Why Death is for Me | Part 1: "Death Happens"

She was just a sophomore in college, and she was dead.

I had passed her in the middle school hallways between classes and seen her laughing with friends. Although she and I never really knew each other, I still remembered her.

Every day on the bus, I would hear secondhand jokes and opinions of hers through my friend. He spoke about her like she was the best thing since sliced bread. His eyes lit up when he said her name: Raven. Raven this. Raven that.

When my social media was flooded with her name, all I could think about was him.

I remember sitting next to another friend throughout her service, wishing I could be next to him instead. I had already been touched by death... If I could just be close to him and will it hard enough, maybe I could transfer my old, healed pain to him and take away his new, raw sadness.

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Years before, my family lost my aunt to a heart attack. And while death is not unique, my Aunt Claudia sure was. She had a smile as wide as the Grand Canyon, and we all marveled at her beauty. Her laugh was more like a cackle, and her singing voice was a gift. Some might say she had a flair for the dramatic, but nearly all would say that the same giant heart that caused her departure, gave lots of love to the world. Her exit from the land of the living was surreal—like something out of a movie. No one saw it coming, and no one was prepared.

Our family gathered together with food, alcohol, more food, and prayer—all to ease the pain. The company was good, and the food was soothing. The joy the alcohol brought out in the adults sitting around the table reminiscing almost made it feel like a holiday. But the somber moments were hard. As I watched my family pray the novenario, I didn't feel the same comfort as those kneeling in the room clutching their rosaries—I felt terror.

The repetitive nature of the prayer, the rocking bodies in chorus... It felt more like a menacing chant or a conjuring, rather than a loving prayer out of Limbo. They repeated the "Hail Mary" like holy robots. Some of them choked back tears, while others repeated their prayers with an empty, solemn gaze.

Night after night I tried to participate but found myself on the edge of hyperventilating. I couldn't understand the loss. I couldn't understand the ritual. I could only understand that death was unfair and that God shouldn't have taken her, leaving us in this Groundhog Day of 9 nights begging for her soul's entry to heaven.

I began to have dreams about my closest family members dying. In one, my family surrounded a casket. Each time my eyes looked inside of it, the person laying there was a different family member, like some morbid wheel of fortune. When the casket of chance had finally chosen a victim to settle on, it was my beloved Grandmother. The horror I felt woke me and I immediately ran down the hallway in tears, flinging open her door. She was in bed, sleeping with the sleep apnea machine hooked up to her as usual, with my snoring grandpa next to her.

When I told her why I was crying, she told me in Spanish: "Dammit, Whitney, you cursed me! Now I'll have to live way too long." With that, she also reminded me that death, although I had prolonged it for her with my dream, would come for us all. No matter how much I dreaded the thought, she would die one day, and I would live on until it was my turn.

"I want to die first" I told her.

Once the fog of grief settled, I didn't find a real reason for the loss of my aunt—except for the fact that death happens. As adult humans, we know it is inevitable. But as a child discovering what the end of life really meant, death being a fact of life just wasn't a good enough explanation.

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When I went to Raven's funeral, I thought I had gone in support of my friends and the community. But, as I got older, I realized it was more than that: I had just come face to face with my own mortality.

Raven was beloved. Her service filled two rooms full of mourners processing the unforeseen loss of life. She had received a scholarship and gone to college, made new friends and was on track to nothing but success. If the world could just pluck such an important and cherished life right out of existence, what did it all mean? What was it all for? In comparison to her, I had very little going for myself, yet I was still allowed to roam the earth waiting tables and picking my nose.

I had mourned and grieved the death of my aunt and felt true loss. But Raven's death affected me in a different way; it was so far away, yet so close. I couldn't imagine my life being stopped mid-sentence like that, and for the first time I was realizing that it could. No one could be saved. We were all going to die.

However long I was destined to live, I would also have to endure the loss that came along with knowing other living beings. Witnessing it, living through it, fearing it, never knowing when the next shoe was going to drop. Or—for that matter—how many shoes there actually were "up there" to be dropped.

Eventually, what seemed like a big steel-toed boot would fall from the sky, changing my view of death forever. I would learn just how nuanced loss can be, and that "one-size-fits-all" does not apply to grief. Instead of fearing death and grief, I would somehow learn to befriend it, and use that superpower to comfort those who still had yet to do so.

And so has begun my life in death. Whitney: Future Mortician and Funeral Director.

END OF PART ONE.