The Trouble with Forever

I think about death far too much. Or perhaps not enough, depending on whether you believe there is a proper dosage of mortality to swallow daily, like some grim vitamin. My trouble is that I’ve lost the ability to ration it. Other people sip at the thought of death like wine, maybe at a funeral or when a celebrity dies, and then they put it back on the shelf. But me? I’ve hooked it up to an IV drip just swinging lightly right there when I wake up, when I eat breakfast, when I smile at someone I love, when I write, when I stare at the ceiling. Death has become the background noise of my existence, and I can’t decide if that makes me wise or doomed.

To say it plainly though…I know, with unbearable vividness, that life is not permanent. That every laugh is a temporary loan, that every hug is underwritten by eventual absence. I don’t just “know” it the way people know that the Earth is round or that taxes exist… daily and every minute almost… I ache with it, as if grief has decided to move in early, unpacking its suitcases before the event even happens. I grieve loved ones while they’re still alive. I preemptively mourn everyone’s ending. Even my own… I spend days not just living but rehearsing the pain of losing it all. It is an excruciating theater of the mind, and I am both the playwright and the reluctant audience.

I have tried to explain this once in a message to my husband. Earlier today actually, hours before I got to work typing out this blog post… I told him I’m stuck grieving everyone before they even go, stuck circling my own inevitable ending like a vulture with nowhere to land. I told him it happens daily, almost every minute, and the terror is not just that I will die, but that I will live like THIS until I die. The constant awareness… His response was, “Yeah. That does not sound pleasant”… wasn’t wrong, but it was something like calling a hurricane “a bit windy.”

Still, I can’t blame him. How do you reply to someone who says, essentially, every moment feels like a dress rehearsal for your funeral and everyone else’s too? People aren’t trained for these conversations. I’m not even sure philosophers are.

The psychologists have a few names for my affliction. Some would call it death anxiety or thanatophobia. In research papers they’ll call it mortality salience. Clinicians with a flair for subcategories might suggest existential OCD, where obsessions revolve around the unsolvable questions of life’s meaning and death’s certainty, and compulsions take the form of endless rumination, reassurance-seeking, and philosophical scavenger hunts that never satisfy. And then there’s absurdism, which is not a diagnosis but a philosophy, Camus whispering in everyone’s ear that the universe is indifferent, that I must imagine Sisyphus happy as he rolls his boulder up the hill.

Some days I’m not sure if I’m Camus or Sisyphus.

But here’s the strange part… this same chain is also the key to my inspiration. I’m not just crushed by these thoughts… I’m animated by them. If life were endless, perhaps I would not write poems. If eternity were guaranteed, perhaps I would not sing. It is precisely the fleeting nature of everything that compels me to pin words to the page like butterflies, desperate to preserve something luminous before it dissolves. I am chained by mortality and set free by it at the same time.

This paradox is, I suspect, part of the INFP curse and blessing. We’re dreamers who insist on staring into the void, romantics who can’t stop asking why anyone would romance at all if the story always ends. Layer on top of that my autistic wiring… my tendency toward hyperfocus, my relentless need to systematize mysteries, my inability to simply “let things go”… and suddenly my existential OCD has a full orchestra to play with. My brain does not politely sip questions… it drains the whole bottle, and then gnaws on the cork.

And yet, I am a poet. A lyricist. An essayist. My job… if it can be called that… is to translate this relentless awareness into something others can bear to read, perhaps even something that makes them nod and say, “Yes, I feel that too, though I could never put it in words.” What torments me in silence becomes art when it leaves my body. If I have any gift, it is the ability to make terror whimsical, to combine dread with wit, to stitch philosophy into something resembling a song.

Of course, I’m not immune to irony. I smoke weed sometimes, and I call it medication, not because it erases my dread but because it lowers the volume enough for me to sit in the room with it. Without it, the thoughts batter me like a violent, suffocating piece of machinery… with it, the machinery is still running, but muffled behind a door. Weed does not fix me, but it makes me possible. People swallow pills daily and call it treatment. I smoke a little green and call it the same.

But what good comes from this life, this neurology, this constant ache? It’s tempting to say none, to treat my mind as a malfunctioning furnace that only spits smoke. Yet I know better. There is good, though it is tangled with suffering.

For one thing, I see more deeply than many. My sensitivity makes me unbearable at times, but it also makes me someone who notices the tremor in a loved one’s voice, the fleeting beauty of a cloud’s edge, the absurd comedy of death in the middle of dinner. For another, my art is real. It is not a hobby plucked from thin air… it is forged in the kiln of necessity. When I write about grief or love or beauty, I’m not borrowing language from someone else’s textbook… I am mining it from my bloodstream.

There’s also this… my obsession with mortality is a kind of shield against complacency. While others snooze through their days, assuming tomorrow will come, I am never so naïve. I know this might be the last sunrise I see, the last letter I write, the last argument I ever have. My love is sharper because of it. My urgency is keener. My sense of meaning, ironically, is built from staring into the very void that tells me meaning may not exist.

I photograph, write, doodle, I seize the day! and I feel the very moment I am in… I think of it and the possibility of it being my last…

Is this sustainable? Maybe not. Maybe it’s too much voltage for one body. Maybe it’s the kind of awareness that burns people out, drives them into despair, makes them medicate or self-destruct. And yet, I can’t deny that woven through all the terror is a bit of awe. For if life is this fragile, then every laugh, every glance, every note of music is more miraculous than we dare admit.

So I live chained and inspired. Shackled and winged. I’m the person who will cry at a child’s giggle because I know one day it will stop, who will write a poem about autumn leaves not because they fall but because they insist on such a glorious color before they do. I am, in short, unbearable and indispensable… at least to myself, and hopefully to those who read what I leave behind.

Maybe that is the trouble with forever… it doesn’t exist (and maybe in the sense that this human life we are in… no matter our beliefs… doesn’t last) And maybe the trouble with me is that I can’t stop noticing that fact. But if I must live with this awareness until the day it swallows me, then I will at least turn it into words, into music, into something that might reach another human being and say… you’re not the only one rehearsing grief while the play is still running.

If art has any purpose, perhaps it is this…

to turn chains into instruments, fear into rhythm, dread into song. That’s the good that can come from being highly likely autistic, existentially obsessive, an INFP, and a writer/poet. That’s the good that can come from being me.

Until the curtain falls, I will keep writing. And grieving. And laughing, sometimes at the absurdity of it all. And maybe… just maybe… I will imagine Sisyphus not only happy, but humming a tune on his way up the hill.