Leonora in the Morning Light (1940) by Max Ernst
Life is a gothic love story, short and deliciously awful. You doubt me now, but one day, death will show up at your door in a jaunty hat, acting playful, asking if you have time to grab lunch. “But I’m so young!” you’ll tell death, which will make him laugh until his salted caramel latté sprays out of his nose. Death just loves your sense of humor!
You can shut the door and pretend the ruthless bastard never swung by. But then the next afternoon or maybe a week later, you’ll spot death on the street behind you, or you’ll hear him crackling through the tall trees in the park, or you’ll go out to gather flowers and feel him giggling at your mortal elbows — your silly, fragile, doomed elbows. Sad animals and their dead-end little hobbies! he’ll mumble, and you won’t know whether he loves you or hates you or a little of both.
Death will stalk you for decades after that. He’s got stamina. It’s not that there’s something wrong with you, that’s just how he is. He lives for this shit. That bitch will breadcrumb your mortal ass until your brittle old bones are begging for it.
At first you’ll resist. You’ll pretend you don’t hear him — murmuring merrily in the coffee maker, or rumbling along with the trucks on the freeway. You’ll tell everyone he came and you brushed him off quickly, you’re in the clear now. But you’ll find yourself thinking about him often, in spite of yourself.
Then you’ll start choosing your music and books just to suit his preferences. If you focus on him too much, you’ll start to anticipate his reactions to everything. Soon it’s almost like he’s there beside you most of the day. Even when he does unnerving stuff, like laugh through the entire first scene of Saving Private Ryan, it only makes you more curious. What’s it like to be so carefree and unafraid of yourself?
Friends will tell you that ever since death showed up, you haven’t been the same — distracted and impatient, you keep losing the thread. Have your friends always been so boring, though? Why do they all look so doomed to you? Aren’t they going to do anything meaningful with the time they have left?
But they don’t understand death. They don’t want him in their lives, so why would they want him in yours? You try to explain that even when you kick him out, somehow he’s still there, flipping through your magazines and making fun of people’s solemn faces or self-serious comments. Or you’re exercising and he’s rolling his eyes at you from the couch. Or you’re sorting old photos and he’s snickering at how tripped up you get over these blips on the radar — dead friends, dead pets, dead parents. “Build a temple while you’re at it,” he says, cracking himself up so hard he spits beer all over the carpet.
“But you actually enjoy being hung up on him,” your one friend says, and she’s not wrong. Death makes things more interesting, adds a certain frisson to the moment, a sense that anything could happen and 90% of it won’t be good. Why does that seem fun somehow? You can even read the news with him and you don’t get depressed because for him, the worst parts are the best parts. Before you met him, your life felt so boxed in and predictable. Now that he’s your buddy, your horizons feel limitless.
No wonder it’s hard to stop thinking about him. He’s everywhere: in the morning light on the mountains, at the bottom of your tea cup at the end of the day. And it turns out you’re not alone. He’s got millions of devoted fans. All it takes is an unexpected loss or a health scare or an accident and they’re haunted from that point forward. Death drops in for a chat, and life is never the same after that.
After resisting for a long time, I’ve finally surrendered to his whims completely. It’s the only way to feel fully alive, every molecule rattling frantically, every hair on the back on my neck standing at attention. Sure, I can’t trust the guy. But who cares? I can still feed him snacks, cackle and jeer through Terms of Endearment, tell him everything, let him sleep next to me at night, clumsy fingers tangled through my hair, making me dream about my father, another drama queen who loved trouble. I remember how stalked he felt, before the end: His condo burned down, his plane got caught in a thunderstorm. Three years of omens and then, finally, the real thing.
But once you and death are good buddies, he’ll admit that the omens begin the moment you’re born. Every day is punctuated by gloomy foreshadowings. This is what fuels the longing, keeps you hurtling forward, tinges the late afternoon with melancholy. This is why you crave love, perfect communion, immersion, dissolving boundaries. This is why you long for new risks, wild impossibilities, bright, terrifying collisions, expansion, annihilation.
Every love story is cursed. Every comedy is haunted. Every day is morbid and whimsical and damned. The whole planet is just a creepy gothic fable, with bad weather and dark angels and creatures emerging from the seas, with wildfires and savage beasts and merciless nations rising and falling. There is an unhappy ending speeding toward us, but try not to take it so personally. It’s not about you. Once you understand that, you’ll finally learn how to let go and enjoy it, how to lose yourself in it, how to savor it, how to beg for it.
After death comes knocking, you’ll demean yourself just to have a little fun. But death can be pretty withholding. He’s easily bored, that’s all. It takes a lot to entertain him. You’d better not fail, though. His approval is the difference between life and… well, you know. So look straight into death’s eyes and say it: I love you just the way you are.
I also wrote this and this and this. Thanks for being here. This newsletter is made possible by haunted weirdos like you.
I was going through some old email and saw where I asked my daughter if it would be ok to have this read at my funeral. When I reread it, I saw I never told you how perfect I found it to be. Now I have.
Best thing ever.