For most of my life, especially since college, I have kept journals. Most of my major life events since then have found their way into notebooks.

But I will have to omit the most major life event of all: death. This is unfair. I think I should be able to write a journal entry afterward saying what it is like and what I think about it, and if I learned anything. For obvious reasons, that is impossible. But there is nothing to stop me from writing it early. I have made some creative “predictions” in this piece, some of which I hope do not occur. But it is all in fun.

Let me be absolutely clear: I love life. I have every intention of living until I am 120, and even longer if I can. But whether my death happens tomorrow or 1000 years from now, I want to make sure than I have the final word. So here it is: my final journal entry.

From the Journal of L.E. Henderson; final page:

Damn. I knew this was going to happen. But not today. Not now. I had plans.

I have half a box of chocolates left over from Christmas, and I still want that other half. Two of them are maple creams. They are my favorites so I was saving them for last. Bad idea.

Besides I was working on a story that was sure to be my magnum opus, an opus to end all opuses, a scintillating story about a sentient banana who goes to the zoo and gets chased by escaped monkeys.

But this gets in the way of everything. Okay, I get it, everyone dies. Someone first told me that when I was around four or five. I did not believe them, not at first. How could there be no me?

But I should have had more warning. I like to sip coffee in the mornings with my cat in my lap and read before I write. I want my coffee and I want my cat. Everything I had planned, my entire routine is capsized by my inability to, well, move.

I still cannot get over it. This really happened. I had kind of thought the singularity might happen and would save me. Ray Kurzweil said as much. The singularity was going to be a point where humans united with computers and achieved immortality. Some even suggested that humans could download their minds into computers and live out beautiful cybernetic lives forever after, in a digital fairy tale happy ending.

Okay, maybe it was a long shot, but it gave me hope. And it was inspiring. Throughout history, there was a lot of talk about immortality. Religions promised it. Horror writers created fantasies of immortality experiments gone awry, featuring Frankenstein monstrosities and demonic pets.

In literature it seemed like immortality always came with a terrible price. It offended the gods or set off disorder in the spiritual world. It required unthinkable acts of evil or the sacrifice of souls.

How many millennia did it take for someone to have the guts to say, “Who cares what the gods think? Dying is a bad idea. Maybe we should stop doing it. Maybe we should figure out how to live forever.”

I admire Ray Kurzweil for saying that and trying so hard to figure it out, even though he died before the singularity ever happened, despite taking 150 vitamins a day in order to stay alive for long enough to experience it. Ray Kurzweil, sorry it did not work out. Maybe the singularity was just around the bend. Could you not have taken one more pill?

A lot of people think God grants immortality to those who believe in him, and maybe that is why none of the greatest thinkers such as Nicolai Tesla or Sir Isaac Newton ever turned their attention to living forever.

By the way I am currently searching for the bright lights I have been told to expect and, so far, nothing. God, if you exist, now would be the time to appear, you coy bastard. Where are you?

I cannot even see my grandmother. She was supposed to be waiting for me under a rainbow or something, with a beatific smile on her face and a retinue of winged seraphim. And unicorns. Okay, I never heard there would be unicorns, but if I am going to go to the trouble of dying, there should be unicorns.

Hell. This is boring. I want to finish my story about the banana, not not be.

Oh no! That did not just happen. I am going to try to pretend that someone did not just put me in a box. I am a person, not a pair of shoes. And why are they nailing it? Do I look like I am about to escape?

Granted, I would if I could. It might even be kind of fun to go lumbering around, arms outstretched, saying “Rroww” or “Arggh.” I have the best Halloween costume ever now, because it is authentic. Unfortunately, I do not feel scary, just kind of helpless. The living scare me to be honest.

Who puts someone into a box?

Well, I do have one consolation: all the writing I did. Maybe a part of me lives on inside the printed ramblings I produced over the course of my lifetime. Maybe some vestige of me remains inside them where they can still affect people.

Okay, so I never got rich for my writing, but I am confident that one day someone, maybe hundreds of years from now, is going to wonder: “Who was this fascinating person who wrote these awesome stories? How unfortunate that she never finished the one about the banana! Perhaps our renowned literary experts should try to piece together what she was trying to say by extrapolating her point of view from her copious journal entries.”

