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How You Live When You Are Afraid of Death
In my experience, it’s nothing like the movies.
Once upon a time, I nearly died. I was very young when it happened, hardly a teenager, with eyes watching the world and my heart hidden at home. I did not know then that there would be no end to the changes that came: the younger sister who became the older one, the parents who greyed before their years would ask it of them, the friends and family who would ebb and flow with turned shoulders and averted eyes. I did not know that, with the stone-cold diffidence of a cruel world, the vice grip of death would try again. And again.
This essay is not about that story, though. It’s not about what got me here, why I live under the dark shadow of a swift knife, why I wake up each day thankful I did not pass silently into nothingness in my sleep.
And it’s also not about religion. It’s not about God or nirvana or the vibrant shores of eternal rest. There is nothing that may come later that changes the fierce hope most of us cling to when forced to think of it — the hope that it comes later, much later.
No, this essay is about life, with all of its acid-washed joys and forgotten tears. It is about how you actually live when you’re actually afraid of dying. It’s about the great tragedy that is the truest loss of innocence…
