Two Stories About Death

I.

I came home from school and my parents told me that the cat was dead. There was a lot of crying; weirdly, more from them than me. It wasn't because they were particularly fond of the cat - he was overweight and aggressive and as my dad liked to point out, "an asshole" - they were just worried about me. They assumed I'd be devastated. I was the one who'd brought the asshole cat home in the first place, and the only one in our family who spent any time with him. I was sad that he was gone, but not nearly to the extent that my parents had braced themselves for. It wasn't the kind of sad that permeates your bones, or makes you want to sob until you're dry-heaving. It was more like the "Oh my god, I can't believe they canceled The Six Million Dollar Man" sad.

My dad calmly repeated what the veterinarian had told them. My cat had Feline Urinary Syndrome, which caused blockage in his urinary tract. It was a difficult decision, he said, but they finally decided to put him to sleep, if only because he was in such excruciating pain. He explained where the body would be buried, and how he'd actually lived a very long and happy life, at least compared with the average feline life span.

After he'd covered all the medical details, we just sat in the living room and said nothing. We weren't about to discuss the considerably more ambiguous topics of souls or an afterlife. As a family, we were already pretty skeptical about the idea of a heaven for human beings. So it was agreed, without anybody needing to say it out loud, that a kitty heaven was kinda retarded.

DON'T FEAR THE REPEAR, KEEP ON READIN'

When my parents were satisfied that they'd done their best, I wandered upstairs to my room for a nap. I sat on my bed and stared at the ceiling, trying to convince myself that I was fine, just fine. I didn't need any "he's with the Baby Jesus now" platitudes. But this was the first time that anybody close to me had died, and I wasn't sure how to make sense of it. During my ten years on the planet, my only exposure to death of any kind was when Obi-Wan Kenobi took a light-saber to the gut in Star Wars.

"Is that how it happens?" I wondered during my first of many, many screenings. "When somebody dies, do they just disappear completely? And does everybody get to come back as a spirit and visit your friends on the ice planet Hoth, or just if you were really, really good?"

I eventually figured out that Star Wars isn't the most reliable source of information. But there wasn't anyplace else for a guy to get a concise overview of spirituality, or at least enough spirituality to get by. I didn't need all the answers, just enough to take the edge off.

With few other options, I laid on my tiny bed and tried to work it through on my own. It seemed easy enough. I just had to conjure up a mental image of the earth and pull back like a camera, until I had an unobstructed vantage of... everything. It'd all become clear if I just got a good look at the nuts and bolts of the universe. So I watched as the earth got smaller and smaller in my mind, becoming one of many planets, until it was just another speck in the vast canvass of the galaxy. And then even our galaxy began to diminish, swallowed up by bigger solar systems and black holes that seemed to stretch on forever. Soon anything even remotely recognizable was gone and it was all just black and emptiness that went on and on and on and...

I gasped for air, like I'd been swimming at the bottom of a pool for a little too long. My heart was racing and I was suddenly very, very cold. I didn't realize it at the time, but I'd just experienced an existential panic attack. I took a good, hard look at the void, and sure enough, it was a whole lot of nothing. And let me tell you, it was fucking scary. Weak-in-the-knees, pit-in-your-stomach, face-to-face-with-the-meaninglessness-of-existence scary. Given that the most stressful part of my day usually involved wondering if I was going to be picked last for dodgeball, it was a lot of information to digest in just a few minutes.

I waited until I was able to catch my breath again and my heart didn't sound so much like bongo drums. And then I went downstairs and watched Young Frankenstein with my dad, and laughed and laughed and laughed.

II.

When I was fourteen, a girl died at my school. Well, she wasn't at school when it happened. She was at home, sleeping in her bedroom, in the middle of the night. There was some electrical problem - an overloaded light socket or something, I don't know - and the house went up like a bonfire. Nothing was left but a mountain of burning embers, and not a single person got out in time, including Cindy.

