I hope that when I die, it’s very quiet. I want to go in my sleep. Sometimes I can talk big game about wanting to go out doing something adventurous, make lists of the best ways to die, and laugh off the inevitable-but when its three a.m. and I think about death I’m not brave. I’m so young, and so small. The universe isn’t aware of me. In terms of the grand scheme of things I am nothing, I am insignificant, I am disposable. I’m a collection of cells floating on a tiny little rock through a void of stars that will soon cease to exist. I am terrified.

My mother had me baptized with my father when I was only a few months old. In my teal colored nursery a priest who, up until about two years ago, continuously sent me birthday cards, welcomed my father and I into the Methodist faith. Neither of us ever stepped foot into a service-mass? sermon? church rave? after that day. I don’t know why my mother did that. Perhaps it was the semblance of security. An insurance policy. The holy back up plan.

She was never big on church herself. “I don’t gotta pay to pray my God loves everybody no matter how much money they give,” she’d repeat to me over the expanse of our kitchen table. But still, as I was nearing high school, she asked in that tone she takes up when she’s afraid, “Do you think you should go to Sunday school?” I know why my mother did that.

Let me break it down:

I have seen heaven portrayed in many different ways. I’ve seen movies, read books, heard friends’ theories and seen those tele-preachers. They’ve all got something different to say. Heaven is this, heaven is that. I found I trusted none of them. If everyone had a different idea of heaven, how in the hell was I to know who was right? As kids normally do when they don’t know what to think about something, I looked to my mom for help.

Not once had I ever specifically asked her to outline her thoughts on the afterlife, because I know that saddens her, but I looked back and thought about how she’d been acting and what she’d been preaching my entire life. She had me pray with her every night, her own brand of the stuff-she talked to God as if they were old pals, colloquialisms and the f-word in surplus. She always talked about how much her God loves everybody, no matter what they do. If someone’s a little different, perhaps gay or very sad or rich or poor, he made them that way, and they are his children. He loves them anyway. If someone had to leave this existence on their own terms, he would hug them tighter. When she was sad she would talk about how beautiful heaven was, and that she knew she’d see everyone she ever loved once again. She’d reassure me that I would see her again and there was no reason to be afraid. She said this more often when she got sick. She didn’t want me to be scared.

Thinking about all these things did quite the opposite. I was so scared. There was a little empty part of me where I figured whatever it was that made my mom so fearless, so faithful in a god, was supposed to be. It was hollow and I don’t necessarily mean metaphorically. I mean I do, but I felt that emptiness physically. It made me sick. I would cry at night thinking about what happens when we die. What does it really mean to stop existing? To not have consciousness? At least when we sleep, we can dream. This is obliteration, this is unforgiving abyss.

This is why my mother wanted to put me in Sunday school. (I’ve never told anyone this part.)

One night I crawled into my mother’s bed and I held her hands. I was very young-young enough that I don’t remember how old I was. I also don’t like to remember this.

“Mom, I’m scared to die.”

That statement had been festering inside me for years, I just didn’t know it. You could see hints of it in the way I would declare “I never want to grow up! I want to stay a kid forever and never grow old.” It felt so good to say it, but once I started, I couldn’t stop.

“I’m scared that when I die I’ll never see you again and Mom I want to see you all the time you’re my Mom I can’t never see you again…” I went on and on until the tears shut me up. There was so much desperation in my little heart I couldn’t breathe and I just let her hold me and tell me everything was going to be okay until I fell asleep. We haven’t talked about it since. We acknowledged it, in the brief beat of pause before I answered her question about Sunday school. I knew she was asking because she remembered my agonized cries. I didn’t go to Sunday school.

I have always been afraid of death. I can’t be brave. I can’t be so accepting and sure like my mother is. Every time she spoke of heaven I only felt that hollow space become more profound. Her attempts to make sure I went through life ready to embrace death and float on tiny white clouds to the pearly gates to see my loved ones again drove me further from faith. I’m eighteen now, and at three a.m. I look out at the stars and feel the pressure of gravity. I see the void above me. The universe doesn’t give a s*** about me or what I do. Some find that freeing, but I can only feel my own insignificance grow larger, and myself smaller. Smaller and smaller, until I inevitably disappear.