The Year Death Introduced Itself

A friend’s car crash. Then 35 classmates on Flight 103. September 11. And then I helped my mother let go

Dark Elegy, by Susan Lowenstein, photo by Peter Lowenstein

*This post was written in response to a prompt by imi: Write a letter to your biggest fear.

Hello Death,

When I was young, I didn’t understand how you worked. My mother cried in her bedroom because you stole away her aunt and uncles, childhood friends, people who formed her early life. I didn’t understand her pain. Not yet.

The first time you and I truly became acquainted, you came for my friend Denise, just 19 years old. She was driving home from a wedding when her car hit a tree. Denise was the type of girl who was going places in the world before you intervened. I don’t know if she’s busy in heaven now, but I suspect she is. What I do know is that you sucker-punched me with grief, and in that instant I understood all my mother’s tears.

You weren’t finished with us that year. Just three months later you took 35 of my classmates on Pan Am Flight 103, collecting them and carrying them heavenward above the little town of Lockerbie, Scotland. Artist Susan Lowenstein, who lost her son Alexander, created 74 life-sized sculptures depicting how the other mothers looked when they learned the news that you had taken their children. These moms came to Lowenstein’s studio to help with the project. “They allowed their bodies to fall into the position that it took upon hearing that most devastating news,” Lowenstein writes. “Some scream, some beg, some weep, some pray, some curl into a ball, while others raise their fists in anger and despair.”

Death, this is the impact of your work.

On September 11, you accepted the souls of 2,977 more innocents, including a boy I had always had a crush on. When I was little, I told my mother that I would marry him someday. True to form, she turned to me and said, “You’ll have a lot of competition with that one!”

She couldn’t have imagined that you would win the competition.

When you came for my mother, I played a role in handing her over. I stopped her hydration. She hadn’t eaten any solid food in hospice for three-and-a-half months, and I knew that ending the hydration meant I was giving her to you, but I didn’t want to believe it. Letting go felt like betrayal, even though I knew it was mercy.

Then you tried for my dad, but that time we fought you off. He is not ready for you.

When you come for me, I hope it’s in the middle of the night, that you come silently and swiftly, and I hope that my children will not mourn for long. I hope this will not happen for many decades. But after a lifetime of watching you pass through the lives around me—never gone for long, always somewhere close by—you and I are no longer strangers. And because of that, I am not as afraid.

Patty Bee