Memento mori
Will and me recently finished the Spiritfarer local co-op that we were doing on date nights. The ending made me cry a lot but we always knew it would.
I am weirdly emotional about death. And to be fair to myself, I think these moments in games and films are obviously meant to make you emotional to a certain extent. They are meant to make you think about things in your own life that hurt. Otherwise, why are they there? But I can be completely and utterly medicated and still be so upset about things like this.
When Freya was waiting for surgery I would be in floods of tears every time we took a spirit to the Everdoor. It brought out lots of thoughts, like what if she thinks we’re abandoning her at the vets. If she dies in surgery she’ll never see us again and she’ll never understand why. If she does die I’ll effectively have ferried my own dog to the Everdoor and left her there.
And even though everything went fine, I’m still so sad and anxious because she’s 12 years-old. I’d keep her forever if I could but unfortunately pets don’t work that way. I know that pain is coming and it’s stopping me from living in the moment with her.
I live in fear of Will dying. There’s no reason for him to but I think about it a lot, and it’s got worse recently. I will have a full panic attack if I think about it for too long uninterrupted. I just stop being able to breathe as my insides go fizzy. As annoying and untidy as he can be, he’s the centre of my universe and I’m so afraid of something happening. Cripplingly afraid.
I’m afraid of dying too. Which is odd, because I’ve been suicidal. I don’t understand how I can so badly not want to exist, and then suddenly flip to being so afraid of what not existing is.
I’m afraid of dying from something going wrong during surgery. I’m afraid of dying from this extremely ugly illness we didn’t realise I had for far too long. I’m afraid of dying before I do anything with my life, before we get a house and have a baby, before I get a real role in anything, before I do really good streaming, before I make a real film.
I want to die before Will, even though it’s scary, and while it wouldn’t be very nice for him, he would be better at dealing with it than I would at coping without him. But in an ideal scenario we’d be nearly 100 before that even started being likely.
Maybe it would be easier to cope with all these thoughts if I knew for certain that our consciousnesses carried on in some form, and thus could still be reachable. It would be easier if I knew I would probably be able to watch over Will or sometimes talk to him. The idea of someone’s personality and soul just completely ceasing to exist in the universe is something I really struggle with. I have faith in El but at the same time, I am so afraid that death is truly the end of something anyone ever was, and that’s why even in fiction, the subject makes me so upset.