I didn't know Cindy very well. I knew of her, mostly as the first girl in our class to get breasts. It was the hot topic of conversation for almost a month. "Have you seen Cindy's breasts?" Personally, I didn't see what all the fuss was about. They weren't much bigger than pencil erasers. But nobody was more proud of her mammary seedlings than Cindy. It became part of her identity. She even added a pair of naked boobs to her signature - as a fleshy double-dot to her "i" - which made her very popular with the boys during yearbook-signing season.

I wondered if her breasts were the last thing she thought about as the flames engulfed her. "What a gyp!" I imagined her thinking, as she cradled her tits like a mother protecting her infant twins. "I didn't even get to own these things for a whole year!"

My parents and the other adults in the neighborhood talked about how tragic it was. For all of the victims, of course, but specifically Cindy. "She was only fourteen," they'd remind each other in hushed whispers. "Such a tragedy. Nobody should die that young." I didn't understand their logic. To my mind, her age wasn't the tragic part. It was the skin-burning part that had the biggest impact on me. When the temperature in your bedroom hits a balmy 500 degrees and your flesh starts melting like the Nazis at the end of Raiders Of the Lost Ark, isn't age irrelevant? I just couldn't imagine anybody sitting in the middle of a raging inferno and thinking, "Wow, this really, really, really hurts. But at least I'm thirty."

They let the entire school skip classes to attend Cindy's funeral, even those of us who didn't know her. It never occurred to me that letting the actual friends and family mourn in privacy might have been in better taste. Like my fellow students - many of whom, like me, probably couldn't have picked Cindy out of a line-up - I had no intention of missing the social event of the season.

The night before the big event, I couldn't sleep. It was all too exciting. I'd never been to a real funeral before. I wondered if wearing black was mandatory or just strongly encouraged. And would there be an open casket? I had no clue. Was that even possible, given the circumstances? What would she look like? A wax mannequin from Madame Tussauds left next to a space heater? Maybe just a pile of green goo, like the monster from The Blob?

Alas, the funeral lacked the theatrics I'd been hoping for. There was no body on display, and much more crying than I felt comfortable witnessing from my peers. Those of us relegated to the sidelines - who, for all intents and purposes, were funeral crashers - tried to keep a low profile. We huddled in the back and quietly remembered whatever there was to remember about Cindy.

"Y'know," a guy named Todd casually announced to the group. "She gave me a blowjob once."

My jaw dropped. I was shocked - shocked! - that anybody would confess to something like that. And at a funeral, no less. But a smattering of guys sitting nearby confirmed his story.

"Yeah," a gangly high school sophomore agreed. "She could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch."

Apparently, had she not been cut down in her prime by a house fire, Cindy was well on her way to becoming the school slut. Her oral skills were legendary, spreading joy everywhere from the YMCA parking lot to under the football stadium bleachers. Given the lurid details offered up by her one-time lovers, it wasn't just breasts that gave her an edge over the competition. I'll just say this: her funeral is when I first became acquainted with the phrase "balls deep."

A line had been written in the sand, evenly dividing the funeral guests between those who had been blown by the dead girl and those of us who hadn't. I tried to laugh it off, but something about this new information bugged me. At some point during the service, a priest invited us to file past the dearly departed and pay our final respects. I loitered just a little too long next to Cindy's urn. The weight of the moment had finally hit me, and I realized that this wasn't just about missing a day of school or gossiping about the exact temperature necessary for a human body to melt. A life had been snatched away too soon, and there was no way we'd ever get her back.

"I'm sorry that I never met you," I said to her ashes, though only in my head. "I know this probably isn't anything you care about, especially after what you've been through over the last few days. But, well, I just found out that you were giving away blowjobs to anybody who asked and... I don't know, I kinda wish I'd made more of an effort to get to know you."

Somebody told me later that it looked like I was crying. And maybe I was. Life isn't fair, especially when you're fourteen and the only girl with a corroborated reputation for giving blowjobs has been burned alive and you're only just finding out now. I mean seriously, did I need another reason to believe that God is a humorless, sadistic prick?

(To read two more stories about death, go here.)