memento mori (i wish i could forget)

cw death, suicidal ideation

I'm afraid of death.
Maybe it's a weird fear to have, for someone who gets passively suicidal at least 1 week a month. For someone who used to feel less passively so about it.

When I was in secondary school, I remember being so unfazed by death. I was like, if I die, I die. I wanted to be a doctor for Doctor Without Borders, and I distinctly remember thinking about how I wouldn't mind dying in the line of work. I wouldn't have called myself suicidal, but I just didn't really care about life. It was not enjoyable to me.

I've always had some sort of anxiety about death though. What always terrified me is the infinity of it. Unending, forever and ever. The idea that for centuries, and millenia, and maybe for actual-fucking-ever, your soul/consciousness is there. Hanging out in the afterlife or whatever. When I told my mom (she's religious, and firmly believes in an afterlife), she said that when you're dead, you're going to process time differently than as a living human. Somehow this did not reassure me.

Infinity is scary. I remember in astrophysics class, when we talked about black holes. How they swallow everything; light and time. And how if you were to go close to the edge of a black hole, as it eats you up, time would perpetually slow down, more and more the closer you get to it. I remember thinking that maybe this is the only true way to experience immortality; but how much of a torture that would be as well (despite the silly name of spaghettification).

Maybe I am scared of infinity more than death, it turns out. I'm not scared of a painful death (if anything, dying in my sleep is the most terrifying to me. The idea that one night I go to sleep, planning things for the next day, and then just never wake up chills me down to my bones), I'm scared of what comes after.

So recently, death has been obsessing me a lot. My anxiety got worse, and I'm terrified of dying, all the time. When I get on a plane. When I get on a car. When something feels wrong in my body. Constantly, my brain is analyzing all the ways I could die, or be dying, right now.

In a morbid fascination, or maybe just to try to exorcise my demons, I've been leaning more into content that surrounds death. Watched again Jacob Geller's video essays on autopsies. Came up with an OC who's studying to become a forensic pathologist. Subbed to a funeral directors' subreddit.
(Side note: I went to a funeral for the first time in my life last year. Not that I've never had anyone die before, but they were overseas. So it was the first time I saw a lifeless body outside of an anatomy class).

I'm not sure if it helped, but that subreddit made me cry. Funeral parlor workers (and others dealing with the dead) sharing their experiences; about how they talk to the deceased as they're preparing them, how they will put on some music in the car ride to the funeral home when they first go and get the body. One talked about how when they had to take care of a child, they wrapped him in a fuzzy blanket and would leave the light on during the night, cause they didn't like the idea of the child getting scared all alone in the dark.
I don't know if it helped with my fears (I'm from a culture where funeral rites are quite different anyway) but I guess it left an impression on me. To see death (or the ones surrounding it I suppose) so gentle and kind.

I'm still scared of death. I haven't figured out how to deal with it. I'm not sure if this pseudo-exposure therapy slash morbid fascination is making it better or worse (can't make it worse than my nagging OCD does, that's for sure) but it is here and it helps me cope in a way.