Fair warning, this one's dark. Something about this birthday knocked loose a part of my brain that's now stuck on death, and I can't seem to shake it. I am having this stark realization that I'm old AF now. I am no longer getting older, or of a certain age. I'm officially old and I have the recent birthday to prove it. Thoughts of Cher and Madonna, and all of the other women who made a deal with the devil to never age, aren't getting me out of this funk. At this point, I'm open to cutting my own deal. Forget the devil, I'll go straight to the top. Somebody get me a meeting with whoever runs heaven, if there is a heaven.
The problem with aging is that my brain still thinks I’m thirty, and when I was actually thirty, I’d see people my current age and think, fuck, that person is old as shit.
Now I’m that person and I’m old as shit and the shit just got real.
I've been afraid of dying my whole life. Nothing about this is new, but what is new is that the idea of the Grim Reaper used to be something that spooked me but that I’d never actually seen. Now he's standing at my bedroom door, an uninvited guest, and for the first time in my life, someone I can't talk my way past. This black-cloak-wearing scary motherfucker isn't budging, and I have no move.
It happens mostly at night because I’m an insomniac, and insomnia is just your brain’s way of saying, “Since you’re up anyway, let’s think about dying.” I’ll be lying there at 2 a.m. doing my usual list making and praying to a God I’m not sure I believe in, and suddenly my chest tightens and my brain tells me that one day I’m going to stop existing. The idea of becoming a pile of dust or a rotting corpse is unbearable.
I was raised Catholic, but my rational brain is pretty much convinced that there’s no heaven, no hell, no anything. Just lights out, show’s over, thanks for coming. I believe this almost completely, until the fears begin and I’m praying with my imaginary rosary beads like a goddamned maniac to anyone who might be listening.
“Please don’t let me die,” I plead into the black void.
At 2 a.m., I also believe in ghosts. I’ve gotten out of bed to grab a glass of Pellegrino and scared myself into believing I heard something which makes me run back to bed and hold onto my husband for dear life. Nothing new for him. He just puts his arms around me and says his usual, “What is it this time? Death?” I just respond, “ghosts.”
As afraid as I am of ghosts, there are times I find comfort in them. If ghosts are real, I might be able to come back as one and watch over my family while haunting the ones that wronged me. Definitely better than not existing.
And at 2 a.m., every doctrine I shed decades ago comes crawling back like a rat in New York scurrying for the discarded old pizza. Sometimes, that superstitious corner of my brain insists hell might be real. I’ve already worked out what it looks like. It’s not fire and brimstone and pitchforks. It’s a thrift store, one of those giant warehouse ones where you buy clothes, shoes and household items by the pound, but this time it’s the size of an airport hangar and it never closes and everything smells faintly of other people’s regrets. To get there, you don’t get struck by lightning or swallowed by the earth. You take a coach flight, a long one, in the middle seat. No warm nuts, no free flowing champagne, no pillow and no blanket. Just some non-alcoholic punch in a paper cup and a bag of stale pretzels with two people on each side of me. One is cleaning their fingernails with a fork and the other has their bare feet on the tray.
That’s my hell.
But maybe I've got it backwards. Maybe I should be picturing heaven instead. In heaven, I'm in first class with an endless supply of champagne, on my way to New York, shopping at every designer store with money to burn and zero guilt about it. Then I board my first class flight home, except home is a penthouse in the sky with a doorman, housekeeping, laundry service, a personal masseuse, and a hairstylist on call.
My best friend has a plan for when things get bad, not death bad, but mind bad. She’s told me over wine that if she starts to lose her mind, she wants someone to load a lethal dose of something into a banana and shove it down her throat.
I’ve thought about my own bottom line that I don’t want to cross. It’s not memory in general, but song lyrics. The day I can’t finish a verse I’ve known since I was thirteen, like a Joni Mitchell song with a chorus that just isn’t there anymore, that’s it. Somebody hand me the banana and force-feed it to me like a goose bound for foie gras.
What really gets me about death is not so much the thought of dying, but the horrifying thought of no longer existing. In the calm of daylight, I can sort of make peace with pain and decline. What I can’t make peace with is the idea of the lights going out and there being no one and nothing left to be annoyed with. Even a bad afterlife would be better than no life at all. At least in my thrift-store hell I get to complain about the coach seat.
The worst part about fearing death is that it doesn’t even buy you the consolation prize of appreciating your one wild and precious life. You’d think staring down the void nightly would make me grateful. Instead, I just feel robbed in advance.
Nora Ephron once said that death doesn’t really feel eventual or inevitable, that it still feels avoidable somehow. But it’s not. We know in one part of our brains that we are all going to die, but on some level we don’t quite believe it.
I believe it now. Nora died at seventy one and that tells me all I need to know about life and death. It isn’t fair.