Behind every spurious curtain of hope, accomplishment and success resides the incessant slayer of death. Inconspicuous beneath relationships, milestones and firsts, are goodbyes, endings and tragic lasts. If life is a journey, the destination is death. A confounding aspect, the opposite of birth, death lies hidden, waiting. Some say for every death someone is born, but the tradeoff is never equal. The day Neil Armstrong died, Snooki's son was born. Death is a stealthy stalker, death is omnipresent. Some people must meet death early, some later than others, no one can escape it. One of the greatest ironies of life is that you can not live without dying, nor can you die without living.
The somewhat paradoxical aspects of death have always terrified me, even as a child believing the deceased person had just entered a deep, long peaceful sleep. As a young child, I was afraid of a plethora of other things, thunder, spiders, heights and the like, but even to this day, I am still wary of the dark shadow lurking around, never leaving. From hovering around me as I panicked on my first roller coaster to retreating to the corner during my elementary school graduation, from each great success to every humiliating failure, it was always waiting, slowly following me till the day it could conquer my soul, trudging around me, impatient for a life to take, staying only to snatch away my youth, my memories, my identity, so all that could remain would be my lifeless carcass, yet another one of its victims.
I clearly remember the day I overcame the majority of this fear, though it still does return to haunt me on dark stormy nights or when the floor boards creak despite my being alone. It was November, late into fall, and the last of the splendid, vibrant tumbling leaves had long since traversed to the soggy, barren ground, leaving only the occasional twig snap. The wind howled , sending hollow chills up my quivering spine. I stamped through the damp leaf piles, heaving my loaded backpack along with me as I dragged home.
As I plowed through the door to my house, I immediately felt something wrong with the atmosphere. Despite dropping to the negatives in the morning the house was unheated, and there were no lights on, though the diminishing sunlight illuminated only enough to just barely see my hand in front of my face. Kicking off my shoes, I closed the door behind me, shuddering as it omnously creaked close. My backpack landed on the floor with a thud, and the inauspicious noises hung in the dead air, no sign of life anywhere in the house. I looked around. Everything was the same as I'd left it, the same jacket hanging from the chair, the dirty, accumulating pile of mismatched socks towering near the stair case, the same scatter of books on the table, my science textbook lying open to the same page as yesterday, everything was the same, chaos, but normal chaos for our family.
"Mom, you there?" I said tentatively, the words suspended in my throat, afraid to seep out. No response. That was until I heard it. Faint at first, it grew, until it became clearly. Someone was sobbing wildly upstairs.
