This Fight Will Be the Death of Me

I think a lot about my grandmother’s death these days, over twenty years later, an old video that plays in my brain. I’m obsessed with death, lately. It’s not a stylized obsession: death as some sort of pale-faced gothic, romantic vision draped in black. I may wonder whether there is an after-life, secretly wishing Jews believed in heaven, or if reincarnation is real. But those thoughts aren’t why I find myself daydreaming about death these days, either. It’s the finality of death, the idea that there is an ending in sight for me. A done moment that lasts for eternity. I imagine the end and I feel like a child ripped from her mother — confused and terrified and angry. I want to shred time into ever smaller units to keep it from disappearing, endlessly separating the particles from each other to make all of the infinitesimal pieces last and then last longer and endlessly rip no matter how tiny each gets. I want never to let go of time. My time.

Maybe it’s growing older that’s exacerbated my fear of death. I’m 48 years old. As my 73-year-old father is fond of cracking: “I’d rather grow old than the alternative, amIright?” Sure, of course. I’d rather grow older than die, yes. But honestly, I’d rather just not die. I mean I always knew death was a fact of life, intellectually. And as someone who suffers from (and survives) depression and anxiety, there have been times in my life where suicide has felt like a welcome option. Still, I never wanted to end my life. I wanted to end my pain and suffering. Now that I’ve grown older and am lucky enough to have the tools to manage my mental health and have possibly gained a better understanding of life as a continuous struggle in some manner or another (or not), I’m pretty clear that I don’t want to leave this place.

Bare and frazzled, I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach one day and gasped for air every day since. Yet, somehow, I kept going.

Maybe it’s the trauma my family endured over the last few years that allowed the reality of death to hover like a thick fog in my brain and settle into my bones. We are coasting, after an exhausting white-knuckle ride that left us all drained. It’s the kind of unexpected life crisis that crushes your gut, sucks the air out of your lungs, and forces you to look harshly at yourself, your choices, and how you want to live out the rest of your days.

Every morning for years as we struggled through the drama, I’d wake up and shuffle to the bathroom where I’d gaze into the mirror and numbly stare at my reflection. Bare and frazzled, I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach one day and gasped for air every day since. Yet, somehow, I kept going. All I wanted was to push on and make things right again. I felt sheer terror in the prospect that it could all end, this mess of a life, on a horrible note, that I became terrified. In that terror, however, I committed myself to nothing but clearing the way for the sun to rise tomorrow.

So, here I am now. I’m not terrified of the actual moment of death. I do feel a dull worry about a long string of moments leading up to my death that might be messy and putrid and painful. I am a worrier. But more than that, I’m terrified of my time here ending. I don’t know how much time I have left of course. It could be five minutes or it could be 50 years. And I feel appropriately ridiculous whining about this when people are actually dying. After all, those are the ones who really deserve to claim the obsession with death, the terror or fear, or just sadness that they don’t have much time left. Why am I so obsessed, then?

Death nags at me these days — always around like a lingering headache I can’t shake. In the mornings when I wake up, as I drift from that cloudy brain state and I’m not quite of the world yet, I consider that I need to take advantage of the day. I tell myself I need today to be the day when I release from my insecurities and the niggling thoughts that poke and prod: I’m not good enough, my writing is of no use, I should be a better mother or wife or friend or daughter or sister or activist.

I speak to myself with a sort of urgent compassion because I want to be kind and loving to myself but when the hell am I going to learn these things, if not now? It’s a tough love approach that may or may not be working. But it’s time to learn these big life lessons. I need to toss that shit because I don’t have all the time in the world anymore.

I never thought about my own death when I was young, which is sort of weird given the roll call of older relatives called by death over and over.

The dead bodies lay in closed caskets and I recall a recurrent fear that the person inside may still be alive. I remember worrying, What if they weren’t ready and this was some big mistake?! So real was my fear and so confused was my understanding of death and burial at my first funeral, I asked my mother whether my great uncle would have a television in the coffin so “he didn’t get bored.”

There is a silliness and strangeness to death, too. Your dead body a container of a memory of yourself.

After the ceremonies, our small family would ride to the cemetery in a long, black limousine. My brother and I quietly amazed at the spacious elegance, sniffing at the leather. I wondered what we were supposed to feel. I don’t remember feeling sad for the passing of these ancient great aunts and uncles, or the grandfather we saw once a year, whose appearances in our lives mostly consisted of annual attendance at my grandmother’s Washington Heights apartment for endless Passover dinners, while my brother and I kicked each other under the folding table.

We (my brother and I) were expected to be quiet and respectful at the funerals, of course. It was far from too much to ask. But as it turned out, our emotions overflowed often during the services — not from grief. We barely knew them, really. Our emotions erupted, looking back, because we didn’t know how to process — or what to think about — the end of a life.

So, we laughed. We’d look at each other and tears would pool; silent laughter shook our chests. There were times when we removed ourselves from the service, to walk in circles around the funeral home, sucking in air, just to calm down. But if I glanced at my brother as we slowly paced, I’d likely lose it again.