Death has a way of making everything seem trivial. All the rushing, all the worrying, and the drama just feels foolish when staring down the face of death. So far I can’t seem to get death to leave me alone. Even when it isn’t the focus in my life, it’s there, hanging in the winds, ready to pounce at a moment’s notice.
I learned that death existed when I was 11 and my father died of breast cancer. Since this was my first real encounter with it, I didn’t really know what it meant to die. So far, I had only seen death through the eyes of my dead goldfish. I knew that my Dad was sick, but I didn’t know that it meant he would soon be gone forever. Subconsciously, I think my 11 year old mind must have known something was about to be erased for good. Every time my Dad would walk in a room I had the sudden urge to wrap my arms around him. He was tall, dark haired, and frequently smelled of Ralph Lauren cologne. He loved peanut butter cookies, would watch “Sabrina The Teenage Witch” with me without complaint and knew all the words to John Mellencamp’s songs. One day during the second year of his diagnosis, I went with him to his chemotherapy appointment. I sat in the cold, green leather chair next to him and watched television while machines pumped chemicals into his weakening body. He looked up from his Dan Brown novel, smiled, and said, “Look Julia, they have all the good golf channels here!” He died three months later at 44 years old. What I remember most from his funeral was burning my finger on the ceiling light of the limo we took to the cemetery. It was the first limo I had ever ridden in, which was only one of the reasons I didn’t want to get out when we finally arrived at the mausoleum. Every year I seem to forget a little bit more about him. First it was the sound his footsteps made, then his smile, and recently, the way he talked. One thing that I’ll never forget was his love for reading. As the years went on without him, literature helped guide me through the life lessons he couldn’t teach me.
When I was 17, I got my hands on the novel “Twilight” by Stephanie Meyers. It was the height of the vampire movement and “twilight” was paraded around my friend group as the best vampire novel, “of all time!” Edward Cullen had to think about death quite frequently as he considered killing his girlfriend and drinking her blood on the daily. He was moody, mumbled and took everything to the extremes. As a teenage girl, I totally understood where he was coming from. Bella, his doomed girlfriend, also contemplated the meaning of life in a way only a 17 year old can do. In the prologue of the first book, Bella decides that facing death is worth it since death itself brought her to Edward. “I knew that if I’d never gone to Forks, I wouldn’t be facing death now. But, terrified as I was, I couldn’t bring myself to regret the decision.” My father wasn’t a vampire, at least to my knowledge, but death had brought him to my mother, too. They met the night before he was scheduled to receive his first chemotherapy session. When he said that he would be going alone, she smoothly insisted on accompanying him. They fell in love as his body healed only to find that 15 years later the cancer would come back with vengeance, this time beating him in the battle. My mother still says she would do it again, and choose him and those 13 years of love over a lifetime with anyone else. At 17, I felt confident that Bella would say the same.
Even with “Twilight” showing me what it could look like to grieve, I wasn’t ready to deal with how I felt about losing a parent. I was content with masking my true feelings with trashy MTV shows and sour candy. I was sad, but full of processed sugar and way too much knowledge on the O.C. Then during my junior year of high school, my dog died. The death of a family pet is something many people deal with, but for me it was final straw added to a pile of pain. I could wrap my head around the finality of losing my family pet in ways that were still inflammable to me with my father. All it took was one week for my dog to show signs of sickness and one more for her to die in her sleep on the cold kitchen tile. This was the dog that had loved my father the most, the one who laid by the door waiting for him to come home after he passed and the last one that would ever hear his voice. If she was gone, a part of him that had stayed with me after he left was gone, too. The dog was suppose to die first, not a parent, but for me the dog’s death meant that both losses were real. Months later, a friend recommended the novel “The Art of Racing in the Rain” by Garth Stein. The novel is told from the perspective of a dog named Enzo. Enzo has the storytelling skills Marley could have only dream of. He took me through the story of his life from his own perspective, and helped me realize that maybe, there was a purpose behind all my pain. Enzo taught me the importance of bringing love and happiness to the people and places we encounter while on Earth.
I tried to take Enzo’s spirit with me as I moved through the end of high school and entered college. Luckily, my college years were more consumed with drinking than death. I spent my 20s learning how to be a teacher, and thinking about death only when I saw it on television. However, everything changed this past spring with I was again reminded of the fragility of life. I was in the middle of my fifth year of teaching when I got a call from my best friend. Her brother, a friend himself, had been diagnosed with cancer. By mid-May I woke up to a text letting me know that he had passed overnight. He was 38 years old. I spent the weekend crying for my friend and the years ahead that her brother would never see. Now that death had returned, it felt like it had never left. The week he passed, I was finishing discussions on the novel “The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak with my students. In the “The Book Thief” Death is embodied as the narrator. Death describes the life of the main character Liesel and the losses she experiences as a child. He follows Liesel and is never far from her, sweeping in to take a soul when tragedy strikes. I spoke with my students about Liesel’s steadfast character even in the midst of heartbreak. She doesn’t live in constant fear of death, but rather with a special kind of bravery that comes from knowing it exists but not relenting to it.
Death describes Liesel’s reaction after another tragedy in her life as, “She did not say goodbye. She was incapable, and after a few more minutes at his side, when was she was able to tear herself from the ground. It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on…”
As I packed my bags to leave for my friend’s funeral, I thought about death and all the stories that had helped me understand it throughout the years. Bella, Enzo and Liesel taught me that death can often feel like different things when encountered in the midst of life, but one thing I can never let it feel like is the end to my story.
Cloverandbelle 