I read a long time ago, perhaps in a story, or an agricultural bulletin, or maybe in an encyclopedia. Anyhow, it was something about pigs being able to just die if they want to.
That always stuck in my mind. It's a pretty wonderful thing, you know. Imagine just being able to die if life didn't seem worth living, or if you were lonely, or maybe just because you wanted to.
Oh, I told lots of people about it. You know how sometimes a lull comes in a conversation. Then I'd say, "Pigs are able to just up and die if they want to."
But nobody ever paid any attention to me at all. They seemed to ignore the remark. One man did say once, "What the hell are you talking about?" but even he wouldn't listen when I tried to explain.
Perhaps it was just too improbable. Besides, people don't like to think about death. They talk about it sometimes and sometimes they brood about it, but they never really think. It has always been too unknown and that frightens them. Then they only fear and stop thinking.
It always did seem sad to me that no one had ever tried to help people out about death. Yes, I know one did. He died and came back—but then He wasn't just a man like you or me. And even He never said exactly what it was like.
I wondered if anyone really ever had said. So I began to read with only a single purpose in mind. I had to know so I could tell people. If they could only know, then they wouldn't have that fear and we could talk of death and still be able to laugh.
But I had read it all when I read of Jacob's dream, for that's all there was—dreams, visions, hopes. No one had ever seen and come back to tell the others.
The question then was why, not what. It couldn't be that all who died had no whole being to return to. Not every death is marked by a body completely uninhabitable. I myself had heard a doctor say, "There is nothing organically wrong now. The patient will recover if only he has the will to live."