Death and me

Most kids don't think about death much when they're little, but I did. I thought about death the way most kids think about candy. Or video games. Or 3:15 on school days. But sitting on the bathroom floor, fingernails torn off at jagged edges so the tips of them dragged between the tiny grouted tiles, cool and quiet and smooth like clean drinking glasses, I'd close my eyes and pretend. I'd drift into a coffin; I'd imagine the blackness around me closing in slowly at first, and then more and more quickly.

But that wasn't right either. Because when you're dead, you can't see blackness. And so I'd try to reason it out: then what do you see? Space, maybe! No, that didn't make sense either. No eyes, remember?

Ideas about God just made it worse. I'd never had any benevolent, bearded patriarch in my life. My dad's father died when I was six months old, and my mom's was more of a bounce-you-on-his-knee-and-teach-you-how-to-fish kind of guy. So where was this strange "father" figure God coming from? No way.

I'd like to say that my beautiful, child-like mind figured out the mysteries of the universe in that bathroom, on those 1950's floor tiles. However, the best I ever did was to terrify myself into a stupor with which I was usually only confronted after particularly horrible nightmares. I would rush out of the bathroom at top speed, searching for any other living soul in the house to save me from the terror of this impossibility: existing without existing.