As a child, I was terrified of death. It was often in the twilight hours, between the moment of lying down and the imperceptible instant of slipping off to sleep, that the terror would arise. The thought of vanishing completely from the world, of being engulfed in ineradicable darkness, would seize upon me and crush with it the very existence of the world. It was not simply that I would no longer be there. It was that reality itself would collapse, devoid of any point of apprehension. Petrified before a void so vast that it could not be contained within thought, let alone a thinking being, it was impossible to know how long it would take to drift off into the abyss that silently beckoned me.



Religion and spirituality were of little or no solace. Even to my young mind, they struck me as fantasies that had been elaborately constructed and forcefully imposed in order to stave off the horror. Their power paled in comparison with the groundless vacuum that they sought to mask, and my restless mind would have nothing of consolation. As I grew older, the appeal of philosophy was that it opened vantage points to stare into the vertiginous face of death, and to ponder the meaning of living in an uncertain world precariously perched on the absolute certainty of death.

Experience added material realities to these unsettling thoughts. I remember attending my first open-casket funeral and peering down on the docile, lifeless body of Everett, an old farmer whose summer straw scent and peaceful demeanor had left a distinct impression on my inexperienced mind. Then there were stories of others dying around me, and the profound sadness that accompanied them, ranging from Russian roulette suicides to horrific explosions of propane gas.

Growing up on a farm brought with it, moreover, the omnipresence of death, from raccoon and coyote attacks to trips to the slaughterhouse, or winter diseases that had my brother and me chiseling shallow graves for animals into frozen earth as young children. I still recall watching my baby sister holding the lifeless body of a newborn lamb under warm, running water with the confused hope of somehow bringing it back from the precipice. Life was imbued with death.