An Eleven Year Old Boy's Guide To Death

Your dad will die today. You’re eleven and school was out. It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

The middle brother will get to say ‘I love you’ before he’s dead. He was the one who needed that the most. You and your oldest brother will learn that you know how to perform CPR. You will also learn CPR can’t undo death. There are things you will see that make you realize sometimes a body can’t be fixed, that a body is done after a certain point.

It’s not going to make sense. He was getting better. It seemed like he was getting better.

It will never make sense.

Your friends will have no clue what to say to you.

No one will. 

Someone will ask you why you’re back in school already. What they are really asking is, “What are you doing back in life?” You’ll have no clue, you don’t know.

You’ll learn the best you can offer is a hug and a, “Let me know if there is anything I can do…”

You will become callous. Then open. And you will flow back and forth between these two states and everywhere between.

You will always be in flux. Everything is always in flux.

You will lose it crying in church, while you still go to church, at 13. You thought you were OK. You lose it when the preacher asks for us to call out the name of someone who could use prayer. Diana’s dad is having problems with his heart, just like dad’s. You will ugly cry your way down the stairs from the choir balcony, where the handful of teenagers worship, and out the door. You will become Godless. It will be one of the last times, save for funerals, you enter a church.

Liminal spaces won’t bother you. Funeral home, hospital, church….

You will one day, far away from this world, from this time, make a girl cry when she says you need to get a new wallet. She starts to softly sob when you say, ‘It was my Dad’s…he’s dead.’ You will feel terrible.

Humor disarms and, more importantly, deflects.

You will be confused. You’ll remember the state of flux, that this 16-year-old girl was in a state of openness. You hope she doesn’t let the world beat her down to rough-hewn edges and selfishness.

You will develop a complete disdain for patriarchy. You will still, to this very day, not know if this is strength or weakness. 

When you find yourself facing down other men it will be a nihilistic spit in the face of masculinity as proof of masculinity. It will be a feedback loop that accomplishes nothing at best, and regressive at worst.

You will fight through a phase fueled by alcohol and rage, pointed at men and at the way things were and will be. No one will take you up on your desire to be destroyed.

You will finally realize that you won’t take yourself up on that desire, that you won’t do what no one else could do.

Humor disarms and, more importantly, deflects.

This phase will pass and you’ll learn that you don’t care. That you don’t need or want to be a part of those things, the world of pissing contests and not enough.

You will find it hard to respect a man that can’t be soft, that can’t say I don’t know.

Love, it's all about love.

You will write this with people who love you in the room next to you, in the state adjacent, on the other coast, on the other side of the world.

You will write all of this and cry.

You will feel better.

 You will be better.