Last Days
An essay about death and dying
As I toil away on new short stories and attempt to turn the deer stories into a novel, please accept this humble essay I wrote in a fit of insomnia.
Have you ever let yourself drift off into the endless black space of your closed eyes at night?
The darkness shifts and undulates, oscillates in and through infiniteness.
There is no beginning, and there is no end.
Just endlessness. Infinity.
This is what I think death is, or rather, this is what I think life is. Maybe they are the same thing?
My whole life, since I can remember, I have not feared death; more so, I have been utterly fascinated with it, and searched out any knowledge, feelings, or artistic expression that even touched on the ideas surrounding death. Some might find this bleak, but I did/still do find something about the boundless nature of, and uncertainty around, death comforting.
Somewhere around 1991, to date myself—as both young and old depending on who is reading this—around the time I was 10, I specifically remember staring out the back window of my boyhood bedroom at the large maple tree in our back yard, daydreaming of floating up, up, up! Until my little boyish body was high above the branches and leaves. High above the cars, the people, and all their earthly problems. Just dancing in the sky like a feather caught on a jet-stream of hot air, until eventually I stopped, not of my own accord or for any reason I could determine, hovered for a moment, and then plummeted to my death, facing the reality of the cool, unforgiving ground once again.
One day, my mother caught me doing this—staring out the window, absolutely transfixed, and she asked me what I was thinking about—no doubt she thought it would be some cute little boyish thoughts, like jumping BMX bikes or contemplating if GI Joe or He-Man would win in an arm wrestling competition, and then I turned my cute little cherub face around to my mother standing gleefully in the door jam and answered, “Death.” Or, more specifically, I believe I said “Dying,” which is probably truer to my thought on the matter, as the word death has a more finite feeling than the active verb, the “ying” of the word dying. And I still think I like the word dying more. It is, much like I keep my characters in my stories, in action, never-ending, eternal.
Starting around the Summer of 2023, going solidly through 2025, I was caught in the deepest depression I have ever experienced in my life. I thought not just about dying every day but about death, and the finality of it all. To be more specific, I thought—could not stop thinking about—my own death—causing the final act of my own life, or what I perceive as my life.
I was living in beautiful Carlsbad, California, at the time. An idyllic, rich, Southern California beach town where everyone comes to get away and forget their problems, bury their feet in the sand, and all I could think about the whole time I lived there was if careening my 2019 Chevy Suburban off one of the many freeway overpasses, or if taking my surfboard out as far as I could paddle into the Pacific Ocean and then pushing it away from me was the better way of dying. I played out each scenario endlessly, watched myself like a movie in my head as I pulled hard on the steering wheel going over some section of the 5 or 805, or maybe the 101 where it passed, went up and over another freeway or lagoon and let myself, inside my Chevy suburban drift weightless momentarily before we, like in my tree daydream crashed and burned. Or one scenario that had me transfixed the longest, and most acutely, was the surfboard one: paddling until my arms had no more strength and then slipping off my surfboard into the cool belly of the ocean pushing my board away from me, watching it drift further and further, away from me, my only life raft, my only second chance, now taken by the currents and waves off to somewhere beautiful and new, then letting myself just sink down into the cool green-blue embrace of the Pacific until I eventually aspirated water and died.
It was a real 50/50, heads or tails moment in my life, to which I ended up choosing to switch to another coin, tell my wife about my hard “th,” thoughts around death, and get some help from a professional.
When I went to see a therapist, he asked me all about myself, inquired about my artistic practice after finding out I was one, and then, when I told him that I was still writing, drawing, and painting, he said, “Ok, I’m not worried about you.”
I was pissed! I wanted him to fix me! Lock me up, put me in a padded cell, and feed me all the drugs I don’t allow myself anymore. Tell me I am too different and dark for this world, not that, “that’s just how it gets for us creatives sometimes.” I mentioned Hemingway and Woolf. I brought up Belushi and Hendrix. And he said, “It sounds like you don’t want to be like them,” and he was right. Deep down, I didn’t.
I wanted to live.
Now, around the time when this was happening—with the thoughts of my ghost endlessly surfing the Pacific, haunting families from Kentucky and Wisconsin—when that just wouldn’t stop. I was writing this epically way-too-long short story called “Last Days.”
Last Days was about some concept of God sitting with—living alongside- three people on three separate days, the day they had decided to kill themselves. God did this because it wanted to die too, and it wanted to see if these people, in their final moments, held any answers to it all.
Ultimately, I realized—especially since I never finished the final chapter of the story, where God (me, the writer, destroyer, and creator of worlds) needed to decide whether it was going to end it all or not—that I did not want to die.
I nearly finished the story, and it wasn’t short, because I think, looking back on it all, it was a battle with myself on whether I wanted to live or not. The story itself, Last Days, what I finished at least, was around 10-12,000 words long at the point I abandoned it, and I actually liked it enough to put together multiple cover designs and layouts for a zine I planned to put out if I finished it, along with a few other stories and poems. Compile them under the title I liked Last Days, maybe later that summer I thought, but then we—Julie, Zoe, the dogs, and I- moved back up to Seattle, and I guess the thoughts around death just turned back to thoughts around dying, much like when my mother found me daydreaming out my childhood bedroom window.
My point with all this is this. If you struggle with depression and or suicidal thoughts, firstly, don’t go talk to my old therapist, he’s a kook, and I’m lucky my wife didn’t get a call that the police didn’t fish me out of the Pacific or scrape my skull off the 805. But mostly yes, still get some help from a professional, not ChatGPT, not some influencer on TikTok, a professional, or as close to one as you can manage. And then give yourself some space—some time. Get a hobby or join a club, get out there in the real world, and live. Give yourself some space away from the finality or death and live like one of the characters in my stories, just perpetually on the edge of it. Allow yourself the grace of a “Ying,” rather than the finiteness of a “Th.”
I think of Death as the final chord of a song, whereas dying is the entirety of the piece itself. Dying is a daily act of going on. Choosing one more day, trudging towards an end we know will come but do not know when or how.
Let the dying be beautiful, and don’t forget to hold the hands of those close to you along the way, because we are all on the journey of dying.
Man, this pulls in both directions - bleak, then uplifting. morbid, then optimistic. it’s honest, though.