Nothing Happens When We Die
When asked what he believes happens to us when we die, Bob the Drag Queen said without ambiguity nor a waver in his voice, “Nothing.” He continued to say that we go back to wherever we were before we were born. Life is exhausting, and he couldn’t imagine sitting in heaven watching generation after generation of people he doesn’t know from some big place in the skies. When I heard his words, the turning of my stomach reminded me of my own feelings about death.
Death has always been a mean, nasty little ulcer eating away at the insides of my stomach. My first time understanding that one day, I and everyone I know will die happened in the 5th grade. We finished reading Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic, a historical fiction about a young girl transported to 1942 to not only witness the death and torture of her ancestors in the Holocaust but to be subjected to the same horrors. Up until now, my education had been treated with a polite nod to the atrocities of the world. Martin Luther King Jr. valued peace and equality (his assassination quickly addressed). Harriet Tubman served her country proudly and freed enslaved people (the permanent head injury that left her with delusions after an overseer beat her with a metal bar unacknowledged). Sacagawea bravely guided Lewis and Clark in their expedition of the west (her forced marriage to a Quebecois trapper at the age of 13 shrugged at).
When we watched the movie as a forerunner to the written work, it unearthed a sorrow I didn’t know my 10-year-old heart could feel. In the nights that followed, I had nightmares. A really bad one catapulted me out of my sleep into my parents' arms. I didn’t tell them the contents of my nightmare, which I think are too graphic for me to even commit to words, but I told them that I was scared to die. They exchanged what-the-fuck glances and approached their next words with deliberate hesitation.
“What do you mean?” I can’t remember if it was my mother or father asking, but a sudden realization came over me. It scares people to know how scared you are of death. My parents were scared of me. I adjusted my response and told them that I was afraid to die when I was old. This relieved them.
“That won’t happen for a long time.” But I knew this wasn’t certain. Jane Yolen taught me that kids die, too. And even if I was fortunate enough to live 100 years, a hundred years still felt incredibly short. A hundred years still feels incredibly short.
I accepted my parent’s comfort, knowing it wasn’t enough—even though I wanted it to be. I tried to forget about death, but the following year, my granddaddy died.
That’s the funny thing about living. You can always count on someone to die. The kid from a pool party you went to falls a couple hundred feet during a hike. A boy who invited you to a prom after party at his parent's house doesn’t wake up in his freshman dorm room. Your friend from graduate school passes away from a long bout of illness. The matriarch of your family collapses of a heart attack on the bathroom floor alone.
Death has danced alongside me my entire life. She’s a horrible companion, and I’ve refused to be kind to her. She stinks. She’s mean. She’s cruel. She’s greedy. She’s self-centered. She’s obnoxious. And yet, she always gets her way.
Nothing happens when I die, but it’s not nothing to me.
