we have a misconception about death: we incorrectly believe they are a single entity, like god or santa clause, who ‘makes the rounds,’ felling humans and collecting souls, one-by-bloody-one. we imagine the psychopomp with cloak and scythe casting wide nets over the peoples of a nation, riding in on pale horses or flying down on angel’s wings, swords unfurled and ready. but death does not stand separate from this world. it does not reside in heaven. it is not a deity, nor is there only one. in fact, every life has its accompanying death. one cannot create life without creating death, too.

everyone receives a little death when they are born, though they don’t have it on their person. for each person’s little death hatches directly from an egg the spackled baby blue color of a robin’s egg. the size of a softball, these eggs grow in dark, moldy places where they are unlikely to be found or stepped on. death eggs are famously delicate and great care must be shown them whenever they are come upon. these eggs are not laid by any creature on earth. rather, they grow up organically from the ground like potatoes or yams. we believe their seeds are carried in on the winds, though the exact mechanics of the death egg are unknown to us. we have only to accept their existence, and strive to understand them.

your death egg hatches the moment you are born. it does not matter where your death egg may be, how close or far away it is from you. some people’s death eggs are worlds away, buried beneath the jungle underbrush or nesting in a rotting log in northern siberia. but there is nothing within the death egg to poke or prod its way out. little deaths have no beaks or sharp talons. the eggs simply splinter and fall away, and inside is a gaseous, formless flicker of heat and light and primal energy. folks who have seen newly hatched deaths compare them to dim fourth of july sparklers. they are formless because we are formless. the exact shape and look of death takes time to develop, just as we do. 

it is a sad fact of life that some babies are not with us long. they live short, peaceful little lives, untouched by the suffering of desire, and then they are gone. for these fleeting blessings, a hatched deathling will not cohere. it will not grow or emerge from the egg. they fizzle and go out. in this way, death does not come for these tiny blessings, for life does not come for them either.

but for those of us who can expect to live just a bit longer, deathlings will crawl slowly from the egg. they will grow little arms and little legs. they will sit in the boughs of trees or in the fields of tallgrass and wait for the magnetic pull of our lives, so matter how far your little death may be, to draw them into the world. they will walk shoeless in the rain and through city streets whose names they don’t know. they will trace your steps as if they have picked up a scent. they will not know that they are looking for you, only that they must see the places you saw, know the faces you knew. they will visit the parks you frequented as a child, they will amble through the hallways of your childhood schools, they will scout out the grungy apartments you lived in when you were young, they will visit the neighborhoods you brought your young family to. they will have no sense of you at all but what they can infer from what you’ve left behind.

for to take you, death must know you intimately. it must absorb every detail of the periphery of your life. it will smile at the faces you’ve seen, and will reach longingly for the hands you have shook. for no death knows instinctively where it will happen or when. it only knows that one day it will come upon you, and it will on that day have to assume the form that takes you. some death come in the form of a crosstown city bus. some death come in the form of a malignant ovarian cyst. some take the form of a mad man’s bullet. but it will not know the hour or the place. and so we never recall another’s death when we see it. it is still a formless, shapeless thing. but they are all around us, shades walking through the daylight, shadows walking behind.

they will simply walk into the same office building you work in and find you sitting in the foyer or standing open-mouthed by the vending machines. they will have never seen your face, though they will know in unsparing detail what the dresser in your childhood bedroom looked like, what books you kept on your shelves in college, the coffee shop where you had your first date. it will not recognize you, but it will know you. and at that moment, it will have to take you, no matter where you are or what you are doing. it is the reunion neither of you asked for, but the one for which both of you have been waiting. it will be two parts, riven from the beginning, finally made whole again.

there are occasions where our death eggs do not hatch. sometimes they fall from clifftops and shatter. or they are discovered by hungry lizards who eat them for an afternoon snack. or they are stepped on by city commuters on their way to and from work. such incidences are rare, but they do occur. in such cases, death never seems to come, and the person lives on past their natural lifespan, destined to see everything they knew and love fall away. such people become an inverse image of death, not full of intimacy, familiarity and knowing, but a stranger to everything everywhere. they go on until they recognize nothing. until they know no one, and no one knows them.