A lady I work with died. Just up and died, 48 years old, after a stint in the hospital to have a procedure done. Details are scant. She was a sweet woman, great to work with, and now she is dead. Not because of anything she did, any risk she took or bad decision she made, but because of the unfortunate convergence of some random circumstances. She leaves a husband and a couple of children, both young adults. She leaves a cubicle that will have to be cleaned out, and her boss, who is also my boss, will get her forwarded emails. We will chip in for flowers and gift cards for meals for her family. Someone has hung a sign saying “rest in peace, friend” on the outside of her cube.
There was no wind-up or wind-down. She is just gone.
[][][]
Lately I’m a horrible backseat driver. If I am not driving, I am a ball of anxiety, all nervous energy, convinced every time our car passes or gets passed that this is it, this is how it ends. My fingers tense and grab at the seat or the door handle. My foot presses into the empty floorboard to mash the invisible brake, my brain so desperate for control that it requires I pantomime driving to quiet it. My imagination, as I sit primly in the passenger seat and practice the same breathing pattern I used during childbirth, feeds me a steady stream of quick and elaborate daydreams involving eighteen-wheelers plowing into us without even seeing us, our car flipping through the air and down embankments, hungry flames licking everything I can see, watery landings where the outside pours in so quickly you can’t believe it or get out of its way. I wonder where should I put my phone to make sure I can access it easily if we crash, to call someone, anyone, for help. Is this bridge going to collapse under us and would I be able to get my kid out of his booster seat in time were we to land somehow unscathed? Could I break a window with my bare feet? Would we suffocate slowly? What if my glasses fall off or my contacts come out and I am blind and cannot find him? How do we get away from the car so it doesn’t suck us underwater with it? Can I save him? Am I strong enough? Am I too out of shape? Could I live with myself if I failed him?
[][][]
A few months ago a guy I used to work with, sort of, died. He fell off a building while taking photographs in a restricted area and plummeted to his death. He was a real lust-for-life kinda guy and all of a sudden he was dead. He left one final prophetic Instagram post that, all things considered, was a good one to go out on. It was hard to process, even though I wasn’t close to him. He left behind several children.
There was no wind-up or wind-down. He was just gone.
[][][]
I think about it all the time. Every day I walk past forklifts and heavy machinery and I think Is this the day this stuff randomly explodes and a piece of metal zips through my temple? It’s sort of funny that my mind even goes there, when it’s much more likely that I will die from cancer or heart disease or, shit, a mass shooting. And yet. Once you realize your mortality, it’s like playing a lifelong game of hide and seek. Three, two, one… Ready or not.
[][][]
The older you get the more death you encounter. It’s a numbers game. You advance in age and people who are older than you die at an alarming clip. Then death comes for the people your age. It’s the random tragic deaths at first but then the hospital deaths and heart attacks and suicides. Suddenly death isn’t so abstract anymore; it’s more like Whack-a-Mole and you’re one of the moles, totally at the mercy of the spring under your feet.
You would think it would create a sense of comfort with the concept but I find it to make it all the more terrifying.
I have long been fine with Death as a literary concept, Death as a metaphor. It’s super clean and useful in storytelling. Universally understood. A gateway to greater understanding of Life.
Death, however, the real deal: It scares the shit out of me. How can one ever be ready for the one thing no living person has ever experienced?
Some folks get right with God and they prepare to go to Heaven and that makes it easier for them. This world is not my home, they say. That has never appealed to me. This world is my home and the only one I’ve been guaranteed. I’ve been so fortunate to have been granted the entirely improbable privilege of existence, and I am not sure I’ll ever be ready to be done with it because this life I’ve been gifted contains infinite joy, pain, sorrow, gratitude, and chances to be kind, chances to create.
Life is the best thing. It’s the only thing the living know.
[][][]
A year or two ago a woman I only knew on social media died in a car crash right after Thanksgiving. She and I ran in related circles in Memphis and she seemed really fun and funny. She commented on my Instagram posts and I commented on hers. Then she was dead. I spent hours reading the emotional tributes her friends and family wrote on her Facebook page.
She never got to see that stuff.
There was no wind-up or wind-down. She was just gone.
[][][]
I thought I wanted to die when I was a freshman in college. Something struck me low and wouldn’t let up and I thought if I ate a bunch of sleeping pills I could dry up and blow away like a leaf. Instead I was just very drowsy for much of the spring semester. To this day I don’t know if that’s what I really wanted or if that was just an overly dramatic way for me to be sad about the death of certain parts of myself as I became a young adult.
It went away and now it’s hard for me to understand who I was then to be so foolish with the life I’d been given. I know what I felt was real. But I also know that the 36-year-old version of me is much more forgiving of low moods.
They don’t always mean I need to hit eject.
[][][]
Holden knows about death. He asks me when I am going to die and I don’t lie to him. Hopefully not for a long time, buddy. “But you will die before me, but when I’m a grownup?” More than likely. He doesn’t like that answer.
But he accepts it.
You must be logged in to post a comment.