Occasionally, I think about my relationship with death, and how unusual it seems to be compared with almost everyone else I know. I talk to friends, to peers, and it strikes me that I became aware of mortality younger than they did, or at least personally acquainted with it in a way that most people are lucky enough to wait decades for. (This is neither a boast, nor a humblebrag; I’m not sure it’s anything good in any way, really.)
All of my grandparents were dead by the time I left high school, for example; half of them were dead by the time I entered high school — maybe three-quarters of them? The timeline of my life feels moveable and shifty before I hit, say, 15 or 16; I remember that things happened here, but they actually took place a year earlier, or two years before that. I had a head start, though; my father’s father had died, back when my father was a kid himself. The Second World War was cruel, that way.
I remember my mother’s mother dying when I was a kid, not because of the event itself but because my oldest sister’s reaction was so big and dramatic that I felt at sea; I couldn’t really comprehend what had happened, but I looked at her and thought, is that what it’s meant to be? Should I act like that? In reality, I didn’t feel that depth of loss, that shock and numbness until the last of our grandparents died years later, with me in my final year of high school and her tripping outside our house, falling and splitting her head open on the pavement. Her being taken to hospital and all of us waiting to hear the bad news in a room from a doctor who told us as if it was weightless and meaningless, just a minor update that pulled the floor out from under us.
But at that point, I’d known someone far closer to my age — a friend of that same sister — who got cancer and died, so I already knew that death wasn’t something that stayed close to older people. Within a handful of years, one of my own friends was dead after surgery failed to save her; the friend who passed on that news was dead himself not too long after.
Both of my parents were dead before I was in my 40s. (Before I was even in my mid-30s, shockingly.) I think about that sometimes and feel this strange sense of sadness towards the me I was then, because even then I’m not sure I knew how to navigate any of that, the decimation of the upper echelons of my entire family. I wish they’d lived to see what happened to me, to my sisters, to everyone. I wish they could see me now.
And somewhere in the middle of all of this, there was the time when I was in art school and a doctor accidentally told me I had leukemia and it was likely fatal, even though it wasn’t true. (A botched test was to blame; I found out the truth before too long, but we’re talking weeks rather than hours.) Having that weight on me, suddenly aware of how short all of the time was, all of the time.
All of this comes to mind as I read a book where the author talks about having to deal with loss for the first time in their early 40s, and it feels impossible to consider, to me. How could you get to that point in your life before knowing just how fragile we all are, when it comes down to it?