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Creative Nonfiction

On Death

Grace Willcox
issue seven

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My mother let it slip one day while we got ready for school in her bedroom, walls painted Gray Sky by Benjamin Moore, a matching duvet made of linen and down, that eventually, on each of our own unknown timelines, we would all die.

She didn’t say it quite in that manner. I was five, and she probably applied all the euphemisms you’re used to hearing when someone you know, or someone you know knows someone who has died. They’ve passed, they’ve gone to a better place, their soul has departed, they’re in Heaven. All those voidless attempts of dancing around the one word that cuts like a freeing knife—death—were so far removed from my understanding that I had nothing but questions.

“Even Chunky?” I asked under the cool cloud of something greater than both of us.

Chunky was our stray cat, and contrary to the name I gifted him, he was a slender black cat who had ended up on our porch one too many times, and I fell in love with him when he graciously lapped up the wet food from the back of our pantry cupboard one hot day in July.

It felt good to take care of something for free.

He was an outdoor cat but came back every day, usually the moment I piled out of our old Land Rover after a long day of school. I would see him dart out of the thick trees across the street from our house and prance up to the front step of our wrap-around porch. I wondered what he had been doing for the eight hours I was away, whether or not he had been hunting mice or making temporary homes in the dense growth of the forest, leaving his own secret universe behind to step across the invisible bounds of nature, to enter into my world of walls, of windows. Of structural sound. All to see little old me.

He was there now, in the forest, while I remained in my mother’s bedroom, and I wished he were an indoor cat because maybe then we would have enough time together. Maybe then, he would live a little longer, protected by the confines of wood and roof and drywall.

“Even Chunky,” she said as she patted my back, hoping to soothe my emotional pain with the soft physicality of mother and daughter. But I was distraught. And I never stopped being distraught over death and dying.

…

I was a very sensitive child.

I could pick up on subtle undertones of exclusion from a very early age. It started as icy confusion and chest pain when I watched movies or shows in which a character was being taunted. I didn’t like scary movies, violence, or revenge. Friends (or not-friends) would turn on Texas Chainsaw Massacre while I was in the bathroom at slumber parties. They knew I would beg them to watch something else, something lighter. Maybe Hocus Pocus or Pirates of the Caribbean, even though the Davy Jones character gave me nightmares for three weeks when I caught a glimpse of the scene my neighbors were watching as I grabbed lemonade from their kitchen, trying to look away and tune out the screaming from the living room.

Nonetheless, we watched in my best friend’s bedroom, me on the furthest edge of the couch, the others on what felt like the opposite side of the room, an ocean away, and me drifting further from shore, covering my eyes and trying not to cry.

This feeling of otherness and a heightened susceptibility to fear followed me. At every age, I was soft. I struggled with hard truths, black-and-white thinking, the “because that’s the way it is” mentality that adults kept trying to feed me, like broccoli and peas I never wanted at the dinner table.

All my primary pals were loners. New kids, just moved from Montana types, and I was the local trying to protect them. Trying to show them around the playground. This is where we make mud tunnels for the ants and worms. This is my favorite bench. This is how to jump off the swings and feel like you’re flying.

My need to nurture has never left me.

…

When I found out I could not cheat death, I was on a camping trip with my neighbor, Tiffany. She and I shared a tent while her father and stepmother slept not-so-quietly 25 feet away. We stayed up late, laughing under the covers of our sleeping bags with flashlights in hand, chasing the shadows of moths that tried but couldn’t find their way to the light through the thin neoprene. On our last night, we were posted up near a bonfire, making s’mores and gazing at the stars. Out of the corner of my eye, something in the sky shot across the horizon. A shooting star. I had been waiting for this moment since I realized you could make wishes with the universe, and that this was one singular chance for a future rewritten, a past undone.

I was seven. I sat very still, taking in the conditions of the environment around me. With every ounce of manifestation I could muster, I wished that no one on Earth would die. Not my mother, not my father, not Chunky, not my neighbor’s dog, Fido. Not the homeless man on 53rd Street that we passed every day on the way to school. Not my teacher, Ms. Handler, and the neighboring teacher, Mr. Anderson. Not the crossing guard and part-time EMT who liked to hang out in our art class. Not a single soul I had met in all seven years of my life.

I wished for immortality, for if my fear of death was too strong for me to live with, I had to ensure that no one else met the same, immovable fate.

After I made my wish, I sat still on the cool damp grass in front of our tent and felt that huge, sparkly sky wash over me. I had never felt more powerful than in that moment. I beamed to Tiffany and her family that I made my first wish on a shooting star. I expected them to ask me what I wished for, even though I knew that would reverse everything, and I would never tell.

“Oh, that ain’t no shooting star. That’s just a satellite,” her dad remarked through the dark black night as he shoved the remainder of his s’more into his terrifyingly gaping mouth.

“What?” I asked incredulously, feeling my stomach drop at a million miles an hour.

“A satellite. In space. They fall sometimes.” His words in between his chewing made me feel sick, and I wanted to go home.

No, I couldn’t fix this. It would happen no matter what. The shooting star was my last hope of stopping it, but despite the movies and shows and books and media that made me believe there was a secret trick to this thing called life, it was all a lie.

I didn’t talk for the rest of the night, and I lay down in my sleeping bag crying silent, slow tears. My mother would die someday. My father will die someday. Everything I’ve ever loved would no longer exist, before or after my time.

…

I’ve been learning to live with death, this inevitable force catapulted on me from a young age, all the way to the age I was when I realized my sobriety, or lack thereof, would not save me from the afterlife.

Sometimes, if I think about it too hard, and imagine 30 years from now, 50 years from now, my body withering and alone, I start to feel a closing in my throat. Something tugs on my organs and squeezes my heart in a way that changes the air and makes me nauseous. Sometimes I start hyperventilating, and I don’t try to stop myself because it feels good to be scared. It feels like letting yourself go numb in the sea during a cold plunge. It feels like telling someone you love them when you know they don’t feel the same. A reckoning that you have to see something through to the end, whether you want to face the music or not. I face the music head-on and let the melody of death hold me.

After I catch my breath, I wipe my tears and let the lack of feeling wash over me, kissing all the scared places inside me and letting them rest. My lover walks through the door. My cat greets me in the living room. I keep cooking, washing dishes, writing, recommending books to friends, lying in the sun, watching the tides come in and out from the window of my apartment.

I think of my mother and how scared she was when she was sick for nine months, on and off. Sick in a weird aging way where she was in and out of the doctor’s office, getting thyroid tests and injections for insulin resistance, for high blood pressure that never ran in the family, still unsure of what came over her and when it would end.

I think of my partner with chronic pain and how he feels old and dying every day, harrowed by another year of life passing him by with little to no hope of the discomfort ceasing. He is 26.

I think of his father and how in one year he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, bit by a tick and contracted lyme disease, and his best friend of 48 years died from a brain hemorrhage in his favorite karaoke bar.

I think about how everyone around me is just as scared, and still we live. In spite of the inevitable. In spite of the truth we all know, but don’t know, we hold on to both certainties at the same time.