My First Death

I was only 12 when I first experienced death. My mother’s friend’s 15 year old son Kevin was shot in the head while riding the new bike he had just gotten for Christmas.

As he rode down the street, a teenage boy ordered him off of his bike, then shot him point-blank. It was hours before his mother would find out about the death of her only son.

Kevin never knew his father. He abandoned him when he was a baby. His mother raised him on her own and gave him everything he wanted, but it didn’t make up for the father he never knew.

I had only seen him on handful of occasions. He was a handsome boy with caramel brown skin, curly black hair and who smiled when he spoke.

He was the kind of boy whose name would be lovingly scrawled with a heart around it in schoolgirl diaries and notebooks. The kind of boy who liked everybody and everybody liked. Even if he didn’t know you well, he made you feel like a part of him.

As my mother hung up the phone that day when she heard the news, her thoughts seemed to be a million miles away. She had that same feeling that I imagine every parent has when someone loses their child; sadness, helplessness, fear and disappointment in not being able to protect them from the harshness of life.

When she told my brothers, sister and me about Kevin’s death, she told us like a mother bird telling her fledglings of the danger of flying and to stick together. She didn’t say much of anything else, she just hugged all of us tighter that day. All I could think about was his poor mother and how she had lost her only child.

Two days later we viewed Kevin’s body. Though the natural reaction for a child is somewhere between fear and curiosity, I was on the curious side.

The mortuary had a cool chill to it, like being in a large refrigerator. The mahogany hallway smelled of sandalwood and a smorgasbord of perfumes. Because it was so quiet, every sound was amplified from talking to walking.

There was a small group of people exiting with their heads bowed. As my sister and I entered the room, we saw a beautiful wooden coffin that looked like a massive jewelry box.

As we got closer, we looked inside and saw Kevin’s body. As he reposed in the coffin in his freshly pressed black suit, powder blue shirt and tie, he looked like he was dreaming.

The handsome boy with the caramel brown skin and curly black hair, no longer smiled when he spoke. He no longer looked at you as if he were concerned with what you had to say. He was gone. It was just like a shell.

I noticed the hole in his head that was slightly covered with makeup but still visible, like his soul had slipped out in the middle of the night. I had never seen a dead body before much less someone close to my age.

As I stood there, my mind took snapshots of his face writing it’s own captions at what it saw. It was a resounding reminder of my own mortality. We prepare for death the moment we are born. It’s innate. Encoded in our mortal coil, yet it still shocks our system when we experience it, even if we are used to it.

Death is supposed to be for older people who had lived a long time, not the young who hadn’t begun to live. Though it wasn’t my death, I felt a little part of me had died with Kevin. That’s when it really set it that life wasn’t guaranteed forever. Death could strike anyone at any age and everyone was within striking distance.

Though several years have passed, I still see his face as clearly as ever. I wonder what would have become of him? If he would have married, had kids, what kind of job would he have had, what kind of person he would have become?

The fact is that death is a part of life. Death gives us strength to live. We need it to continue our evolution. Life is motion. When one flame burns out, another one is lit. The inevitability of death doesn’t mean that we should give up on living, it means that we should live as fully as possible. Death is a comma, not a period in life’s continual story.

Have your experiences with death changed you for better or worse?

“To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?”

~Socrates