Imitation Writing

Excerpt:

"What is an "instant" death anyway? How long is an instant? Is it one second? Ten? The pain of those seconds must have been awful as her heart burst and her lungs collapsed and there was no air and no blood to her brain and only raw panic. What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous." - John Green, Looking For Alaska

My Imitation:

How does someone just die? Without warning. Without notice. Dead. Gone in a matter of seconds. Is this normal now? Do people just die at the age of forty? The peace must have spread throughout his body that night after he tucked himself into bed, my mother lying next to him. Death overcame him without any signs. How could this even occur? No one just dies. Car accidents can mean death, cancer can eventually lead to death. Sleeping doesn't mean death. Instantaneous silent death doesn't occur on the young, only the old. But the silence overcame my father in that late September evening.


For my imitation I used John Green's use of rhetorical questioning along with his use of imagery and of sentence length variation.