Pardon Me While I Continue Dying
Recollections from 18 years of hypochondria
I was 13 years old, sitting in my 8th-grade math class on a wholly unremarkable day, contemplating my imminent death. It wasn’t the first time I’d thought about it, but never before was I so sure — I wasn’t going to make it to the end of the year, maybe not even the month.
This was it. And if I couldn’t be “brave” like those terminal kids in fiction who are halfway to being angels already, then at least I could be quiet. I was good at quiet. It would be marvelous practice for being dead.
Morbid thoughts for a middle schooler, one might think. Sitting here now, with the benefit of hindsight — knowing that I did make it to the end of the year, and many years thereafter — it’s bleakly humorous. But as with many jokes, it’s only time that makes it funny. Nostalgia is something we reserve for forms of torture that we anticipate never having to endure again.
And lucky me, it’s been a solid decade since I placed myself at the threshold of the world beyond. The day you stop looking behind you for skeletal men with scythes is a very pleasant one. Which isn’t to say that you can’t learn something from an obsession with death, it’s just that the lessons aren’t always productive ones.
