After reading an early version of this essay, my friend Matt asked me: “Why are you in such a rush to die?” I was shocked by the question, even a little pissed. This wasn’t about me! This was about the universal plight, which I happen to have an exceptionally clear perspective on because of my inability to ignore it like some other nincompoops!
I had never thought of it that way, but Matt was right. The hypochondria. The intensity of my reactions to death, and my inability to disengage with the topic once it is raised in a group. My need to make it clear to everyone that it’s coming for them, too. My need to meditate on it. Is what’s manifesting as a fear actually some instinct to resist being young? Youth, with all its accompanying risks, humiliations, and uncertainties, the pressure to do it all before it’s too late. Is the sense of imminent death bound up in the desire to leave some kind of a legacy? I did once write, though never shot, a short film in which I held a massive funeral, heard everyone I love speak on the topic of me, then jumped out of my casket at the end and yelled, “Surprise!”
I am still in my twenties so a fear of death is, while reasonable in a macro way, also fairly irrational. Most people live through their twenties. And their thirties. And their forties. Many people live longer than is amusing, even to them. So every time I think about death, when I lie in bed and imagine disintegrating, my skin going leathery and my hair petrifying and a tree growing out of my stomach, it’s a way to avoid what’s right in front of me. It’s a way to not be here, in the uncertainty of right now.
If I live long enough and am given a chance to read this when I’m old, I’ll probably be appalled at my own audacity to think that I have any sense of what death means, what it brings to light, what it feels like to live with the knowledge that it is coming. How could someone whose biggest health scare was a coffee-induced colon infection know what the end of life looks like? How could someone who has never lost a parent, a lover, or a best friend have the faintest clue about what any of this means?
My dad, who looks pretty great for sixty-four, is fond of saying, “You just can’t fucking imagine, Lena.” He can see the big event in the distance (his belief in robotics not withstanding) and says things like “Bring it on. At this point, I’m fucking curious.” I get it: I know nothing. But I also hope that future me will be proud of present me for trying to wrap my head around the big ideas and also for trying to make you feel like we’re all in this together.
Gram’s sister is still alive.1 Doad is one hundred, with the energy of someone in her early eighties. Although her body resists most activity, she still knits, whittles, and practices the organ. She has the kind of Yankee disposition that takes things as they come. For her, cancer is akin to a shopping center going up next door: inconvenient and unexpected, but there’s not much you can do about it. She has never listened to Deepak Chopra, switched to almond milk, or meditated. Yet she is here, in the chair by the window in the house she was born in, outliving her husband and siblings and nephews and friends.
My father and I visit her about once a year. I ask her about her thoughts on current events (“Obama seems like a nice kid and handsome to boot”) and the history of her house (“One toilet and five kids; it was a goddamn joke”). She uses the expression “not in a dog’s age!” the way millennials say “like.” My father, when beholding a woman with the same matter-of-fact staccato and cap of white hair as his mother, becomes withdrawn, childlike. He shuffles his feet the same way he does at his mother’s grave or in traffic court, all traces of radicalism gone.
Doad wrote a memoir. Seventeen years ago, when she was already pretty damn old. She chronicled life in her town in the early part of the twentieth century—the first car, the first television, the first divorce. She wrote about the one-room schoolhouse, her lone black friend, and the time her brother climbed on a ladder in a devil mask, peered into her bedroom window, and scared her so badly she wet herself. She did it not for glory but for posterity—spare, practical prose designed simply to get the information out, to prove that she was there and that she is still here. She’s proud of the fact that, at her age, she doesn’t need help to dress—plaid shirt, nurse’s shoes, pastel “dungarees.”