Your girl almost had a “crying in the club” moment, and on her own birthday, no less. Ever become like, overwhelmingly aware of your own mortality? Like, really aware?
I was at karaoke and scrolling through That Accursed Platform™ when I stumbled across this picture:
My hero, Ann Wilson, whose trademark long dark hair and straight bangs were the inspiration for my own hairdo. Her signature hair is missing. She looks beautiful, as always, but she no longer resembles me. She resembles another woman now.
My mother.
Ann is getting older.
My mom is getting older.
I’m getting older.
And if I’m honest, it terrifies me.
I don’t want to think about a world where Ann Wilson doesn’t exist. No one wants to think about their hero dying. Dying is such a vulnerable state, and your hero is supposed to be invincible, right? It’s the cracks in that invincibility that give you that unsettled feeling. Also, your hero is supposed to be someone you see yourself in. And seeing Ann get older is like seeing myself get older in real time. I’m seeing an older version of me.
I guess this is a Part Two to my first birthday post, since that last post also talked about my impending death. I won’t lie, I’m actually pretty content in my life right now, but there’s always that nagging feeling of “You are mortal. You will die. You will be forgotten.” It colors everything I do. I thought I was out of the OCD woods when most of my lifelong obsessions and compulsions went dormant a few years back, but now I’m realizing it just morphed into something else. There’s something called existential OCD, and it’s hell. Imagine grappling with the Meaning of Life every single fucking day.
Yeah, it’s not fun.
The good news is…well, I started typing that and didn’t really come up with anything great. I am going to watch all my heroes die. I’m going to watch my mom die. I’m going to watch my dad die. I’m going to probably watch a lot of friends die. And God forbid Crass or Livvy die before me.
But I’m not alone in any of that.
Death is part of the human experience. There’s a reason tarot experts tell people not to fear the death card. Everyone in human history has perished eventually. No man has truly achieved immortality. The closest anyone has ever gotten has been men like Jesus and Mohamed and Aristotle, whose ideas transcended millennia. But they’re rare exceptions. Most humans fade quietly into time. No one remembers who your great-great-grandmother was. In a way, the universal experience of dying and becoming forgotten unites us all.
I may be slowly catapulting toward death, but we’re all slowly catapulting together. I named this post “Don’t Fear the Reaper” for the Blue Öyster Cult song, but when I was writing it, I had the words from “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac in my head. “Time makes you bolder, even children get older, and I’m getting older too.” There’s a good reason I chose it as my daddy-daughter dance (which was the only dance I was allowed to do at my own wedding — long story short, don’t marry a Baptist).
I wish there was an easy answer. I wish I was gullible enough to believe wholeheartedly in afterlife, but I don’t know anymore. I still consider myself a Christian, but a fairly agnostic one. I want to believe more than anything that there’s a special place for our souls after we die. More than that, I want to believe in that elusive Meaning of Life, some higher purpose for our existence, but I’m starting to lose faith in humanity for a lot of reasons.
I want to leave a mark on this world somehow, because I’m finding the only way to quell my fears of death is to life fully and with purpose.
I want to believe that should I die, there will have been some reason for me to have been here.
JESSA JOYCE 