Like most people, my mind tends to wander as I fall asleep at night. Unlike most perfectly healthy 21-year-olds, my mind wanders to, ""HOLY SHIT WHAT IF I DIE IN MY SLEEP TONIGHT?"" Perhaps all the sodium from the Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos is going to my head, but I can't help but worry about the possibility of dying before I wake.
No, I'm not afraid of death (no more than the next person, at least). What am I afraid of? That I will die on a night I have decided to sleep in the nude. That I will have no say in who gives the eulogy at my funeral (take it away, Sarah Carpenter!). That I will die before the Chicago Cubs win the World Series. And most of all, I am terrified that my parents will find my hot-pink vibrator while cleaning out their deceased, eldest daughter's room. I know I will be dead and incapable of actually caring, but that possibility alone is horrifying enough.
I have always been weirdly morbid about death, though the vibrator
was not always an issue. When I was a kid, the inevitability of
dying would keep me up all hours of the night. I was so terrified,
in fact, that when I was seven I drew up a will, allocating my
prized possessions to my best friends and family. All $32 of my
life savings was for my parents to donate to a charity that saved
lost dogs (the movie ""Benji"" really stuck with me).
Benny, the stuffed animal I sleep with every night
used to sleep with every night was for my sister. And my totally
awesome Razor scooter was for whomever my best friend was that
week.
Why was I so preoccupied with death? It's very simple: ""Titanic."" Seeing all the dead bodies bobbing in the Atlantic Ocean was too much for my 7-year-old mind to handle. I even went so far as to resent Leonardo DiCaprio for his being in the film. While my friends read J-14 and swooned over his picture, my freaky self would just snap, ""I hate him."" (Don't take it personally, Leo. I've since moved on. I hope you are not too upset. Why don't I make it up to you with some sex?)
This all eventually led to a new heaven, designed by yours truly and my best friend Sarah. My death-obsessed self needed to know, or at least discuss the possibility, that some kind of afterlife existed, and since I am clearly an omnipotent being whose will immediately becomes reality, designing my own heaven seemed like the obvious next step.
In our early teen years, neither Sarah nor myself was terribly interested in subscribing to a religion that outlawed premarital sex (because we had so many suitors on the horizon), so we devised our own heaven, complete with the option of going up, down, left or right. To the left would be a room with cool music and deep conversation… and that is all I really recall. Apparently our alternative to heaven and hell wasn't impressive enough to remember. Stick to the religions you've got, folks.
I'm thankfully not as preoccupied with the possibility of death as I once was. I'm too busy wigging out about having to be an actual, productive member of society this time next year. Still, I should probably find a better place to hide my vibrator.
Find yourself worrying about what the afterlife has in store for your poor soul? Have your own version of heaven you've cooked up while lying awake at night? Share them with Jacqueline at jgoreilly@wisc.edu.
