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I was thirteen when I saw My Girl, a romantic melodrama made for the sole purpose of jerking the tears right out of teenage girls and their mothers, starring Dan Aykroyd and Macaulay Culkin. It tells the overwrought, saccharin story of Vada Sultenfuss (I’m not making this up), an eleven-year-old girl whose mother has died, whose father owns a funeral parlor, and whose best friend, Thomas J., is “allergic to everything.” As I sat there in the theatre watching the story unfold, its events escaped harmlessly from my memory almost as quickly as the images flickered past on the screen.

Until the moment of Thomas J.’s all-too-predictable death.

Yes, the movie’s plot was certainly manipulative, trying to tug, no, yank at one’s heartstrings at every opportunity, but something happened as I watched the life blink out of this slightly-younger-than-I boy. It was like the filament of my own insulated, comfortable existence was quietly tearing, somewhere in the distance.

The next weekend, I went to see The Hand That Rocks the Cradle at the Orange Showcase Cinemas. Boy, was I in for another afternoon of high-quality early-90s filmmaking. I won’t even bother to summarize the story of this cradle-rocking mess, but during its final reel, Rebecca De Mornay’s character, a homicidal nanny of sorts (this was the era of Basic Instinct, Single White Female, Sleeping with the Enemy, Point of No Return—female leads were predominantly either frigging whacko, frigging vengeful, or frigging both), meets her end by falling (or being shoved, I don’t exactly recall) out a window and through the glass roof of the greenhouse below (I’m not making this up, either).

It was at exactly that moment, as I sat there with my monstrous bucket of popcorn in my lap, watching Ms. De Mornay’s awkwardly contorted, bloody corpse on the screen, that the filament which anchored me to my comfortable obliviousness gave way completely.

Suddenly, I was bathed in a cold sweat. My pants clung to my legs and crotch, and my shirt felt two or three sizes too small. My heart was pounding hard enough that I could feel the blood pulsing through my ears. My face was hot and seemed to be pushing out against the air, as if my head were expanding. My stomach had flipped itself upside-down and inside-out. My mouth was dry, and the lump in my throat was too large and raw to swallow around.

Without even thinking about it, I was out of my seat and fumbling down the row toward the aisle, out into the hall, and through the men’s room door. I stumbled to the wall of urinals—they were the sort that run all the way to the floor with drains slightly below floor-level—and flushed one. The sounds blurred into their own reverberations: my hand on the metal handle, my sneakers squeaking on the tiled floor, the water rushing drainward. The echo surrounded and consumed me and redoubled itself in its endless amplification and multiplication. The fluorescent light and the shiny chrome and porcelain assaulted my pupils, and the room spun violently. As the water ran down the white enamel wall in front of me, I knelt on the textured floor—tiny grey and maroon squares which scraped my palms—and vomited undigested popcorn and Jujyfruits into the urinal.

As bits of food followed the running water down and were trapped outside the drain beneath me, I thought, This is the moment of my death. This is how I’ll be found. Covered in my own puke, face-first in a movie theatre urinal. And at thirteen, no less.

I had known for as long as I could remember that every living thing eventually dies. I had known it for so long that I couldn’t recall the moment at or event from which I’d learned it. And I had known in some vague way that this rule might’ve actually even applied to me. I was aware of and empathized with other people’s inner struggle with their own mortality. But for all of my conscious life, I had assumed, no, known that all I had to do to forestall my own death was refuse to think about it. If I could just prevent myself from ever considering what the fact that I would certainly die actually meant, what my death might be like, how it might feel, how scary and painful and lonely it might be—and I certainly couldn’t have any thoughts about what might await me in its aftermath—it simply wouldn’t come. And, I knew, that was the trick to life. Because it wasn’t that we’d all eventually die, but that we’d all eventually succumb to the temptation and acknowledge the inevitability of our own deaths. But I was a stubborn little kid. I could go without TV for days without even complaining, if that was the sentence passed down in the wake of some misbehavior of mine. I could sit in my highchair all morning, refusing to eat my oatmeal, if I felt like it. I could go weeks without doing a single ounce of schoolwork, and there was simply nothing anyone could do about it. So I could obviously refuse to think about my own death, if the stakes were this high.

