When I was four years old, I thought that life was just a game being played by superior beings. The world was just one big playmat and all human beings were like life-size barbie dolls. I believed that only the bad guys and the elderly died. Death was a nice angel who took the bad people away and took the elderly to a beautiful land and helped ease their pain.
When I was nine years old, my uncle passed away. He was only forty-three years old. He was taken away so young. Forty-three-year-olds are not supposed to die unless they're a bad guy - and my uncle wasn't bad. I started to realize how cold and twisted death really is. She doesn't care if you're bad or good, she just takes away whoever the hell she wants. She made my father cry. He never cries. He told me that the only other time I would see him cry was at my wedding. Death was a reckless, selfish, evil being.
I was eleven years old when my father passed away. He didn't even get to see his fortieth birthday. I was never going to see him at my wedding when I get married. He suffered two heart attacks and survived. Death tried to take him so many times and he dodged her bullet - but death will make sure that she has things her way. Death wanted to take my father away and I'm not quite sure why to this day. Perhaps he had something that she wanted, and perhaps she just wanted to watch my family suffer even more. Death was ugly, disgusting, and vile filth.
When I was fourteen years old, I took the blame off of death. It wasn't her fault that my father had died - it was my fault. I didn't take the time to research the effects that his surgery could have had on him. I'm the one who just let him go with a kiss and a hug. I'm the one who let myself keep the false notion that everything would be okay. I was angry at myself for not doing everything I could. Why didn't I block him from leaving the house that morning? Death was not a being, death was my punishment.
When I was seventeen years old, I wanted to be dead. My depression and anxiety were starting to cripple the quality of my life. I felt like I was a failure, that I was lazy, and that I was disgusting. Nobody expressed pride in me. I was just a useless being who took up too much space by breathing. I was extremely anxious all the time. My mind told me that I was disgusting, that I was horrible, and that I needed to die. The worst part was that nobody ever knew how serious it really was. I formulated a plan and I almost did it on that dark and frigid night. I almost jumped off of the bridge over the train tracks to my death and my pain would finally be over. Death wasn't a punishment. Death wasn't horrible, or evil, or selfish - death was what got people out of this cold world. Death was what I yearned for.
I am nineteen years old now. I got help for my suicidal tendencies. I don't seek out the bottoms of bottles anymore because whenever I did that, I just wanted to "have the courage to finally do it". I'm slowly getting better and I've gotten my anxiety and depression under better control now. I've also accepted the fact that my father has passed away, and I will never see him again in the physical world. I wish that I could deny this and that denying it would strip this statement of its truth, but there is nothing that will ever reverse it. Death is the only definite truth that there is; at some point, we are all going to die, no matter who we were or what we did. Death is a fact of this weird thing that we call life.
