content warning: death, suicidal ideation
what kind of corpse will you leave behind?
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 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 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.
much, much later, my grandmother on my dad’s side passed too. she fought with dementia for the last decade of her life, and all i know her by are vague memories of wrinkled hands and gray hair. i feel cruel for this remembrance of her, as foggy as i’m sure her memories of a little grandchild were. all that’s left are ashes buried in a little plot hidden away in the mountains of western China, oceans away from me now. and even when i visited i was forbidden from going to visit her grave by the cold and uncaring hand of logistics. my uncle told me after he passes, there will be no one left to visit her on grave cleaning day. i wept.
nonexistence scared — scares, present tense — 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, computer 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 high school years being grateful for my cowardice, my inability to act on any of those urges. but i flirted with death once or twice, wondered if i could perform the ultimate act of self-minimization and finally rid the world of the burden that was me, free the space i had so selfishly hogged. mom and dad wouldn’t fight so much. i wouldn’t take opportunities away from anyone else. my younger siblings would have a better role model. if, as everyone insisted, our goal as humans on earth was to leave our world better than we found it, why couldn’t i achieve it by leaving the world?
i’m better now, and i know that it wasn’t cowardice that saved me, but self-preservation; and i know now too that though doubt about my self-worth and my right to take up space may creep in, i am deserving of the grace i would extend to anyone else. and if you too sympathize with some of these thoughts, know that we are aboard the same boat in this rocky river and i will row alongside you. i love you.
at the risk of grossly oversimplifying, two factors intervened: the first was that as much as i have tried to change this, i am afraid of being hurt. i don’t want to feel it, and suicide would have made me, and i simply could not bring myself to weigh the two hurts — one of existing, one of not — and make a choice. so inaction, continuing to exist, became the only decision.
the second, and perhaps more motivating factor was that i am afraid of hurting others. having someone who’s died by suicide in your life is linked to having higher rates of suicidal thoughts. i, selfishly, had made so many friends, reached out across the social gulfs and joined myself into a web of people; and now that i had linked hands with so many, could i then sever those connections so abruptly and violently? no. never. the cost — even if it were just a small increase to their risk — was far too great.
to address this cost, i debated what i’ve called “social suicide” (not related to the popular usage of the term, which can refer to either a horrifyingly embarrassing act or the far worse act of ostracizing that causes someone to be entirely othered and excluded). if i slowly cut people off, drifted apart, gave them time to adjust and adapt to my absence, then the hole i would carve in the world to escape to would not bite so many so deeply. it’s been a tempting option, recurring so often that i even fight it today. things would be so easy if i were not entangled in the world.
it just so happens that as a corollary to factor #1, i also love being happy. i surrounded myself with friends because they cheered me, made me feel lighter, showed me they cared, and god damn it if i wasn’t suckered by the proposition that i could be loved and deserved the air i breathed. and to deprive myself of that would have been agonizing, for both parties, regardless of how glacially i did so. eventually i came to the conclusion i belonged in this world more than i did to the void calling me.
so it is to my friends i owe my life, because without their tethering i would have long since drifted into the clouds and never come back to the earth.
now that i have “gotten better” (so to speak… these things are hardly ever linear), when death’s song comes calling it has a different refrain. i now wonder what world i will leave behind, when the time is right (and hopefully far in the future!). what will be my legacy? what kind of corpse will i leave behind?
naïveté calls me to say, simply, “a better world.” a noble aspiration for sure! but you cannot just leave it there; the ideal is nice, but the devil’s in the details. will i make a career out of helping people, of fighting for rights in the great democratic square? can i??? is politicking and elbow jostling in the legislature my destiny? or should i consign myself to the comfortable life of a corporate career, holding my nose while sinking into the muck of linkedin-isms and professional brown-nosing and emerging with a paycheck solid enough to throw at those who are truly brave enough to push for the change i’m too afraid to wear on my sleeve? god damn it, i just want to be proud of having lived. i hope i die for something. i hope i die having done something. no, i hope i lived for something.
all this to say… i have no idea what legacy i want to leave behind. i’m still thinking about it, i suppose. and maybe it’s a thing that can evolve and grow with me, and maybe that’s okay. it could even be good, with time. and that’s all i can give it.
i have spent ages writing and deleting and editing and rewriting this post. mainly because every time i make more than a few paragraphs’ worth of progress i inevitably tear up and have to take a break… thank you, dear reader, for dealing with my disorganized ramblings on a subject both forever foreign and yet deeply intimate to me. know that even as i grieve and mourn the myriad deaths that life brings me, i also find new life and love everywhere i look, and i hope that i never stop.