How You Live When You Are Afraid of Death

In my experience, it’s nothing like the movies.

Once upon a time, I nearly died. I was very young when it happened, hardly a teenager, with eyes watching the world and my heart hidden at home. I did not know then that there would be no end to the changes that came: the younger sister who became the older one, the parents who greyed before their years would ask it of them, the friends and family who would ebb and flow with turned shoulders and averted eyes. I did not know that, with the stone-cold diffidence of a cruel world, the vice grip of death would try again. And again.

This essay is not about that story, though. It’s not about what got me here, why I live under the dark shadow of a swift knife, why I wake up each day thankful I did not pass silently into nothingness in my sleep.

And it’s also not about religion. It’s not about God or nirvana or the vibrant shores of eternal rest. There is nothing that may come later that changes the fierce hope most of us cling to when forced to think of it — the hope that it comes later, much later.

No, this essay is about life, with all of its acid-washed joys and forgotten tears. It is about how you actually live when you’re actually afraid of dying. It’s about the great tragedy that is the truest loss of innocence. (Parents, protect your kids from learning too early about the nature of the world. Childhood is a magical palace, eagerly thrown aside and impossible to retrieve.)

I must say first that there is nothing good about my reality. The cutesy stickers about living each day as if it is your last have spared no second thought for the manifestation of what that becomes in a world of plans and cities. It is better to focus on life than to wonder when it may end, of that much I’m certain. I wish for nothing more than the days when I’d go out to the green park and the red slides and the yellow swings and not wonder if it would be the last time I’d share the blue sky with my friends.

But you cannot control a mind that has seen too much and refuses to forget it. So you adapt. You let it change every bit of your whole life, every bit of who you are, because you are nothing without mortality and yet you are nothing with it either.

Some things are obvious. I live with no regrets, no need for last words. I tell my family and friends I love them every chance I get, and I communicate all my little feelings. I eat ice cream and scream out car windows. I discover new music and listen to the same song a thousand times in a row.

Others are unique. I feel responsible for changing the world now (yesterday would have been better; yesterday is always better). But, long ago, I wanted to be a singer. I still compose poignant melodies on the piano I’ve played for two decades. Someone once told me to spend my twenties in Hollywood. I had a music agent. It was the dream once. My high-school counselor told me I’d be President one day, after I had a long career in something else, anything else. I worked at CERN when I was a senior. I wanted to be an astrophysicist. I’m told you can start politics when you’re forty, fifty, even seventy. It’s never too late. It’s always too late.

But if you have no guarantee of making it to forty, you don’t wait until you’re forty. You don’t sing love songs or study the stars, pretty and meaningless as they are. You graduate college at 17 and go to law school. You get married at 21. You start an international nonprofit at 23.

And when the people look at you and point fingers, accusing you of Asian tiger parents and bitterness, of greed for fame and money and awards, you smile and joke and nod because you cannot tell them, “I am not a genius. I am dying.”

For that is the truth. The reality of this bitter and beautiful world, this precious and fleeting planet, is that we are all, always, in a thousand ways, in a cascading fall until the inevitable end, dying. We are.

And today, I get the messages from my friends on my phone, piled up like little scattered post-its, “Why do you not travel? Take a break. Spend your money. Don’t work so hard. YOLO.” I do not YOLO, I tell them. I do not believe in stripping Earth for your short twenty five or a hundred years of existence. I believe in living on. In the extra moments you buy for someone else. In the quality of life you share, the laughter you’ve caused, the moments of humanity you’ve created.

I try my hardest to prevent death — for me and for everyone else. I do not eat meat. I fight police brutality. I want gun control. I use natural products.

Whatever life you cannot live, I believe you must give to someone else, a thousand times over. You must make things better, you must.

I try every second I’m awake, every second I’m not filling my choking lungs with the fresh air from my parent’s backyard, playing games with my overworked sister, or savoring the delicious taste of a well-cooked meal. Every second I cannot directly give to the world, I use to recover or to grow so someday I can give more.

For that is the true shadow of death — the threat that you will have been worthless, or worse, a blight on the planet. That you will have been here, living like a little black hole, sucking away the light and giving nothing back. That you will wander, maskless, conviction-less, spreading your germs and disease and poison, killing others before you, too, vanish into the void. Those who understand death do not lightly take others’ happiness and lives.

And then there is the strength of every emotion you feel. And you let yourself feel it. You hate with the fierceness of a Category Five typhoon. You celebrate small victories like they are the Biden inauguration. You protect your family like you’re fighting for the last life boat on a sinking ocean liner.

And you try to do it all. I draw and paint. I write bold novels. I fight for justice. I sing in several languages.

You take risks. I still think about running for office someday, and yet I write inflammatory words and personal love stories. I quit my day job for an uncertain future.

You do the little things. I recycle everything. I watch the sunsets like I watch people, like they are a fleeting glimpse of true beauty, like they are special. I see my family almost every day. I call my mom before I sleep. I cuddle my dog and kiss my husband and worry they might die before me and worry they might not.

You do the big things. I will never stop fighting to make sure other people and animals live a life filled with innocence, and joy, and happiness, and love, and light, and peace, and hope, and everything that was snatched away from me far too young and far too easily, all because I loved the world with open hands.

And, above all, you live.