I had known somewhere in the quiet recesses of my mind that the death of someone close to me would make me vulnerable to thoughts of my own mortality. But through thirteen years, the closest I had come to the death of someone I knew was a friend’s father, and that had been far enough removed as to not seem terribly real. It would be another two years before anyone I was even blood-related to would die, and then it would be my Great Uncle Eddie, an emphysema victim, who had seemed to have both feet—and one leg all the way up to the knee—in the grave for all of the time I’d known him. Hearing how his body temperature had risen so quickly just before his death that the skin on his face had split open and his eyes had bulged out of his head before they could pack him in a tub of ice to die, would certainly shake me up, but only in that way that watching a bad car crash on TV is scary or upsetting. It would still seem too foreign and faraway to touch my core.

But then, it had snuck up on me. How was I to know that some combination of the tragic death of Thomas J. and a lunatic babysitter’s earth- and glassward plunge would suddenly have me facing the truth about my own death? How was I to know that I’d be sitting there in my soft but stubbornly unadjustable seat and find myself acutely aware of what it would feel like if I were the one lying there in all that broken glass, looking up through the jagged hole I’d just made in the roof, as the life flickered out of me? How was I to know that the mental image of the underside of that bloodied, broken, glass roof would suddenly send me to a moment decades later, lying in some strange adjustable bed, my loved ones gathered around me, feeling my organs shutting down, the blood moving up my appendages toward the trunk of my body, my vision blurring and my thoughts jumping about, bits of my life replaying on the movie screen in my head, all alone in my own private theatre as The Nothingness consumed me?

I had felt myself lying in those cold sheets, my head propped up on too many pillows, surrounded by the faceless, but surely important, people of my future life, and I’d found that the feeling that overwhelmed everything else—the pain, the apprehension, the disconnection—was loneliness. There I would be, lying in that bed, presumably covered in as many afghans and heating blankets as I’d need, people holding my hands and telling me it was okay to let go, and all I would feel, all I would see and hear and smell, would be cold, empty, loneliness. The bottomless, hollow, stainless steel emptiness of how purely and truly alone I’d be at the moment of my death. And that’s when I realized the truth I’d been avoiding for my entire life: at the moment of your death, you’re powerless and totally alone. No one can help you, no one can understand what’s happening to you, and no one—no one—can share it with you. Your death is your own, more than anything else is.

So here I was, kneeling on the floor of this strange bathroom, knowing—knowing—what it was going to be like to die. Knowing that I actually would die. Feeling the first real fear of my life—the same fear which would certainly envelope me as my life eventually, inevitably slipped away.

And that was it. I had given into the temptation. Suddenly, and without any complicity on my part, I had faced my own mortality head on, and now, based on the pounding of my heart, the throbbing of my brain, the tingling of my skin, I found that I had certainly been right in my attempt to avoid ever thinking about it. I had crossed that line; I had allowed my mind to wander to the forbidden place, and the moment of my death had arrived. This was certainly what it must feel like. Any one of these earth-rattling heartbeats would surely be the last. Any one of these mental images of the extreme empty loneliness of death would surely be the last thought I’d think.

But then, I didn’t die that day. Eventually it crossed my mind that I had been thinking about dying for quite a while, but I hadn’t yet died. I picked myself up off the floor, wiped off my mouth with a brown paper towel, and shuffled back to the theatre.

Instead of losing my life, I found that I’d lost the ability to control my own thoughts. I don’t remember a single second of the rest of that movie. Or many of the days that followed. For hours it just kept repeating in my head, over and over again.

I. Will. Die.
I. Will. Die.
I. Will. Die.

At some point later that day, other words and images started to make their way back into my thoughts: many of the different ways that I could die; the fact that I might know long in advance that it was coming or that it could happen suddenly, without warning; the fact that apparently, based on the onscreen death of Thomas J. (this was before Home Alone 2; it wasn’t yet as painfully obvious what a blessing the death of a Macaulay Culkin character was), it could come at any time, at any age, young or old. It seemed that thoughts of my own death were like some strange mental self-flagellation. I just couldn’t stop myself.

