When I was 9, I vividly remember the first time I faced my own mortality; I was laying down flat, my entire small body across the length of the back seat of my parents’ Toyota Camry, staring up at the partly cloudy skies, sobbing.
I saw the sunlight halo-ing across the roughly patched edges of those clouds, as if there was an angel peering down to see me, and I was realizing, in my mind, that that angel probably doesn’t exist.
That’s probably just a cluster of condensed liquid, like I was taught in school.
And I’m probably just going to die, a rather meaningless death.
Why was I even here?!
And that was the first time I recall facing the question of my own mortality. I completely forget about this memory, and buried it under the “useless to remember” pile, until I was just casually watching a scene from The Good Place, in the episode where Michael learns how to be human.
Eleano (Kristen Bell) just tells Michael, who laments being mortal,
Eleanor: “All humans are aware of death.
So, we’re all a little bit sad, all the time. That’s just the deal.”
Michael: “Sounds like a crappy deal.”
Eleanor: “well, yeah, it is. But, we don’t get offered any other ones. And if you try to ignore your sadness, it just ends up leaking out of you anyways.”
This was a very good 3 minutes and 15 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcDjpjuQNk8 where I got to process my own 9-year-old feelings, too.
