Mari's Diary: I've been thinking about death (again)...

Unpopular opinion? on death

Welcome back. This is the first publication in a new section of my Substack called Mari’s Diary. As the name suggests, it will contain more frequent posts about my life experiences and reflections. These publications will be for paid subscribers, allowing me to keep it a sustainable part of my life. Child-psychology-focused posts and occasional Diaries will still be available for all subscribers. I love to hear when these posts spark something within the readers as well, so please feel free to keep the conversation going in the comments.

Diary 1: Unpopular Opinion on Death:

I wasn’t born with a fear of death. As long as I can remember, I have always kind of wanted to die. Not in a suicidal way, but out of gentle wonder towards the spiritual world.

I would look out of my second-floor bedroom window from the age of 6, and think about how I might have to land for it to kill me. I thought about car crashes and giant storms, and I was not afraid- I was curious. I felt like dying must be the ultimate experience.

Moving through adolescence, I decided it was cooler to be full of angst and label my curiosity about death as actually wanting to die. I starved myself and self-harmed, but lived through it and realized that while I’m very alive now, I may as well learn to make the best of it! Death will come in due time.

Reflecting on this, and feeling around the comments I’ve heard from following my fathers death (age 55,) in September 2024, I have concluded that it doesn’t really matter if someone dies when they are 90, 50, 20, or 2… no one deserves to die young, and no one deserves to live for a long time either; some of us just do.

Although the timing is sometimes surprising, dying is one of the most universally expected things to happen. We have no idea what a child’s hobbies will be, or what they’ll do to survive in the economy, but we know that one day, they'll die.

That doesn’t make it easier. Dying sucks for those of us that live on… It’s this whole process of pain, grief, and asking questions that don’t have answers… but it’s also a chance to feel. When our connection to another person is so strong, it goes beyond the material world.

As most of us learned in science class, energy can’t be destroyed; it just shifts into new forms, and a human body is a heck of a lot of energy. For a dead person’s energy to be gone is impossible; it’s just gone from the way we knew it. Death is a chance to connect to them in new, perhaps deeper ways, to tell them everything you couldn’t face-to-face, to open yourself to their invisible guidance, and understand ourselves in ways that go far beyond this material realm.

Thanks for hearing me out.

My Dad with my Grandma, 1970