I faced mortality at too young of an age. One of my first memories is playing hide-and-seek with my cousins at my grandmother’s funeral. Death had no meaning to me at the time.
I have no memories of that grandmother, other than that funeral. Dingy photographs of her holding my head up at a month or so old.
Eventually my dog passed when I was still a child. I played no games then as I helped my brothers dig her grave, saw my parents wrap her in a tarp. We lowered her into the ground and replaced the soil while it rained gently in the early morning. My father told me it was angels crying.
Death was commonplace. I knew that we all died but didn’t understand it. That understanding came with age, not through any traumatic event of my own. Around me as I grew, others died.
I don’t remember the orders anymore. My uncle went from terminal cancer on New Year’s Eve, 2009, a few hours from a new year. My brothers lost friends to drunk driving accidents. I lost classmates to suicide.
Death was commonplace. I knew that we all died, and I began to understand. With that understanding came a crippling fear of my own death. Inevitable, marching forward. I was fifteen or so - only sixty or seventy years left.
For a while, I refused to leave my house. I dreamed every night or car crashes and murders. I would stun myself into inaction simply by thinking that someday, I would be gone, and that was it.
Maybe it would’ve been better if I was raised religious. I believed in no afterlife, only in nature and rotting away.
But fears are meant to be faced, so I attempted suicide. A pedestrian effort, an attempt at drowning that my body overruled regardless. I hadn’t done it to face the fears - I had my reasons - but it worked for the same purpose.
It didn’t clear away the fears, but it showed me I could face them. So I adopted it all. I let death define my humor, my writing, my music. I thought of it before bed and as I awoke. I let myself face it all.
Over the years, it worked. I can say I no longer fear death. And Lord, what a side effect it’s created.
My bloodstream insisted that I grow with depression, a nasty little devil that sits on my shoulder and holds me down. He helped convince me that death wasn’t to be feared, to accept it, to seek it.
The fear went away. I adopted it all and became disinterested. Death would be here in a scant handful of decades, so why bother with it all?
So I rot now, dying before death comes to take me. I fear no death and fail to see the light that this beautiful life attempts to show me daily. I see the thorns without seeing the rose.
I wonder if this was the way it was supposed to be. I think that I could’ve been happier if I’d stayed how I was. I lie down at night idly wondering if I’ll die before I awake. It was better when I was afraid.