thoughts on death
FROM THE ARCHIVES: Expanding on a page from my 4th grade writing notebook (2006)
While helping my parents prepare for their move, I found a notebook from my 4th grade writing class.
The entries are dated from 2006-2007, and contents range from in-class prompt responses, to poetry, to clippings from old Nintendo DS game manuals. Our teacher encouraged us to decorate composition books which became our writing notebooks for the year. We pasted photos of our families and friends on the covers and looped ribbon to form makeshift handles, then attached string to the edges to tie bows (for added privacy of course).
This book holds a special place in my heart.
Rereading my old work, I love how everything feels so earnest and unfiltered. It was surprising how many of the things I wrote about at age 10 still resonate with me now.
A page that caught my eye was one dated 11/29/2006 with the heading:
Questions: After you die, what happens?
I have a feeling that on this day our class prompt was something to the effect of “Develop a question and expand on further questions around the topic.”
For those struggling to read my scrawl, the sub-bullets read:
Do you go to another life?
Do you just see eternal darkness?
Are you ever hungry?
Do you see what’s happening?
Are you burned out when the world goes into the future?
Is your funeral nice? Do you have one?
Will you have to live your “afterlife” well or the same way you did when you were alive?
I’ve always had a mild fixation on the idea of death. Maybe it was briefly getting the chance to meet my great-grandma as a toddler, then grappling with her death and wondering where she went afterward. Maybe it was my near death experience drowning when I was around 10. (Thanks Dad for saving me).
Maybe it was the prevalence of death in media - especially in Disney movies. Death was such a common plot device, it made me constantly contemplate the effects of someone you love, someone once tangible and whole, being no more.
I think Disney’s fixation with killing off a parent (Bambi, The Lion King and Finding Nemo to name a few), also bred a deep rooted fear of the what if-s of one of my parents dying during my childhood. Realizing that death could be indiscriminate in waiting for old age created a new fear in me.
Fear that at any time death could come for me, or for anyone.
Growing up, my family would often drive past a large cemetery on our way to the park. I would be in awe of just how many headstones and mausoleums marked people who once were but were no longer.
These frequent drives past the cemetery became a constant reminder of the circle of life and that death is the great equalizer: everyone who lives will one day die.
They also became my exposure therapy. Seeing the cemetery glow on sunny spring and summer days, ripple with color in the fall, then become blanketed in fresh snow come winter made death feel less frightening. Somehow as a concept death became more peaceful. More achingly beautiful.
I became less fearful of death itself, but found myself still fixated on its aftermath.
Sometimes I went to church with my grandma on Sundays. Light would stream through the windows, suspending glittering particles in midair. I’d stare at them and consider the idea of heaven.
If there was a heaven wouldn’t it be tiresome to have everlasting life? If we were reborn into a new body on a new Earth would our soul remember or would we be wiped clean?
Am I someone who has lived before?
I’d like to think reincarnation exists so I think I have, and I think I will again.
As a child I went to a wake for an extended relative. Seeing their body on display, devoid of life as I once knew it, was jarring to say the least. Death meant their physical form was abandoned - so where did they go? What was them in the first place apart from their body?
I began to consider the self as two parts temporarily attached - the body and the soul. The body, our physical form, felt like a container. When I thought of myself, I rarely thought of my physical form - I would always think of “me” as the parts inside. My mind’s voice felt like the real “me”.
What will happen to the me I know after my body breaks down?
In the physical aspect, I do know that I'd like to be cremated and have my ashes scattered into the ocean.
As for the soul…
For so much of my life I've continually wrestled with the implications of life and death, but as more time passes, I’ve grown to accept that there’s little point in over-speculating.
There’s an odd comfort in the unknown.
Lower on the same page of that notebook, there was a poem entitled Death. (transcription included below the photo for legibility)
Death
Eternal light
or darkness
No Sense
Of the Outside World
The Phantom
Of Spirits
grasps you
in invisible
misty hands
Coldness slithers
into your senses
as a grim vision of death
comes into view.
Peacefully,
or brutally,
another life
fades
beyond the spiraling web of sameness
Lives change,
Spirits die,
And death takes another life in its unseen hands.
I definitely had a colder view of death as a kid than I do now. I saw death then as a true end, as a subtraction of life. Now I’d like to consider it more as a transition.
I remember the day my grandfather passed away: it was so brilliantly warm and sunny outside, a sharp change from the brisk October days prior. I was almost angry at first: it felt like a sick joke that the outside world was radiating such joy and beauty while my family and I were experiencing such intense grief.
I wished my grandpa could see how beautiful of a day it was.
Then I realized he was the one who gave us this beautiful day to enjoy and remember him by. I feel that his energy will always be with us: just in new and inexplainable ways. Since he’s passed, I’ve seen blue birds and butterflies and ladybugs and moths and just knew in my soul that he was there with me. Sometimes I just feel him in the air.
In the end, we live and die and things will inevitably go on without us. With that in mind, I try to ground myself more in the present and relish the act of living as I know it.
What happens next? I don’t know.
But I don’t fear it, as it’s just part of the journey.