When I was clinically depressed, I always had a morbid preoccupation with the thought of my premature death bringing people together. How everyone I’ve ever known or loved, wretched with guilt and a common sadness, could somehow rectify their unseen differences through tragedy.
Growing older, I’ve come to realize that acting in morally ambiguous ways doesn’t render you a horrible human being, merely a contradictory one. You can hold a staunch moral opinion about something, but actually standing at a crossroads you never anticipated is an entirely different matter; knowing what the righteous thing to do is does not equate to doing it, just as acting ambiguously does not mean that you lack a compass or a set of values by which to orient yourself.
While it is easy to surmise that ideally, people ought to confront their most uncomfortable fears to deconstruct their prejudices, I have always harbored an avoidant fantasy of a different kind: that the insecurities which have plagued me in life would somehow be rectified by other people once I was gone, and that the explanations I never managed to give would no longer be necessary. I would never have to clear my name from the misrepresentation I fear; my contradictions and failures would eventually dissolve into the soft sediment of memory as those I had ever loved hovered over my body in a serene sleep.
They would want to remember me. They would want to speak of me as someone who had made a positive impact on their lives, because doing anything else at a funeral would be, for lack of a better word, blasphemous. Death (more specifically, the setting of a funeral) seemed to possess a peculiar authority over the living; criticism was sacrilege. In that sense, I sometimes imagined it as the final and most convincing argument I could ever make.
A perpetual fear I always had when I began dating was that bringing a partner home to a family plagued by years of dysfunction would completely taint any prospect of a thriving relationship. Ever since I left for university, I began to compartmentalize my life as something increasingly distant from who I was as an extension of them. Because I was no longer physically present within that environment, it became easier to believe that the person I was becoming had very little to do with the people who raised me. In my independent existence, there seemed little reason to interrogate that separation too deeply. Their dysfunction occupied a strange place in my life—close enough to explain certain things, yet distant enough that I could treat it as something that had already concluded. Here, my history could be reduced to a collection of carefully organized explanations and masked anecdotes told with just enough self-awareness to make them sound almost harmless.
My relationship disrupted my ability to maintain that illusion; my issues could no longer exist in isolation from the people who had helped create them, because loving someone inevitably meant introducing them to the parts of your life you would otherwise prefer to keep separate. And so, alongside all the ordinary anxieties of intimacy, there emerged the realization that one day I would have to introduce this boy to my family, and that on that day he would come to understand the full extent of the bullshit he would have to endure for the coming years if he chose to stay.
There was always the fear that he would look around the room and understand something about me that I had spent years trying to outrun. The sensitivities I had reframed as personal shortcomings and the contradictions I had painstakingly claimed ownership over would suddenly appear as inheritances, and that one day, the most intimate part of my life would inevitably depart because he could not look past where I came from. Truth is, I didn’t have a right to tell him he didn’t know what he was doing when he found his ineffable definition of love in me; it was, to my chagrin, his—and it wasn’t my place to take that away.
I would wonder about that approaching day when he would meet my mother. Perhaps by some miracle, she would learn how to be in my presence without wanting alcohol to dull the very fact of my existence. It was a fantasy I entertained without ever fully believing in, because the truth was that the possibility of them meeting remained perpetually suspended between us, never impossible, merely one complaint, one phone call, one flight away. And perhaps that was what made it so terrifying. To watch the two of them occupy the same room would mean confronting the reality that being her daughter was once again real.
When I pondered my premature funeral as I watched him sleep languidly next to me through dawn, I almost laughed at myself, perturbed by the saccharine nature of it all. It was, after all, the only conceivable way that my boyfriend meeting my parents could manifest itself into existence through brute force. Through me. There was something perversely funny about entertaining the possibility of that impossibility—concluding that the introduction I had spent years dreading would finally occur only once I was no longer around to witness it. I imagine my mother sobbing hysterically in a corner of the church, clutching at her chest as though grief were a physical thing lodged somewhere beneath her ribs. I imagine my father standing beside my casket, staring up at the apse with the quiet desperation of a man hoping that God might still grant me a favorable judgment. People who have not spoken to me in years file through the pews, each attempting to remember what little good I may have served in the grand scheme of their lives.
I imagine him cupping my mother’s hands with his and, through bated breaths, telling her that who was once her baby was also his. They will speak of my magnetic extraversion, my soft, dimpled smile, and my fervent, unselfish love for almost everyone and everything. And the frenzied hurricane that was my life would eventually be remembered for the improbable fact that, in its aftermath, the two opposing halves of who I was had finally found one another.
Perhaps this is the ultimate cowardice: to shy away from what I perceive as inevitable and dangerous through the morbid fascination of leaving everything behind. Still, I unconsciously suspect it is sustained by an almost unwavering faith in everyone who has ever loved me at one point in time—even the family who have done me wrong.
For all of our failures to understand one another while I am here, I have never doubted that grief would compel them to try. They will share the parts of me easiest to love and forgive the rest, and the certainty of that alone is enough.