Death in the Summertime

My hiatus ends.

It’s ten in the morning. The heat wave persists with a will, anchoring its claws in the earth and driving people crazy. There’s no way to be subtle in heat like this. You can’t feel irked, you have to feel furious. You can’t whisper, you have to scream. Strength and passion are required to break the heat barrier. I was up too late last night drinking, sweating, and making a fool of myself at the pool table. Today my body feels all wrong. 

While getting dressed for work this morning, my vision kept vignetting, opening and closing like a camera shutter, so I sat down and ate some peanut butter crackers. It was enough to regain some power, but as soon as I opened my front door, the heat crashed over me, and I was weaker than before. I’m sitting here at work now, fearing things. Every ache in my limbs. Every twinge in my chest. Nobody mention death today, please, because I think I have it. There’s something stuck in my lungs. I know this isn’t how breathing should feel, it’s too sour. Maybe cancer? And my head has this whistle sound. There’s a hard-shelled beetle between my skull and scalp wanting to come out. Maybe an aneurysm? Please don’t mention death. I beg. That means keeping the news out of your mouth. Fire. Explosion. Bacteria in raw shellfish. Car accident with one survivor. Seventeen-year-old’s body rolled into a gym mat. Cancer. Undisclosed. 

Why must you speak of death? I can’t stand it. With such ease of tongue, you recite tragedy after tragedy, each beyond my comprehension, each devastating enough to fill my stomach with mud. I become a cat with a hairball. Gagging on it. But there’s no relief, no spit-up, just a feeling I can’t lose. Then you go back to your work like nothing. How can you speak of death? These are not stories, these are people, and they are burning, they are bleeding, they are disfigured, they are spread across the pavement, they are motionless, they are never going to take a bite of anything delicious again, they are never going to laugh, they are vanished from the world, they are no more, they are out of chances, they are shadows in dreams, they are daughters in pictures being held by mothers, they are faces in school yearbooks, they are faces turning blue, they are bodies with no breath, they are rotting as we speak, they are gone, they are gone, they are me. How can you speak of it? Don’t you know, I don’t want to die? I don’t want it to be real? I don’t have a grip on it? I’m at work right now? 

This is a problem for me. There are people who are not so bothered, who accept death as the answer to life, who can listen to true crime podcasts while eating. When I was a child, I couldn’t even watch videos of people getting hurt, television shows like Ridiculousness or America’s Funniest Home Videos, when someone attempted a backflip and landed on their head or crashed their motorbike into a fence. I would ask my friends to change the channel, and when they wouldn’t, I’d avert my eyes. I can vividly recall standing in a swimming pool, I must’ve been eleven years old, and my friend was telling me about the show 1000 Ways to Die, and I grew nauseous and terrified, I hated how it made me feel, I didn’t want to hear about it at all, and I still remember the image I conjured of a gymnast impaling herself through the rectum, and when I had to return to gymnastics practice myself, I felt so anxious I could have burst into tears, and I wished desperately to forget that image, but now I’m twenty-three, and I think of it clearly, and I grow nauseous. 

Honestly, I can’t decide if I’m better or worse than the less sensitive. In a practical matter, I’m worse, because it’s easy for me to shut down or lose my temper when death is mentioned. My demeanor could be considered ultimately mercurial, which is not efficient in the workplace nor affable in casual dialogue. However, in a more theoretical and emotional context, is it not better to treat death with gravity? Death is much denser than water. It should not join the stream of other words, when we talk about inconsequential topics most of the time, like heat waves or pool games, conversations made of feathers, melting on the tongue, meaning absolutely nothing. Death means something. 

We live in an age of information overload. There is too much at our fingertips. I think there is harm in knowing everything that happens, all of the time, everywhere around the world. Perhaps this is an unflattering character trait, but I would prefer not to learn about harrowing disasters on a daily basis. This constant churning of news, which is accessible in an instant and hard to avoid, is overwhelming. We become desensitized. We chat with our acquaintances, say it’s awful, then the next day, it’s terrible, then the next, it’s so sad, but never fully, whether it’s a migrant boat capsizing off Cape Verde, a factory explosion in Moscow, or wildfires in Maui, give it the attention it deserves. This is not the fault of any individual but instead a product of excess—there is no time to rightly discuss and process each tragedy because there are so many tragedies taking place, and we know about them all. 

I offer no solution. Ignoring the news paints a coat of ignorance and, ironically, apathy. Alternatively, staying up to date with a deluge of catastrophe, tracking death tolls day after day, sends a chill across the planet, as we gradually evolve into a less empathetic species. Again, not at the fault of any individual. Our brains seek to protect us from emotional distress, and the more we are exposed to horrors, the more a shield forms. It’s precisely why those horrors end up in casual conversation. Now, everyone is wired differently, and I don’t mean to imply that anyone comfortable discussing death is immoral or somehow less attuned. There are morticians, obituary writers, coroners, and the like, people whose lives are intertwined with death in a fascinating way, and their minds are not inherently warped or wicked. A difference in brain chemistry, I suppose, which lets some work as surgeons, butchers, crime scene cleaners, specimen collectors, even dentists, while others would be too squeamish, is the same difference affecting my behavior in certain discourse. 

My reaction to death as a subject represents a vast philosophical abyss. Nothing else in existence is as sure as death, and yet, the idea of it is so nebulous, so profound, so boundless, for we are quite literally staring into the darkness. How do I reconcile? Death is an ending, the ending, and I find it impossible to accept. There is beauty, of course, in absoluteness and sheer immovability, like waves approaching the shore. If we could see it, there would be death chasers as there are tornado chasers. Yes, death is magnificent, and one day I hope not to be so defiant. I will crawl into its palm like a child and be soothed, or maybe not, maybe I’ll fight, but anyway, I have no choice. I get very sad when I think of death, mine and everyone’s. A couple of weeks ago, beneath a supermoon, my thoughts became totally consumed by death, and I sobbed to the point of screaming, and I begged aloud for something to change, I told the moon, You can’t take my mom from me, and my body was not in my own control but in the grips of despair, until finally, I was empty and could sleep. 

How can you speak of death?

A Horse frightened by Lightning (1813) by Théodore Géricault