I was five the first time I contemplated my own mortality. I was lying in my parents’ bed alone, facing the wall. I remember the sun seeping through the window, illuminating the room and the electrical outlet.
I thought, “If I stick my fingers in there, I’ll get electrocuted and die.”
There was an alternate version of my life then, where I got up from the bed, stuck my fingers in the socket, convulsed, and was gone.
It was a strange concept, my own mortality. One I’d known existed in some shape or form, but did not grasp until that moment.
***
The summer after first grade my mother took me and my sister camping at Cape Cod.
I loved everything about the ocean, but I was afraid of getting in too deep and being sucked under by the tide. There’s always been a very cautious and calculating side to my nature, and it was stronger as a kid, since I did not have the ability to ration and reason with myself. The idea of relinquishing control and learning to swim with the tide was either too obscure of a concept, or I was not ready.
I remember sitting on the beach on one of those camping days and watching my mother and sister swim in the ocean. I watched their heads bob up and down and under in the waves, along with all the other heads of swimmers. It was like watching the people on the upside-down roller coaster at the amusement park, when you’re only big enough for the caterpillar ride.
The tide was rough the whole week we were there, and I was small then, so the waves seemed extra giant. Still young, it was hard to distinguish between imagination and reality. I sat on the towel, watching my mother and sister be swept up by tidal wave after tidal wave, relieved every time they came up for air. Relieved that they were still alive.
At some point during that trip my sister and I went to wade in the water. But the ocean was fierce and knocked me over. It tugged at my legs to take me with it. Salt water stung my eyes and rushed to the bridge of my nose. I screamed, clawed at the sand, tried to hold on, but it was futile. I was slipping deeper and deeper in. My sister, only a few feet away, grabbed me, and pulled me out.
In real time it was probably only ten seconds, but the terror of the event escorted me back to where our towels lay on the sand, and our mother, cross-legged on her own.
I was angry with her for not watching us. For not helping me. How could she just sit there while I almost drowned?
“I saw you,” she said. “You were OK.”
One afternoon or evening I sat outside the tent, bored. My mother was cooking a meal on the camping stove and my sister was in the tent, either listening to music on her Walkman, or doing her summer reading.
I sat on the ground digging a hole in the dirt with a stick. At some point an inchworm came to join me. I put my stick down for it to crawl on, then placed the stick with the inchworm in the hole.
I can’t say what came over me, only a need to know what would happen. So, I picked up my canteen of water and spilled some into the small hole. I watched the water fill the hole, sweeping the inchworm up with it. It floated motionless on the surface, dead. I sat there watching. I didn’t know the word regret at that time, but it swelled in me from head to toe as I realized what I’d done. I had killed it.
It wasn’t just the awareness that I could kill that disquieted me, it was that I had the power, the capacity to take a life. The fact that I couldn’t go back and undo the harm that I had caused was a lot to sit with. The only thing I could think of to do was to hold a burial.
So, I took the inchworm out of the water with my stick and placed it on dry ground. I then dug a small hole with the end of the stick and lowered the inchworm to the bottom. I covered the hole with dirt and said a prayer for forgiveness. I finished the ceremony and ran to join my mother at the picnic table.
It’s strange to look back on a moment like this, when a light bulb turns on and you’re suddenly pulled forward into another level of self-awareness and consciousness. I’m not sure why I grasped this basic concept, that every human has the power to kill and to physically harm, in this particular moment. Like all kids, I had stepped on ants before, squashed mosquitoes and spiders, but the inchworm was different. It didn’t have eight scary legs, and it wasn’t trying to eat my food or drink my blood. It was innocent, and its death had been calculated.
***
I learned my own ugly power to cause psychological harm and death in others a few years before, when I was four. There was one of those Little Tykes climbing gyms in my preschool classroom, and the kids in my class and I were all standing on the second floor of it, leaning over the top wall. One of my teachers was a very large woman, with a particularly large bum.
In this moment her back was to us and the kids in the class were taunting, “teacher’s gots a big butt! Teacher’s gots a big butt!”
The teacher turned around to scold us, telling us to cut it out. The kids did not. I had been silent throughout this time. There was a deep sadness swelling inside me that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I knew it was evil, what my friends were doing, but I also knew, on some instinctual level, that I could not tell my friends to shut up. I had to go along with it, or risk being teased myself and undergoing some form of psychological death.
I joined in, mumbling the words as the kids continued chanting and our teacher walked out the door to bring in her co-teacher to deal with us.
I’ve shared this story to others as an adult, and I usually end up laughing along with them at the humor of it. But it is always with a slightly heavy heart. The extent to how the teacher was affected by us or not is besides the point.
After that moment, along with that of the inchworm, there was no going back. Both instances opened a whole Pandora’s Box of consciousness, one that most of us experience in our own time, in our own way. The string of events that occur in our lifetime, where we pay quiet witness to or an active part in the process of death to others, is numberless. And it is inevitable to never play a role in death and dying. If we are in life, in society, in our communities, we will be catalysts for death and we will also be bystanders.
Accepting this, and learning how to delicately carry this awareness, this power, is difficult. There’s a myriad of episodes that I could replay for you now to strengthen this entry, but I will leave it to be continued at a later date.