Much of my freshman year of high school went on this way. Every day I’d envision a new way I could die. What if I fell out of this chair and impaled myself on the pencil in my pocket, piercing my femoral artery? I’d bleed out right here in Mr. DellaPietra’s English class, and there’d be nothing anyone could do about it. What if I bent down to tie my sneaker while waiting for the bus in the morning, and the bus driver had been out binge-drinking all night and no longer had the motor skills to negotiate the turn right before my house? My mailbox and I would be shmooshed against a tree before I could even look up, crushed together until the paramedics would barely be able to discern which bits were me and which bits were mailbox. What if my barely-meat hamburger from the school cafeteria carried some new and yet-to-be discovered African bacteria? I’d be the first recorded case, and my skin would boil and fall right off, and my eyes would turn black and rot right out of their sockets before my liver would rupture pus and bile into my stomach cavity, eating a hole through me from the inside out.

And it was in every moment of my day. I’d sneeze and my next heartbeat would come a moment too late, and I’d be sure this was it. I’d have a mild headache behind my left eye and know that the tumor was only a few days away from taking away my ability to speak. I’d see a manhole cover and know that if I walked anywhere near it, the road would cave in, crushing me and three innocent bystanders beyond recognition.

I’ve never been religious; I’ve never had much faith in anything. I realized during those months that my natural inclination is to believe that death truly is the end. Nothing follows. It’s a dreamless sleep without the sleep. One just blinks out of existence. And worse than that, everyone else just keeps going on. They just keep existing. The world just keeps moving forward. Science and literature and film and music and sports and soap operas and politics and technology and Dick Clark and ideas and inflation and porn and QVC. New varieties of Diet Cherry Vanilla Ham and Cheese No Carb Extra Fizz Zero Calorie Pepsi. Everything just keeps on keeping on. As if nothing happened. Because, really, nothing is exactly what did happen. One’s death is the birth of one’s nothing.

As time moved forward, and the days and months grew shorter, I could feel myself sinking back into the comfort of shielding my mind from the truth of my own mortality. Those words and pictures and situations slowly faded into the background, gradually drowned out by the noise of the moment, of other ideas and fantasies and regrets and fears. But their echo remained, humming along just beneath the surface din. Not that I’m not still terrified of death, but perhaps I’m just a slightly more regular person who understands that it just is, there’s nothing I can do about it, and it’s probably a waste of energy to worry about it all the time. But it’s always there. I can always send myself right back to the way I felt that day that Rebecca De Mornay taught me how it feels to die. I can always bring on that cold sweat, that nausea. And I can always—always—feel the cold, the emptiness, the infinite solitude of that oncoming instant.

• • •

Of course, it did eventually come. That moment I had feared and resisted and ignored and denied certainly did come. And as the cold, shivering, futile acceptance of it passed through me, I found myself back in that movie theatre bathroom; I found that I’d never really made it out of there. I had indeed died there that day; thinking about it had killed me.

As I slunk down to the floor, I could feel the knot which tied me to my flesh starting to give way. And here it was. As the millennia of that tiny instant unfolded, I found the surprise of dying: Release. Life’s one final moment isn’t consumed by fright or cold or loneliness. It is satisfying. It is safe. It is comfortable. And it is a relief.

The end of life is the singularity of it, the very tiny, very big bang of existence. In it there is infinite density, infinite volume. And with it, all consequence is lost. The events which precede it simply lack the power to influence anything which follows. Once the thread of causality is broken, only the free and empty ether remains. It isn’t that the answers no longer matter; it’s that the questions no longer exist.

There certainly was pain: the pain of this machine finally groaning to a halt, its gears rusty, its pistons tired. But the pain was gone almost as soon as it came, fading away as sensation collapsed in on itself, replaced only by its long, familiar echo.

As I lay there, the cold porcelain stood tall and resolute before me. I reached into the water, the pouring, pouring water, and it was clean and cool and fresh, and all was new.

————

The above was my third submission to Professor Listro’s Narrative Nonfiction class.