remembrance, legacy, and death

when i was little, i would routinely scare myself by thinking about death. i think this is something everyone does for the most part, so it doesn’t make me very special.

i would go about my day like normal, but in the quiet moments, like waiting for the shower to get warm, i would start to think. and the fear of the unbecoming would creep up on me, slowly at first, hairs on the nape of my neck rising, before it snowballed into a deep and unsettling conclusion about the nothingness that awaited me, the final dissolution of all the atoms that comprised “me.” it would stun me, locking me to the porcelain side of the tub, watching as the water began to run cold.

funnily enough i was still a fairly devout christian during that time too. i’d not found god per se but there were rules to follow, divinely promised morals to uphold, and i was comfortable enough in doing that. but i never had any delusions about heaven. i professed to believe it existed; who wouldn’t want such a beautiful thing to exist? an eternal paradise for those who did good in the brief blip of time they spent upon the earth. but i think subconsciously i knew when i died, i had no guarantees. i hoped heaven was real. but i still allowed myself to be wholly swallowed by the dread that nonexistence brought upon me.

i didn’t cry much back then. but now when i think of the things that scared me most about death i do weep. what would i leave my family behind with? would my friends still remember me? would i leave the world having made it better? what legacy would little me have?

my grandmother on my mom’s side had died before i was born, due to health complications, right around when my family immigrated to the US. until my mom’s miscarriage, that was the only “death” i’d been familiar with, and it was a world away, time a thick glass barrier between my grandmother and any grief i could summon up.

姥姥，我爱你。我想你。我一直到现在为止都没有好好的纪念你。我对不住你。

miscarriage itself is not really death. we grieve for it in a similar way, i suppose. anytime there is death, we mourn what could have been. i never got to meet my first little sister. i don’t remember much of that experience, either. i remember the bubbling, building excitement, my mom’s sonograms. and then one day it just vanished. i don’t even remember when the news broke. i want to say i was there, my dad’s arm around my crying mom’s shoulder, but i think those might be my mind grasping for memories of an event i should have carved into my mind more. instead i let it wash away with the tides. there was a life we were preparing to celebrate, and then it never came.

a few years later, my mother successfully had my little sister. she is a true light in my life. i am forever grateful she made it, she exists, she is real.

nonexistence scared me a lot, is all i’m saying. to blink out of existence — or to never exist, i suppose — is a terrifying prospect. a star fading from the night sky… would that be my fate?

then i became an angsty teenager. it just sort of happened, and i still do apologize for it today.

i found out certain things about myself. the way the world, my parents, my friends saw me, and the way i understood myself began to diverge, and it diverged really fucking fast. and out of that incongruity spawned my good friend undiagnosed mental illness. this, i’ve found, is also not very unique amongst most teens.

i think i staved off wanting to kill myself longer than most. after all, i told myself, what reason did i have to commit suicide? i had loving parents, good grades, a decent friend group, internet access. the world at my fingertips. but you can drown in an inch of water or the ocean, and slowly my resistance bubbled away.

i spent the better part of my teenage years playing therapist for online friends, so i knew what suicidal thoughts looked like, the form they took… nights spent on the phone, angry outbursts, feeling like the whole world is unseeing and you’re someone’s only lifeline. i resolved to never put someone else through the same thing. sure, would it be easier to just… stop? to give up. to cut everyone off and fade into obscurity? yeah. but i loved too much to ever consider it seriously. i knew the statistics. having a person die by suicide in your life sharply increases your own risk for it. not to mention i was very, very familiar with the stress it placed on those who cared about you.

didn’t stop me from dreaming about it, sometimes. maybe i’d make the world better by leaving it; it would certainly be easier to stomach. sometimes i even started the inklings of a plan. i’d slowly drift away from everyone who had made the terrible mistake of caring about me; commit suicide socially first. that’s the trick, you see… once i had shed those terrible tethers of relationships, obligations, being perceived and god forbidden loved or even just cared about… then i could be truly free.

i’m at the age where i’ve met enough people that some of them may start dying. it’s sobering, to say the least. i can’t mourn my own situation more than i do the true tragedies of my friends losing loved ones; my dread is simply that, fear boiling over. so i channel it here. my heart aches for those who leave, making it all the worse i yearn for it sometimes.

the good news is that those feelings have gradually subsided. mostly with being busy, but also with surrounding myself with people whose love have started to rub off on me. if they love me, surely i ought to love myself too, yeah?

in turn, though, it makes me worry about the previously-unthinkable. now that i want to live for myself, now that i have friends who make living worthwhile… what should i do if i lose that? it’s a fear of a different flavor; now i have something to lose… or perhaps i am the thing others stand to lose. now that i know how keenly my absence would be felt, how do i prepare for the inevitable?

one consequence of being terminally online is that a lot of those aforementioned friends are online. should i start thinking about writing a will? how will they find out? will my icon wink out one day, go offline for the last time? how will they know if i’m gone? will they think i just took a forever break from being their friend? is there a meaningful difference? there are friends i’ve not talked to, who haven’t touched steam in years, deleted discord accounts… will i fade away too?

i don’t have a good answer to that question yet. i still am afraid. but i’m glad for it. i’m glad i have something worth treasuring; that i might be something worth treasuring. i’d mourn myself if i died. that, i feel, is a good step in the right direction.