“And thou, most kind and gentle Death, 
Waiting to hush our final breath,…
Thou leadest home the child of God, 
As Christ before that way hath trod.”

-from “All Creatures of Our God and King,” by St. Francis of Assisi

Between the ages of twelve and thirty-one, I spent most of my days in an agonizing trek through the canyon floor of despair. To treat this malady, a whole pharmacy of medication was thrust upon me, none of which did any damn good. It was like living in Mordor; bereft of anything green and growing, dark and shrouded by heavy clouds, with no light save the glowing lava fountain of my rage and resentment, the only emotions that fueled me. The death wish was never far from my fancy; often it was my over-bearing companion. I planned out my demise many times and even attempted my extinction once with half a bottle of bourbon and a couple of handfuls of Tylenol PM. I bring this to light in the happy context of my presently not being suicidal at all for nearly six years. In that time, though fraught with difficulty and sorrow, I have never wanted to end it all, and the reader of this essay should in no way imagine such ideation in me as I share these musings.

Life is ever-pregnant with experience and happiness. Though I’m lazy, I’m still zealous to spend my time on earth at its summit. I have a whole library of poetry to create, essays to compose, and novels to write, as well as a whole humanity to share it with. A multitude of places in Europe, Africa, and Asia await my visitation. And I hope to make friends with nearly everyone in the world. Such ambitions are glittering – and occasionally preposterous – but I know that with just a little effort, I can realize some of them, and thereby realize myself and not “go gently into that good night.”

But more than this, I have a lot of time to make up for. Although my childhood and adolescence were not especially wicked, there is still much to regret. I was often disobedient to my parents and elders, I was a terrible student, I was mouthy, pompous, and obnoxious, and I tormented my poor little brother through bullying for several years (a common crime to be sure, but still a heinous one). In my adulthood, however, I uncover a freight of guilt. Not so much for years of unbridled hedonism but for the fathoms of selfishness, dishonesty, sloth, and waste that attended it. I ever floated in a caustic sea of resentment and hatred, clinging to petty vindictiveness for dear life. I fled from responsibility and dependability as if from a hungry predator. I was as shallow as a rain puddle and as vain as a politician, and I committed a couple or three sins the regret of which I will carry with me every day until my grave.

All this to say, I am not yet ready to stand before God in judgment with so little so far to show for my life, the story of which I want to include more than just the scoundrelry of my twenties; I want it to be about service to others and progress in my character. There is so much unnecessary suffering that I could (in my own small way) help to remedy, so many people who need encouragement and assistance, and so much potential for making myself into a better person. I want to atone for my multitude of misdoings, receive a lighter sentence in Purgatory, and have a finer and nobler soul to present to God before I spend eternity with Him.

Nevertheless, while I wish for three more decades on this planet to accomplish the aforementioned (as well as to do my parents a solid and outlive them) I very much look forward to death. As St. Alphonsus Ligouri noted – when he advised that one should not pine for a long life – the longer we live the more opportunity we have to sin and thus risk estranging ourselves from God. I have offended the Deity enough and I do not relish the frequency with which I continue to do so. Moreover, despite being crammed with glamor and joy, life is exhausting and often demoralizing.

I know from bitter experience how draining a lifetime of intense mental illness is. It evaporates vitality and resilience out of the soul like a raindrop in the hot sun. The noxious fluttering of anxiety, the ten-ton slab of crushing depression, the howling zoo of executive dysfunction, the yawning portal to hell that is psychosis, the maze of confusion that is autism – to say nothing of the slings and arrows of a whole variety of other manifestations of madness, these all chip away at a personality like a grater to any block of cheese. Given enough time, all that’s left are shreds. But even when such agonies are absent, there are pains more mundane but nonetheless excruciating. From the misery of friendlessness to the outrage of injustice, from unrequited love to years of a loveless marriage, from dreams in youth just beyond our reach to the graveyard of said dreams in older age – Hamlet did more than enough to elaborate on such in his famous soliloquy. Though one of the great goals of life should be to find meaning in such sufferings, to endure them and grow from them, they still grind us down and there isn’t much for compensation to get back the joy and peace of which we are robbed. Indeed, what St. Alphonsus said about sin we can say the same about suffering: the longer we live, the more opportunity to hurt and never be healed.

But what might be my most important reason for desiring a short life and the release of death is no doubt a selfish and cowardly one. Simply put, I want to die before my friends do. I am blessed with a number of intimate friendships, those I’ve known for many years or only a few, who light up my life like the Aurora on a winter’s night. Whether through sharing significant commonalities of perspective and interest or for relishing the charms of what’s radically different, my friends have enriched the desert of my existence into a lush and fruitful vineyard. I would be destitute, depraved, and probably dead without them. As life is so rewarding with breath being in their lungs, their deaths to me would be like the loss of a limb; life would never be the same. I get more from my friends, I believe, than they get from me; thus as weak, dependent, and fragile as I am, I could not endure a lifetime of their absence. With every year of life I could gain, I would open myself up to more and more loss, a dark, pallid garden of misery entwining my time on earth with greater amounts of ashen vines. Long life seems to me much less of a blessing.

I have a healthy fear of the act and process of dying. I hope my exit from human society will be as pleasant and quick as possible, and I make sure to always look both ways before crossing the street. Avoiding death is the most basic and powerful of our instincts. But given the manifold and ubiquitous sorrow of life, I think that it is also wise and salubrious to anticipate and be hopeful about this ultimate reality. As an atheist, I was not troubled by the prospect of being dead: I would not exist, thus while I would not enjoy myself, I would also not suffer either. Unending nothingness is not something one has to endure as one will not even be aware that one is gone forever. Now that I am a Christian and believe in an afterlife, although the prospect of punishment does keep me on my toes, I am very confident about the alternative. Trust in God’s mercy, repentance for my sins, and a willingness to keep His commandments and cooperate with His grace gives me assurance that I am on the path to eternal life. And oh, how sweeter that prospect is than the atheist’s rest in nonentity! I will pass from this vale of tears into a country devoid of tears, I will attain the complete realization of myself, I will meet the saints who have gone before me, and I will be transfixed by the face of God forever: to forever love Him, to be loved by Him, and to contemplate His goodness and majesty unto my everlasting salvation.