Essays, Etc.

Death, Etc.

People often ask why me why I’m so obsessed with death in my writing.

I normally respond by saying that it fascinates me, which, while true, is not the whole story.

I am fascinated by death because I am surrounded by death.

One family member died of a drug overdose.

Two more died of old age.

One died of cancer.

These all happened within five years of one another, if I can point that out.

If they are not dead, they have something that cripples them.

One of my closer family members suffers from schizophrenia, which, while not fatal, confines her in her room and makes her comatose to the rest of the family.

One of my closest family members, of which I have lived my whole life around, has breast cancer that keeps disappearing and coming back every one or two years. She also has a bum leg that causes her extreme pain when she walks, and can cause her to fall, which has happened multiple times at this point.

Another family member on the same side that is just as close to me has breast cancer as well.

Two of my family members are so old that they will probably pass away within the next two years, and I have grown up with them and have extremely strong connections to the both of them.

One taught me how to con people with playing cards.

Then, to top it all off, I have my occasional thoughts of suicide to remind me that, yes, my life is engulfed in death.

I have realized that I approach death in a way that almost borders on robotic. I rarely cry, and the only things I notice are how it affects other people, and not myself. I focus on how how the absence of one person can destroy the life of another, and I find it fascinating.

I feel awful for the way I react when people die. I know other people see me as some kind of immoral, unreactive asshole, but the truth is that I never react on the outside, only on the inside. This is the same reason people never suspected it when I told them I was suffering from anxiety.

When someone dies, I don’t cry. My brain just blasts me with memories until I become an empty shell of a person, and at that point I just focus on other people and tell myself that it’s alright, it’s just a part of life, and I react to things differently.

My great-grandfather died very recently, and I only met him once in my life. He was a very short, kind man, and I remember that he liked to tell dumb knock-knock jokes and would laugh so hard at them that he coughed.

I also remember that he told me that, even though we had never met before, he had heard about me and I made him more proud than I could ever know.

He died of old age about two years later.

I never saw him again.

I never heard another dumb joke, and I never made him proud again.

I never got to feel his firm handshake, notice the liver spots on his hands or the stains on his teeth when he grinned at me and said I had a nice handshake again.

That was the death that hit me the most.

Not my pets.

Not when a closer relative, who I had more than once and whose company I enjoyed, died of an overdose.

It was when my great-grandfather passed away peacefully in his sleep.

I didn’t get to go to his funeral.

I asked my mother if I could go, and she said no.

I said, and I quote, “God damn it.”

She stared at me as though I had asked to eat another human being.

“What did you say?”

“I want to go to his funeral.”

“You met him once.”

“That doesn’t matter!”

So I stayed home while she went to Illinois.

She talked to my cousin, who’s thirty-seven and been through a divorce. He was the closest to him before his death, and told stories after the funeral about how, every night, Grandpa would ask him to tuck him in before bed.

I wanted to cry when I heard that, but I didn’t.

All I could picture was the man that had a strong handshake and a stained teeth and pride in me asking my cousin to put him to bed, shut out his lights, pull up his covers.

I wonder if my cousin knows how strong his handshake was.