You know how death is certain and inevitable, and so to discuss and acknowledge the subject of death from time to time is completely natural?
It's as though I've been surrounded by death this whole week. Beginning with the last writer we studied for the ending of the summer class, Edgar Allan Poe and the whole gothic genre
Walking into my roommate's room a few days back for fish feeding time, I notice something a little off as I approach the tank. I peer in through the glass to find that Frank, the large koi, is floating around on his side, lifeless.
This makes me worried, because having someone else's pet die on your watch just raises suspicion. As though it was somehow your fault. This is when I back out of the room and it hits me that I have a genuine fear of dead things. I think it was seeing the life sucked out of it, and its eyes wide open, staring at me in death that made me feel sick. I called my roommate, who is back in DC for the remainder of summer, to relay the bad news. Fortunately she took it well, and then says the part I'd been dreading - "I really hate to ask this, but do you think you could take him out of the tank and flush him down the toilet?"
"Yeah, no problem," I lie.
Frank died on my birthday. I tried to see it as symbolic of something, being the egomaniac that I am. Something totally momentous or foreshadowing, like maybe I was being renewed as a person, reborn with the childlike confidence a lot of us had lost in the growing up process, and something had to die to initiate this transformation.
My roommate's room is reflective of her passion for theater. I catch sight of this framed poster, The Burial at Thebes that I had not noticed before, the fifth century Greek tragedy by Sophocles. From what I know of this play, some major family drama went down which ultimately led to the rebellion of Antigone against her father, the King of Thebes, thus prompting him to punish his daughter by banishing her into a tomb. By the time he had a change of heart, she'd already killed herself.
I recall reading a few blog posts of supermodel Daul Kim long after she'd hanged herself in her Paris apartment last year. In one of those posts, written a month before her suicide, she wrote about remembering what it felt like to be a child, remembering thinking for the first time, who am I? Where is God from? Where do I go after I die?
And then she wrote, in an optimistic tone, that one day when she becomes a mother she would hold her child close and explain all of those things in a reassuring way when she asked those questions.
I walked into my roommate's room earlier today to feed the two remaining fish, Alberta and James (they are named after theater greats according to Liz). James stared blankly at me from the bottom of the tank. He was dead.