About the journal entries: I produced a ton of them during my lifetime. And I was conscientious. To make it easier for my biographers, I have labeled my journals by the year on the bindings. That way they will be easier to reference in academic literary journals. It was a trial to be so far ahead of my time, of course, but posthumous glory is nothing to sneeze at. A girl takes what she can get.

If I had known what was gong to happen today, I would have typed them up for clarity and legibility. Otherwise, I might end up being egregiously misquoted.

I guess it is pointless to regret things. I made plenty of mistakes but, for the most part, I did the best I could.

There are some people who say you should live every day as if it were your last. Bullshit! Okay, I am discovering that Dead Me likes to cuss. But this has been a rough day. Humor me.

Now. Back on point: If I had lived every day like it was my last, I never would have finished college. Why study? I would never have finished writing a single novel. I probably would have annoyed the hell out of everyone saying things like, “Please, do not mourn for me when I am gone. I want my funeral to be a happy funeral, with clowns and mariachi bands and puppies with little party hats. And of course, it would all be lies. If I am going to go to the trouble of dying, somebody had better cry about it. In fact, wailing and the rending of sack-cloth clothing would not be excessive. And yes, you heard me right. Sack cloth.

I hate good-byes anyway. I even hated it when my college classes would end, because I would get attached to my professors and their weird sense of humor or their bad comb-overs or how they would start talking about their vacations to Europe instead of the DNA double helix or the Emancipation Proclamation.

All endings suck, except the ones that end pain, and even those are not ideal. Like with me now. No more toothaches. No more worrying about what anyone thinks. No more gum on the bottom of my shoes, no more waiting in longs lines or cleaning up hairballs left by my cat.

But here I am. And I still want to finish my banana story.

This may sound weird, but I used to mourn my own death sometimes, at night. I would think about how sad it would be for people to lose me or for me to lose myself, and tears would spring to my eyes.

So for to any of you who are mourning me, I am kind of mourning with you now. Like I said, I hate endings. But I am still glad I got to be alive, even for a little while. I am glad I got to eat ice cream and pet my cat and fall insanely in love and watch bad movies and swim in the Gulf of Mexico.

But to do all that, I had to be bound up with this rattly caged wagon called “time.” I spent too much of my life grappling with the uncomfortable knowledge that life was always in motion and looking for something that does not really exist called “stability.”

Finally, I am free of time. At least, my psyche is. And I think that was true before I was born, for the billions of years following the Big Bang when there was no me. In fact, the universe did not seem to be in any big hurry for me to be born; I am a little insulted, to tell the truth.

So maybe I am not so much leaving as going back, reuniting with the cosmos. Fortunately, I am a fan of the cosmos. I think the cosmos is kind of like this toy I had when I was a little kid called a “Lite Brite.”

It was a light box that had a flat black surface with holes in it and it came with these little colorful beads. Actually they were called pegs but I always thought of them as beads, and since I am the dead one here, I get to choose what to call them.

Anyway when you put the beads on the surface and plugged in the screen, the beads would light up. You could make patterns or images with the beads, and there was no limit to the designs you could make.

I was never any good at making the impressive images on the box like bunnies and castles. But I think that maybe the cosmos is like that: kind of like a Lite Brite trying to discover itself.

The patterns it makes might be pretty, but if it wants to make new ones, it has to break the old ones down and start again. But the beads are the same beads; in that sense, nothing ever really goes away.

I admit, it is not much consolation. I would be so upset when in kindergarten another kid would knock down my “palace” of wooden blocks. If someone had told me “Stop crying! The blocks are still there,” I would still have cried.

But back to the Lite Brite: I like to imagine that one day, after an infinity of infinities have passed, maybe the universe or multi-verse will want to try my pattern again. It will say, “That was a weird experiment but kind of interesting. Maybe I should give it one more try.” And I will find myself alive again and eating chocolate and reading Ray Bradbury.

But maybe just having been here, this one time, was enough. Some people think you get a kind of immortality by having kids. Bullshit!

Okay, this is one of my pet peeves, so bear with me here. I decided in college not to have kids. Babies are super cute, but the world has enough people. I wanted to devote my life to creative pursuits like writing.

