Why do we, grown people who should know better, who should know what things make no difference, still hold our breaths when we pass graveyards and make wishes on the tips of our cheesecake?
Or is it just me?
All my life I have been extremely supersitious. I was that kid, battling my own obsessive need to put the arch of my left foot on the crack in the sidewalk with every step, with my terror that I was the reason my mom had back problems. I made wishes on every necklace charm, graveyard, and star that I saw.
As a child, of course, I thought I could pray to Santa. Now that I am an adult, I have put away childish things.
Mostly.
I still make a lot of wishes, which I guess is silly. But only on things that really make sense, like birthday candles and pie slices and build a bear hearts. And more than anything, I ascribe power to words that they just don't have.
For example. As I'm sure many people have, I have spent the last few years of my life dealing with death. Not coping with the loss of loved ones so much as really wrestling with the idea that someday I am going to die, I and everyone I've ever loved and hated. For a while I chose to stare death in the face, looking at the morbid reality of it all and seeing my friends and family and being able to see that they were just fragile animals, sacks of meat and bone and blood held together by flesh.
My other main strategy was avoidance. Somehow being able to shut my mind to it all....but not quite. Because even with my eyes closed I could feel death looming somewhere. "It may not be today, it certainly wasn't yesterday, but someday when you least expect it, I am coming for you.".
The idea that someone could be unprepared for their death, that a sixteen year old can be killed by a drunk driver on a street I could have been on, is terrifying. I think about that girl all the time. She died one major street away from the street Dan lives off of. And I never take that street. I never have. I almost always turn to go to his house a block north or south of the stretch of road where she was hit. But I've taken it before. And I almost went to Dan's house that night. And there is a possibility, however small, that it could have been me.
I still hold my breath a little bit when I drive past the area where she was killed.
Sixteen is so impossibly young to die. She had plans. For college, for true love, for a family. She was sweet and everyone loved her and was so excited to see what she had planned for her life, and one night that was supposed to be so much like any other was her last night alive.
I always coped with death by telling myself that I would be ready, that we all would. But tragedy is tragedy because we aren't. The people in that awful, murderous plane crash screamed for several minutes before they died. And I bet all of them wished it wasn't happening.
If my coping mechanism, that death is something I will be ready for, is gone, what can I do? The obvious answer is to make peace with it in my life now, and I have. I assume I will be ready, or make peace with it very quickly, and either way the experience of dying shouldn't last too long. I had a near-death experience just after christmas last year. Dan was passing someone on the way to South Dakota, and the road had a weird dip in it. It looked like you could see for miles, but he couldn't see that there was a car coming straight for us. I looked up when he hit the brakes and saw the car and made a sad little noise. I blinked and my brain refused to accept what was happening for a second, and then I had a definite moment of "this is actually happening. That car is going to hit us, and we might die. Okay, God..." and braced myself emotionally.
The car didn't hit us. We both slowed down a lot and Dan pulled off onto the shoulder. I had panic attacks for the rest of the day. I wanted nothing more than to be done, to get into a bed and cope, but of course we still had hours to drive before we got to Rapid City, and that helped nothing.
The fact that I had a brush with almost-death and felt peace is one of the most encouraging experiences I've ever had. The day it happened I was upset and wished we had driven there as normal, but it was a really good experience for me. I feel like I have come to terms with the fact that we'll all die.
And that, dear friends, is where superstition enters this post yet again.
I have refrained from posting anything about death, or saying anything too ominous, out of fear that they will be my last words or my last post. Not because I'm afraid I'll die any day now and something has to be my last words and won't that be sad. Out of fear that the words will cause the death. I have seen too many reddit posts of "Look at this morbid thing my cousin said before she died in a freak accident". So I held off on finding real closure with death out of a vain hope that it would prolong my life.
But here I am now. Writing this with the intention of posting it.
I read an excellent book recently. It's called "Smoke gets in your eyes and other lessons from the crematory".
I checked it out from the library with that same dark, morbid fascination with which I read all those reddit posts. And at the start of the book, she is exactly that kind of person. She works in a crematory because she wants to be the person to look death in the face and not flinch. Over the course of the book, however, it becomes less about gory details and how unusual she is, and more about how unusual society is. Modern society is strange in the way that we want to sanitize death.
Nothing is scarier than a skeleton. When someone dies we need to remove the body right away. Bodies must be created or embalmed. Your fish is just sleeping.
We want to remove death from our minds, so we obsess over aging. One of the richest men in America is pouring tons of money into life-prolonging science because despite all his wealth and privilege, he is terrified to die.
But he will. And so will I. And so will you. And there's something beautiful about that. About clearing the world so that new life can explore and discover and care for each other. About how we have a finite amount of time and it's up to us to make it matter.
So here I am now. Posting a long, circuitous blog post about death. I feel pains in my chest. It's probably my heart. Or maybe it's just my constant anxiety about my heart. I'm about to drive to boulder, and I may get in to an accident.
Or maybe, just maybe, I will show this to my grandchildren someday.
Life is beautiful. Death is beautiful. And if this is my last post or not, I hope it encouraged anyone who read it. You are not alone, and it's okay to not be afraid.
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