Work Text:
This won't be easy for me to write.
Death has always been something I've avoided, the thought of it at least.
The first time I encountered death was when I was young, I can't remember the exact incident but death seems to happen in clusters. People die, you go a little bit without anyone dying, people die again, always in groups.
My great aunt died when I was around six years old. Maybe younger, I don't really remember. She lived in an apartment with my uncle, and his kids, my cousins. Markie Mark and Little Mark, we used to go to his apartment building and I'd play with Little Mark in the apartment building's tennis court. Nobody ever played tennis there, but it also had basketball hoops and sometimes we threw things at it but we were all around the same age and much too short to actually get any hoops. She'd been suffering with breast cancer for a while, and my mom used to go over to help with taking care of her. She wore diapers, I remember that because one time I walked in on someone helping change her and it embarrassed me, so maybe there were other things wrong with her but she was also an older lady, maybe 80ish. I don't remember when she died, but I remember afterwards Markie Mark moved into a house, and we had a new stocking on our fireplace every year for Christmas with a D on it, for Dianne. We never put anything in it, but we put it up anyway.
A couple years later, my god aunt died. Lots of women, more often than not women are the first to die, I think. Marshelle, she was a beautiful lady. She lived in a trailer, married to this guy who I kind of liked but I kind of didn't. They apparently smoked cigarettes, but i'd been to the houses of people who smoked cigarettes and their place never smelled like it, at least not strongly. When we went over, she always had some new princess themed toy, whiteboard or something for me to play with, it usually came with a dry erase marker or something. I'd sit on the floor of their trailer while her husband worked on our car, and I'd watch animal planet. One I remember particularly was about this big snake, that ate things bigger than I was at the time, it didn't really freak me out. I think I remember that one the most because thats one of the last times I saw her alive. She apparently died in her sleep, but there was always a quiet understanding that her husband killed her somehow. He never got arrested for it, and nobody could prove anything, but she was only 40 and we all knew how he treated her.
A couple months after she died, one of my uncles died. I didn't know him, we didn't go to his funeral, but I knew his kids. My cousins, much older than me, twins and I knew their mom too so it was weird to me i'd never met their dad, especially since they seemed so upset about it and so did my parents. He died in a motorcycle accident, it apparently wasn't his fault but I remember hearing about how his funeral had to be closed casket because they couldn't put his head back together in a presentable way. We watched a video of my cousin Austin speaking at his funeral, and all I could really pay attention to was how they had his helmet resting on the casket, and they couldn't get the blood all the way off of it at the edges.
Thinking about those instances isn't hard. They're gone now, they've been gone. It's not like I didn't care for them but for some reason their deaths didn't really affect me, it was like they were there and then they weren't.
I had a pet die recently, my guinea pig, I haven't been able to move his cage out of my room. I don't know why but I feel like its rude, maybe. Or like, uh… I don't know. It's his, he sleeps there and stuff. It wouldn't be right to. I don't know if I should, like, move it, or…. I don't know. It's like when you have an outside cat who stops showing up, and you still leave the food bowl out because "What if he's lost and wants to find his way home? What will he look for?" Except I buried my guinea pig, and outside cats just slink away in back alleys to die and you never know how or when or why.
That one's been a little harder to deal with. I spent so long poking him when he was curled up asleep to make sure he got up, but when it actually happened I just… don't know. I called my mom home from work and she wrapped him up in one of my shirts and we buried him in our flower bed, but for some reason I cant break the habit of looking over at his cage and expecting him to be there, and when he's not…. I don't know. My mom eats a lot of salad, and when she has leftovers I get excited thinking "Oh, Jack's going to love eating this!" but when I say it out loud, she gets quiet and then I get quiet. We got carrot chips recently for some vegetable soup, and there was too many and I caught myself before I was able to say it out loud. Maybe that's a bit of progress.
Anyway, I don't like thinking about death. Part of me, a deep primal part of me that I try to ignore, knows that when you die it's over. There isn't anything afterwards, you're just gone. It's not a pleasant thought, but I know it in my heart that its true.
Well that's not completely true. Logically, I think that that's true. Logically, I hear stories of people who've died for five minutes and came back, they described it as a sense of peace - of being in oblivion, total nothingness. But I also think… that maybe there's a blind spot. There's people who say before they die they see their loved ones, people have dreams of dead people, people see ghosts and hear things they cant explain all the time and even if I think to myself, "The human brain is a beautiful thing, and we hallucinate things all the time." its hard to logic myself out of it when several people hear or see the same thing, or when people share dreams or see something they both cant explain, I think there might be a blind spot, but the thing about blind spots is that the important part of it is that you cant see it. You'll never know what's inside of it, even if you know it exists.
