My first brush with death was at age six, and it was all because of a book.
That might sound a little dramatic, but when you’re six, a book can be terrifying. A book opens up a world of ideas that you may not have had full awareness of previously, providing examples that hit you in the metaphorical balls.
Hell, I’m a librarian. Don’t get me started on the power of books, perhaps best demonstrated by those who call for book removals from libraries. Heaven forbid that we mention sex, the act that brought us to this Earth and the source of so much pleasure or pain, depending on the situation. Discuss mistreatment of minorities in our country that persists to this day? Cause for concern if you ask the uber-conservative parents in some school districts. People who worship differently than you, whose spirituality and understanding of our existence took a different path than yours? My own mother can’t open up her mind to anyone other than Catholics; should I be surprised that there are others out there who call Harry Potter “blasphemous?”
Again, I digress. The book I’m talking about here wouldn’t fall into any of those categories, because it discusses something we’re all too familiar and in agreement with — death. Loss. And the grief that we endure as we heal and move forward with our own lives.
It was a simple picture book about the death of a pet dog. On glossy, bright white pages with illustrations crafted in calming watercolors, a boy tells the story of his beloved family pet as it ages from puppy to adult to senior dog. In the end, the dog succumbs to failing health issues brought upon by nothing more than time.
When I put it like that, I don’t feel so foolish telling you that it was terrifying. Because think about that. If it happened to that dog in the book, then it could happen to my dog. To Jenny, our little black and white beagle mix. She wasn’t a spring chicken anymore. I was never old enough to appreciate her youth, her having already been about four years old by the time I was born. I had enough fingers to calculate this math as I lay in my bed in the dark at night, Molly lightly snoring to my left. If this bedtime story had any impact on her, it didn’t show.
The book tried to put a positive spin on the whole thing, being a kid’s book and all. The boy feels sad for quite some time, but in the end he moves forward with his own life. He adopts a new puppy but, as the author made clear, he did not replace the old dog. He would always love the old dog. He would always miss her.
After my mother kissed us goodnight and left our room, I jumped out of bed to rip this book out of its place on my pink bookshelf. It would need a more secluded location, somewhere that it couldn’t just pop into my life again. Under the bed wasn’t even good enough; I squeezed it between my mattress and box spring, hoping to forget about it forever. Hoping to banish the realization of death from my mind.
Don’t we all do this, every day? Act as if we’re going to live forever? Push thoughts of death aside until something happens to someone, and we’re slapped in the face with mortality?
That day was the first day that I felt it. I felt the heat creep along my body, from head to toes, my chest tightening and my breath momentarily catching. My mind, attempting to wrap its punitive concept of consciousness around the fact that, one day, it would be over.
And not just for me. For all the people and animals that I loved, too. In fact, they’d go first, statistically speaking.
My dog, my Jenny — she was going to die one day.
You know who else was old? My grandparents. They were the oldest people I knew well, so they automatically qualified as dangerously close to death. Looking back, I hate to admit that they were only about 55 at that point. Not far from where I am now.
My parents were raising me Catholic, so they kept things very hunky-dory in the death department. My mother had talked about heaven before, and she reassured me that the boy in the book would see his dog again one day when he died and went to heaven himself. She reminded me to be good and say my prayers so that I’d go to heaven one day, too.
In my head, I pictured heaven as a gold palace on a ground of white clouds, surrounded by bright blue sky. Did I conjure this image myself, or did I borrow it from one of the many picture books that my mother let me read during Mass? No matter; it was only slightly reassuring. I was quite content on Earth, thank you very much. Heaven could wait, and God didn’t need to take my people or my pets.
Perhaps he could leave us right here on Earth forever, instead, I reasoned. I amended my prayers from that night forward, asking God not only to bless all of my family and friends, but also to “let nobody ever die and let everybody live forever, Amen.” It was a refrain that I would repeat each night until I realized, as a teen, just how redundant and frivolous it was.
Going to sleep was tough that night. I wish I could say that I grew out of my fear of death, but does anyone? That night was only the first of many nights peppered throughout my life where I was restless, looking up at a dark ceiling, trying to tame my wild heartbeat as I felt the finiteness of my situation.
I was going to die, I realized, and so was everyone that I loved.