Column: Death an 'awfully big adventure'

By Polina Yamshchikov, Columnist
Sept. 28, 2007

I think about death a lot.

I know that sounds morbid, but I don't think it is. There's nothing wrong with a fascination with that moment of ending, of ceasing to exist. In fact, it's probably unhealthy to push it away and pretend as though it will never come for you. And it would be a waste not to think about it.

After all, death is a terribly, terribly interesting subject; it is the one thing, besides birth, that will happen to every last one of us. It is something that unites us. Inevitably, we will all experience death: First vicariously, through the loss of those close to us or those peripherally related to us or even those whom we have never met but whose names we read out of the newspapers, and then personally, our own last moments.

It's something that terrifies us. Death is uncertainty; it is unpredictability.

Perhaps to say that death terrifies us is inaccurate. Perhaps it is not that we fear the actual moment of ending itself, but we fear what it implies.

Death is irrevocably final. It is something from which you cannot simply recover and get back up again. It is the point at which there is no return and at which apologies and their acceptances have come too late.

In a way, I have to think of death with a sort of reverence. It is the root of all of our fears, and it that black terror at the edge of our nightmares. We like order in our lives. We like schedules and to-do lists and neatly ranked accomplishments on resumes. And how on earth do you factor death into that? It is the unexpected variable, the one thing that throws off all our plans and foils accomplishments-to-be. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, it can strike at any moment. You could be crossing the street. You could be sitting in a meeting. You could be in your car, in a hospital bed, in a park.

My grandfather died when my dad was 10. They were playing ball in the backyard, and he had a massive heart attack. My grandmother was making dinner. You are there, and then, quite unexpectedly, you are not.

What I'm most afraid of is not my own death, but rather the deaths of those closest to me. I think about my parents dying and about my sister dying, and it makes me feel sick and trapped and lonely.

I don't know how you cope with something like that, begin to fill that void and return to normalcy. A little boy died on my first shift as an emergency medical technician. I think about his mother a lot. I think about how when he was born, she must have held him in her arms and thought about the kind of man he would grow up to be. It catches us by surprise, doesn't it?

That kind of loss is beyond any comprehension. It is too sudden, too sharp, too raw. Too traitorous.

Hey, I'm 19 years old. I can't imagine all of this coming to an end. But when it does, whenever it comes for me, I hope I'm ready.

I think I will be, or at least I'll find myself more prepared than I would have expected. I think we all will be, in that moment when we turn our heads and say, "Oh! Hello, then." In a way, we've been preparing ourselves to leave this world since the day we entered it. I'm afraid, but I'm also not afraid.

To die, in the words of Peter Pan, will be an awfully big adventure.

pbyrmf@mizzou.edu

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Column: Death an 'awfully big adventure'

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