Nights Like These

I've always been a rather morbid girl, even as a very young child.  I've made many an adult acutely uncomfortable with my probing death-questions.  I try to imagine how I would respond to a 6 year old asking me, "But what if we just die and that's it?  What if there's no heaven and we just lie in the ground?"  What the hell is a grown-up supposed to say to that?  If most grown-ups are honest, they'd probably say something like: "Yes, that is a terrifying prospect, & one that keeps me up some nights.  But that's what the pills are for.  And honestly, I'm just too busy and have too many responsibilities to find the time to contemplate those things.  And someday, honey, you'll also be so over-extended and stressed out that you'll be entirely too exhausted to ponder ever-encroaching death."  Or something to that effect.

A death-obsessed child does not tend to grow up to be a well-adjusted non-death-obsessed adult.  The problem only builds, compounds.  One accumulates more and more terrifying information about the world from history books and news stories and personal experience.  And if one is cursed with a particularly vivid imagination, there is no end to the nightmarish scenarios one can envision.

And so on nights like tonight when I cannot direct my mind to a less distressing subject, I try to think of myself as some sort of sentinel or guardian, the keeper of death-thoughts.  I'm collecting all of the terrors in the dark so the rest of you might sleep soundly.  It's a silly thought, but it brings me some comfort.  Because I can abide all of this if I can pretend that I'm shouldering a burden and sparing others grief.  But I cannot endure the reality that I am torturing myself to absolutely no end.