I am afraid of dying.
I am afraid of killing my mother with a careless cough or careless word,
And I am trying so hard not to be careless that I plan out my route through the grocery store so I won’t have to breathe in the building, on the building, any longer than I have to.
I am afraid of accidentally ruining everything—
And I think part of that is the weight of former evangelical guilt
And part of it is the weight of being human;
And, God, I am trying so hard to live a life worthy of being loved even though I know I cannot earn love.
You see, I know every exegetical or theological or theoretical version of the afterlife and yet:
I am still afraid of dying—
And I feel ashamed about that.
If heaven is so good, why am I not at peace?
But, God, I want to live :
I want to finish writing my book and fall in love and see the rest of the continents and laugh with people I haven’t met yet and get allergy tested so maybe i can adopt a tiny cat someday.
God, I just want to adopt a tiny cat and somehow that’s the reason I give you for why I’m afraid of dying as if seeing you and seeing the cat are synonymous.
But if you are life and you’ve given us life and I’m breathing life, then shouldn’t I fight for every last damn breath in honor of who you are in my lungs?
I don’t know how you are both beyond death and the oxygen that keeps me alive, but perhaps I need a little more time to let that truth sink in and maybe when it does I’ll be as I afraid of death as I am of breathing.
quarantine