But every time I would read a book on biology, I would see the same irritating word repeated over and over: “successful;” The successful organisms were the ones that reproduced.

I am all for Charles Darwin, but that word “successful” slaps a value judgment on a blind natural process. According to this definition of success, Sir Isaac Newton, Emily Dickinson, and Nikolai Tesla were unsuccessful.

After reading The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, I think this definition of success is all wrong. According to him, the real winners in reproduction are the genes. Genes only want one thing: to make copies of themselves. They do not even care how they do it. In fact, the whole point of making people is that the genes will have hosts who will go lustfully insane, reproduce, and send the genes marching out into healthy new hosts.

If the first host dies a horrible, agonizing death afterward, that is all perfectly fine with the genes, as long as they get to escape into a new person first. Wake up, people. Our genes are farming us.

Richard Dawkins compares genes to viruses. When you have a bad cold, the virus hijacks cells for the purpose of copying itself and makes you sneeze. When you do that, you spread the virus into the air where other people breathe it in. The whole self-copying cycle begins again. Same with genes, except that the genes create their own hosts.

Genes are sketchy. Never trust them. If you ever see a gene coming at you, at night, in an empty parking lot, run like hell!

In fact, I am pretty sure I know who made the writers of the biology textbooks use the word “successful” when it comes to reproducing: A gene made them write that. In fact, I would not be surprised if a gene seized the pen from the writer and wrote the whole thing itself.

If I could be really be immortal by reproducing, I should be able to see the world through the eyes of my far-future grandchildren. Through them, I should be able to eat moon-rock ice cream and feel the coldness on my tongue. Through them I should be able to skim the surface of Mars in a jetpack instead of being a dusty and earth-bound remnant of the distant past.

But it seems silly to vent about that now. Here I am. This really happened. The big “D.” I think I expected more of it, but now that I am here and can see it for what it is, it all seems very… disappointing. But not in the way that you think. If I have any major complaint it is that it is not scary enough. No pain. No irrational obsessions. No worries about what I need to do next. Just a kind of sigh.

Still, it is hard to look back over my life and wonder what it was all for. All of my petty jealousies, silly compulsions, my fretting over bad hair days, and anxiety over slights from other people, real or imagined.

I think about all the journals I kept throughout my life, all part of my effort to make sense of the relentless march of days. And I think about all of my stories, conceived in great ambition or in a frenzied bid for fame or wealth or admiration.

Would I have done anything differently if I had truly believed this day would come? Really believed it down to the core of me? I really cannot say. For the most part, I think I did the best I could.

The actions that stand out gold-rimmed in my memory are the ones where I was able to step outside my routine and say, “What a strange and beautiful and horrible and fascinating thing it is to be alive. Maybe I should look around. Maybe I should enjoy this while it lasts” – not when I was rushing from one frantic activity to the next.

Those were the times when I made the best and most conscious decisions; the times I was most alive and most acutely aware. Maybe that is also why I wrote in journals, to recreate that state as often as I could, although I did not get to write in my journal every day.

I never got to write a journal entry about how it felt to be born because when it happened I barely knew. I did not even know it was going to happen. It just did, and I was stuck with the way things were.

Then, as soon as I got used to the idea of being alive, someone told me I was going to die. But in the time between those two points, I had room to play. I had no say over my destination, but I could create my own path. And my path has brought me to this point where I have decided to take what I have sought, and fought for, and longed for: the final word.

Maybe that is the real meaning of everything: that in all the confusion, in all of my comings and goings, in all of my stumbling progress, I was able to have some say in how it all happened.

Enough ruminating. This Lite Brite pattern is dimming fast. I feel like I should say goodbye. Adios. Au revoir.

But those words are too boring, too expected, too dull. I would rather select my own. So, what do I want to be my final word? I have always loved the onomatopoeia words like “moo” or “crash,” but those will not do.

If I am going to get a one-up on death, I need to be more thoughtful. Maybe a longer word would be better, like “sussuration,” meaning a soft murmur or a whisper. But no, it is not quite right. An idea is whispering to me, like a breeze, a murmur, a sussuration that is getting louder.

Hey, I think I have it, the perfect final word, eloquently succinct, unforgettable, and deeply felt. Hey death: Thpppffffff!

Yeah, that one. I really like that one.