The first time I can remember knowing and understanding that we don’t get to live forever I was still in the single digits as far as years on the earth. 

I had a neighbor, a pastor, who looked as if he had stopped updating his style at the 1950s or ‘60s. He wore black, thick glasses nestled below a short and always-slicked-back haircut. 

He kept his face clean-shaven, and I can’t remember ever seeing him not wearing at least a dress shirt (short or long-sleeved, depending on the time of year) and slacks. 

When I think about him now, I don’t remember much that we ever talked about, besides the fact that he would say hi and call me “buddy” in his booming, baritone voice that I could hear clearly no matter where he spoke from in his yard. 

But I remember how warm his welcome and his smile were. He was the quintessential 90’s neighbor. 

He was a good man, and I liked him very much. 

Then, one day, I walked out of my house to check if I could see any of my friends already awake and outside and ready to play for the day. But my eyes focused on a broken flower pot in the corner of our front yard near the sidewalk. My mother always kept the pot —  a plastic bucket inside of a wood, fence-like encasement —  filled with different plants and flowers. 

However, that day all of the wood pieces that had been holding it together were strewn around the scene like a mini explosion had taken place. The deep, dark brown of the dirt they had helped contain now drowned out the lush, green grass that had surrounded it. 

Something happened. But I didn’t know what.  

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Story continues below.

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A little later, my mother and father sat me down to explain why the pot had been destroyed. My  pastor friend — who mowed his lawn on a riding mower weekly in the summer while his wife would prune flowers in their yard and around their long, white porch —had suffered a heart attack while undertaking the routine task. 

While his heart was attacking his body, he lost control of the mower and crashed into my mom’s flower pot before falling off the side of it into the grass. 

When someone noticed, they called 911. 

But it was too late. He didn’t make it. 

They told me he was “dead”. 

Suddenly, that word and concept that had no bearing on my life had become real. 

This thing I had read about or been told about happening countless times to people in different stories that my father read to me from the Bible and other texts as a kid had weight and shape. 

I remember how it solidified its form in my mind as I walked up to my friend’s  lifeless shell at his funeral a few days later, as tears flowed down my cheeks to the soundtrack of “Amazing Grace”. 

My friend lay there in a casket. No smile like he always had. No flash of light in his eyes as he calls me “buddy”. No pacifying pulse of low frequencies coming from his throat. 

He was gone. 

This was death. 

In that moment I knew two things with absolute certainty: Death is real, and some day it’s going to get me too. 

Apparently, I couldn’t shake those thoughts. 

My mother tells me now that, following my friend’s funeral, she would find me lying in the grass of our backyard and staring straight up at the sky. She would stand there for minutes just staring at me, and I wouldn’t move at all. 

Finally, starting to get somewhat worried, she came outside and asked me what I was doing.

“I just wondered what it’d be like to be dead,” she tells me is what I said in response.

See, I’ve always been anxious about everything. 

The way that I’ve learned to cope is to try to “practice” for an unknown experience as much as I can so that it feels less intimidating. This has led to countless hours of watching videos of people doing a physical activity I want to try or studying loads of instructional text about a new hobby I’m pursuing. 

But, how do you adequately prepare for death? 

Your body will only do it once, and in order to do it successfully, you have to — you know — actually die. You don’t get a practice run.

So I struggled with finding some way to simulate the feeling to decrease my anxieties about my inevitable end. 

That is, until I started drinking. 

I’ve been sober quite a few years now, and with perspective comes never-ending, new revelations. I don’t think now that it was the dependency or the feeling of separation from the real world that I was so hooked on in my drinking years. 

It was the weight of it. 

If you’ve ever been on a multi-day bender, you probably know the heaviness that your body takes on that last day that you get drunk again — piling it on top of the previous days’ collective hangovers.

 It’s like deep down inside you have the energy to lift up your bones and go about the day like you usually do. But when you start to send the impulse to move from your brain out to the parts necessary to do so, nothing happens. 

Either your willpower is too weak, or the elements keeping your body down are too strong. 

No matter which one it is, you know you’re not getting up. 

You can’t. 

That’s what I loved. That feeling is what I craved. 

Because it was the closest I could ever get to being dead —- the labored, slow breathing; the immobility of the deterioration of self; and the acceptance of the final curtain —- without having to go through it before I was truly ready to. 

It was the perfect way to prepare for lying in that bed that I’ll never get up from again in that last room I’ll ever see. 

I now had a method to practice. 

So I did. A lot. For a decade. 

And I would love nothing more than to tell you that the motley crew of booze that has passed through my body washed away that fear and anxiety over death along with all the memories of positive moments from my life; however, I can’t do so honestly. 

The moments are gone, but the fear remains. 

Because even now, when I’m drifting off to sleep and for a moment that heaviness of slumber hits my body, all of those years of practicing for death come back into my mind. 

And I know I wasted them. 

I haven’t lived enough. I want to really live. I haven’t done that enough. 

I’m not ready. 

I’m not ready at all. I’m nowhere near ready. 

But regardless. 

Some day. 

Maybe even today. 

I’m going to die. 

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