There have been many instances in my lifetime when I mourned the death of someone to whom I was related or acquainted. These passages made me sad for I would no longer share the gift of life with these people, but they did not genuinely prove to me that someday I would die. Now, at age nineteen years, I have celebrated the three separate funerals of three of my four grandparents. The death of my paternal grandmother when I was six years old was most likely the first time that I realized other people could die, and apparently someday some older version of myself would die as well, but for the time being I would never die. I understood what it meant for someone else to die, but not what it meant for me to die.
Children are content to know that things work without caring so much about how they work.
Turn a knob and water flows from the faucet in your kitchen sink. So was my understanding of death as a child. I had no concept of the process that was already taking me toward the point at which I myself would die. As a young, healthy person it is far too easy for me to procrastinate my own mortality. Telling myself that dying is for old people, not girls in high school.