In recent years I’ve heard the phrase “death comes in three’s” a million times over—from other people and from the voice inside my head. I’d never heard this phrase before, until last year when one of my best friends had to endure the deaths of three people very close to her. She kept telling me, “They say that death comes in three’s, I’m scared of who will be next.”
I didn’t think much of it then but when my grandfather died this past December, that phrase was one of the first things to pop into my head. Since his passing, I swear that not a day has gone by where those four words don’t pass through my mind—they’ve become a mantra, a nightmare.
I sat on the edge of my seat, biting my nails, for almost five months and in May, we got news that my great-aunt had died on her birthday. It was during finals week at school, so I wasn’t able to go down to Kentucky to grieve with my family, which is something I’ll always regret. Around the time that my great-aunt had passed, we also got news that my uncle, who had been battling cancer for four years, only had months to live.
At this point, I started talking to my dad about my fears, how I was afraid that “death comes in three’s” was true. When he didn’t deny that he too thought that there was truth in the phrase, I began preparing for that tragic phone call.
On July 14, my mom came running into my room at nine a.m., jarring me from sleep, to tell me that my uncle had died in his sleep that morning. I ran on autopilot the moment that those words came out of her mouth. We live six hours away from my mom’s hometown in Kentucky so we had to pack and haul ass to get down there to be with my aunt and cousin in record time.
I became so paranoid with the idea of losing someone else close to me that I dissociated myself from the situation—I didn’t cry, I just went through the motions. I held my aunt and assured her everything would be okay, I answered my cousin’s questions and held her for hours upon hours.
I was stupid to believe that if I prepared myself for death, I would be okay, that I wouldn’t grieve as much and that I could move forward with my life. Death has always been something that, in my youth, affected me very deeply. I had hoped that as I got older and more familiar and accepting, it wouldn’t set my mental health back like it used to.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that death sucks, which is something everyone in the world already knows. I thought I had spent months preparing for my family members to die, but nothing can ever truly prepare you, no matter how desensitized you think you’ve become.