Another part of me, a bigger part, thinks maybe reincarnation sounds right. That's another one of those inexplicable things, kids saying or remembering things they shouldn't. I used to be like that when I was younger, I insisted I'd been alive before. I worked in a flower shop, I saw deer and I lived on a street and I had a good life I remember it even now. That deer. We made eye contact, I remember it.
I like to say i'm Agnostic, that I think there's something or someone out there and there's just no way to prove it exists, whatever it was, but other times I think about how rats have formed organized religions in captivity based around the routines of their caretakers. Maybe i'm a rat, maybe we're all rats.
Rats are smart enough.
…most of the time. But people are also only smart most of the time. Not even.
I read a lot of suicide notes from people who've died. A concerning amount of them get uploaded to the internet, printed or copied or just pictures, people post their suicide notes online. A lot of them think about death as a sort of relief to this world, a break. A lot of suicidal people just want a break. I want a break. A coma, or… just to skip to the next good part, if there ever is a good part.
If I thought about death less, maybe. If I didn't think that it would just send me to a quiet, nothingness oblivion, I think i'd take that break, too.
But that's the thing - there's so many blind spots. So many unfathomable things. Humans like to think we're the biggest thing in the world, but we're not. Even though we learn it very young, that the planet is a stupid amount of feet in diameter and there's planets even bigger than ours, its still unfathomable. Not until you see it for yourself, and even then I don't think I've heard a lot of astronauts autobibliographies about passing by gas giants, about passing over entire continents freely. I wonder sometimes how all of it is put into perspective, how we fight and kill each other for land and money, I wonder what would happen if our world leaders spent just a day up there in orbit. If they'd understand how small and futile all of this is, or if they'd just see themselves as bigger.
The universe is ever expanding, apparently we have some way of knowing that. Apparently it's math. I like to think i'm good at math, but I don't think i'll ever be that good at it. Or at least I don't want to be, i'll try not to be.
There has to be something out there bigger than us, I hope there is. God I hope there is.
If I ever were to kill myself, I thought it'd be with pills. I had a near-death experience with pills recently, I took some not knowing they were narcotics, that if I just took two or three more i'd be dead. I didn't know till the next day, although maybe the constant vomiting and fatigue should've been an indicator. It was miserable, if dying like that is what its like then I don't want to do that. But then again, maybe if I took more it would be faster, it would be less miserable. I'd throw up, for sure, but if I died in under 30 minutes maybe I wouldn't even be alive to vomit, I'd already be unconscious and then I wouldn't have to feel how miserable I would be.
I've been anxious all day, which is why i'm writing this. I've been anxious for a while, but today I was thinking about it. I'm mostly depressed. I have enough energy to function, barely, but not enough to thrive. I'm miserable all the time, it just has been making me think about this thing I saw online, I spend a lot of time online, about how suicidal people are. About how you don't have to worry about them until it seems like they're getting better, because then it gives them enough energy to actually kill themselves.
I've been rather passive about it my entire life, but there are days like today where I think about it. I think about how so many people in my life have died, and i'm only 20. I think about how my mom has a full bottle of prescription narcotics in her closet, free for the taking, things that would kill me if I just took three or four of them. I think about how i'm a burden to everyone around me, how I'm not doing anything and i'm so scared all the time.
We have every opportunity to die every day, every night we subconsciously go to bed grateful that we survived, and every morning that we didn't die in our sleep. Would it be so bad to take that into my own hands?
There's a certain human instinct, I think, that prevents us from wanting to die. People sob and scream at cliff faces, even though they're bungee jumping and dozens of people have done it before and they have to go against their own instincts just to jump because the people running it aren't allowed to push them. People have to get strapped to other people to skydive, because they wouldn't do it on their own. People scream and piss themselves and throw up and pass out on roller coasters, even though very rarely do people ever die on them. People learn that when the rest of a forest is quiet, you should also be quiet. Because you know noises mean life, noises mean knowledge. And you don't know what's out there. You don't know if it wants to hurt you. You don't know if it's already hurt the animals in the forest, and you don't know if you're next.
I consider that a lot of these people who've killed themselves, lifetimes before me, have felt the same way I do. They look up at the sky and see the same one I do today. They read books and attend funerals and feel the same way I do - afraid. But at some point the feeling of being miserable outweighs the feeling of being afraid.
When does the feeling of being miserable outweigh the feeling of being afraid?
I think, as I sit here writing this, with an empty pill bottle and in my comfiest pajamas, with a note taped on the outside of the door with instructions, knowing I wont be missed until i'm needed, that I know when misery is stronger than fear.
And I am so very afraid.