Death Pisses Me Off

I am obsessed with death. Not in a gothic Marilyn Manson sort of way, just in a running theme kind of way. I've known a few people who died, including my own father, and none of them has spoken to me since. That upsets me.

I am a product of my generation. I watch too much TV and read too many books. I escape reality at nearly every opportunity and I have learned something from those escapes. Dead people are supposed to talk to you afterward. They either become vampires or grim reapers or they just stick around invisibly and leave little signs to let you know they are okay. Sometimes, they appear in dreams, uttering the sort of sentimental crap they never said in life, because ghosts are inherently sentimental creatures, being dead and all. And if they can't get ahold of you that way, like if perhaps you don't dream or maybe have such nasty erotic dreams that they don't want to be anywhere near you in your sleep, they will find Whoopi Goldberg or Patricia Arquette or Jennifer Love Hewitt and have them relay a message. But so far no one has called me on behalf of my father, no mysterious attorney has handed me one last letter, entrusted to him to be delivered only upon my dad's death, telling me how much he loved me and how proud he was of me. And what few dreams I have had of my father have fallen into two basic categories: dreams where he faked his death and dreams where he hadn't died yet so I didn't know to ask or say the things I now feel the need to ask and say.

This world, or at least my little corner of it, has no permanence. It's full of second chances. Marriage has the option of divorce, pregnancy has the option of abortion, criminal records can be sealed or expunged, classes and work days can be made up if missed, everything has an escape clause or a do-over. But death, that's the one thing that has no second chance. When someone dies they are just gone. And most of the time there's no prophetic and meaningful last sentence to carve into a tombstone, no final reconciliation of petty disputes; people don't even put personal messages in their wills anymore, if they ever did. Maybe that's just something they made up for the movies. You know, "And to Susan, my loving wife. I leave you the summer home where I proposed."

I want to talk to Smokey. I want to tell him that whatever small milestone in his life was footnoted with my name, he played a larger part in mine. Even without the tragic and untimely death part, I would never have forgotten him. I wonder if he knew that a girl he hadn't spoken to in eleven years still thought of him fondly. But I can't ask him, although if the Catholics are right I will see him again someday.

I want to talk to my dad. I want to yell at him for fucking me so badly when he died. I want to ask him if he liked me. Parents love their kids but they don't always like them. Was I a person my father liked, independent of blood? Although, in the same vein, I'm not sure I want the answer. After all, his last words to me were lies, deliberate lies which served only to put me in therapy for a year, hopped up on so many anti-seizure mood-stabilizers that I couldn't have convulsed if I'd tongue-kissed a 220 plug.

I wish I'd known they were going to die. Two perfect examples of people who knew when their time was, two pivotal people in my life whom I would have dropped everything to talk to, and it never occurred to me to call them regardless of life expectancy. I should make a list of people I would regret not calling if they were to die tomorrow and I should call them. But I won't, because that's the curse of the living. We don't open up until it's too late. Maybe having the warning, the diagnosis or death threat or execution date, is the greatest mercy there is.

May God someday have that mercy on me.