The Furies

My sister and I watched Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire today. We got to the scene where Cedric's father is weeping over his dead son's body, screaming "my boy!" at the heavens. Dumbledore's hand is placed delicately on his shoulder, but he's crying too so it isn't much consolation. About halfway through this scene, I realized my cheeks were wet and my vision blurry. 

My sister looked at me strangely, as though I'd grown several heads, and gently reminded me that I had known Cedric was going to die. She's right, of course. In fact, the first time I read his death scene in the books, when I didn't know what was coming, I didn't shed a single tear. I was more excited to move onto The Order of the Phoenix than I was sad, honestly. 

This got me thinking about how Harry Potter only works because children are so young when they first read it. "Kill the spare" meant nothing to me, because I didn't realize how casually cruel it was to consider a teenage boy a "spare". Even Sirius or Dumbledore eventually dying did nothing to me -- in fact, I knew it was coming, so it was almost satisfying to finally have reached the part of the story that everyone had spoiled for me. But now, each year, as I revisit the series, these deaths get more and more heartbreaking. The tragedy of Harry's life gets darker and darker, the abuse he faced increasingly traumatic. 

In some way, I suppose this is confirmation that I'm not a psychopath, that I have empathy. It's good to know I'm not too jaded to cry for orphaned children and orphaned parents (or whatever the word is for parents without children), I think. In another, I think it's proof I'm weaker than I once was. I hold on to things more, let things slide off my back less. My skin has thinned with age, and I'm no expert, but I don't think that's what it was supposed to do. 

This holiday season, my father has been struggling with a couple medical issues -- some nerve damage in his neck and a diagnosis for pre-diabetes. Given that it could be so much worse, I know these minor, fixable problems are nothing to write home about. But the doctor's notes littered around our house and the sound of my dad running out of Motrin is an indication nonetheless that even the best of us don't last forever. Is it weird to pre-emptively mourn my father, when my grandparents aren't even dead yet? Perhaps. Not as weird as mourning the person I am currently, the one who relies on my father for everything, the one who I will no longer be the second my father is gone. Which I also did. 

I have a confession: I've always thought I would die young. Not tragically young, but as soon as it's no longer so dramatic. Early 40s, maybe. Maybe I die with the rest of the planet, when climate change finally makes fools of us all. Maybe my death is just a me-thing. Either way, for all my daydreaming and fantasizing, for all the plotlines I've made for myself, it all ends mysteriously at 36. Just static. 

I don't write this to make anyone concerned about me. I'm not Cassandra, so my words aren't prophetic, and for what it's worth, the thought of dying young makes me sad, because I rather like living. I only write this to remind myself that *life* isn't the thing happening in the distant future, nor the thing happening in my head. It's the real, tangible thing I hold in my hands every morning (and, actually, every night, every noon, every 2:17pm, every second). It's the dreams I'm actively trying to realize, not the ones I whisper when nobody else can hear me. It's who I am, not the amalgamation of everyone I've been. If I'm going to die at 36, I'm halfway done. Why do I feel like I've not even started? 

If my blog is evidence of anything, it's that I spend an inordinate amount of time in my head, wondering if I've made myself proud yet. Ever since my Ghost Story blogpost, I've begun to think of past versions of myself has dead. Discontinued, not just phased out. In this lens, perhaps my preoccupation with death is both real grief and grief for the lives I could've lived. Is it narcissistic to mourn yourself? Probably. But it's more poetic than the alternative, which is just grim. 

A few years ago, I told someone that my biggest fear was being forgotten. (Yes, I realize now that this, too, sounds narcissistic.) I've since realized that this isn't really true; I think my worst fear is forgetting myself. I have this vision of sitting down to write a memoir and not remembering all the little anecdotes I had wanted to include. What if I forget that one lecture from AP European History about Hitler that I'd wanted to quote when I taught my children about World War II? What if I forget about my piano teacher when creating wedding invites? I'm not Greek, but I sometimes like to think of the Furies holding my lifeline in their hands, sharpening their scissors to make a snip at the right place. I don't even really believe in predestination, so I'm not sure why this is how I envision my death -- there's no guarantee I'll die at the "right place", or that there even is a "right place". I think it's just satisfying to think of my story as one that has an ending; after all, I hate uncertainty. It's comforting to think of my life as a line, something that's neatly cut off, because perhaps that I can memorize and never forget, even dead. It's disconcerting to think of my life as a series of a million little lives -- a mosaic of multicolored yarn all stitched together sloppily by Girl Scouts learning to tie knots. But the latter image is far more realistic. When I die, I'll be buried a hundred times, each one private and unique to everyone that loves me. I don't have just one life for the Furies to snip snip away. I have a thousand. 

Which brings me back to Cedric. Maybe I knew his death was coming. But the first time I read it, it was one life. Each time I re-experience it, it's a hundred. A thousand. A million. We grow exponentially -- I know personally, 2023 has brought the most hockey-stick shape to my trajectory yet. Maybe what I'm mourning now is the knowledge that we will never have assurance that the person we died as, of all the people we could've been, was right. We can't mourn ourselves. We can't give speeches at our own funerals, or see people crying over our dead bodies to confirm we lived with meaning. The only barometer for success and happiness that matters to us -- our own -- will never measure the value of our life in its totality. We live to die without closure. It feels discordant. 

But maybe when the time comes, I won't think about any of this. After all, I'll be dead, won't I?