The Spark of Life

In one of my creative writing classes in college, we would do a writing assignment each week, then spend part of the next class workshopping it with an assigned group. As the semester wore on, a trend began to develop in my work.

In almost every piece I wrote in that class, someone died, or came close to dying, or in some way flirted with the other side. In increasingly graphic ways. Why is that? I’m not a particularly morbid person.

The fascinating thing about death is how close we are to it at every moment. A step off a curb, a twitch of a steering wheel, a usually-benign crazy guy on the bus—that’s all it takes to send us from one world to the next.

Most people spend their whole lives trying to avoid death. For most of human history that was all life was. Nowadays with the convenience of Safeway and universal health care it doesn’t require the same exertion just to make it to tomorrow, but avoiding death still takes a lot of energy. People build their lives around postponing the inevitable: exercising, wearing a seatbelt, taking swimming lessons. But postpone it all you want—one day, it’s still coming.

I’ve only seen one dead body in my life—it was my great aunt. She had an open casket at her funeral, and I had just turned 15. It was a little scary, but also uncanny. Freud defines the uncanny as that which is familiar, yet somehow not, and that’s what she was. She looked the same—maybe a little greyer—but at the same time, she was just, not.

So, what is that thing that makes the dead not alive? Aside from a pulse and brain activity. Is that all there is to life?

And that, my friends, is why people die in my stories. It’s not because that’s all that happens in life, or because it’s all I can think about—it’s because I want to understand life, and the fine line between the two. Either that or I’m just strapped for ideas.