D e a t h & B a b i e s
By Charlotte Thurman
Two subjects that are very real to some people, and as I approach my thirtieth birthday, still seem very intangible to me.
I have no surviving Grandparents, but their presence with me is still very real. My Grandfather’s paintings hang on my walls. I’ve had dreams with my Grandmother in them that felt so palpable I believed she was hovering above the laundry hanging in the back yard.
When I was fourteen years old, I wrote a short story about how I was going to die.
I imagined that I would be thirty years old. I’d die in a crashing plane. In the story I described the plastic water cups shaking--an image, which, since seeing Jurassic Park, has precluded all ominous o c c u r r e n c es in my mind.
I imagined myself gripping the plastic tray table. The muffled sounds over the intercom. I imagined that I was somehow ethereally successful and I was alone on a business trip.
I’d be engulfed by the o c e a n u n d e r me.
I ’ d w a k e u p f r o m nightmares gaspi n g f o r a i r . T h e close s t I ’ d e v e r c o m e t o death.
All of my life goals somehow fell into the shadow of this vision. I’d hoped I’d find a partner by the time I was thirty. I am now married. I’d hoped I’d go to Grad school by age thirty. I now have a Master’s degree in Art. I believed I’d have a good job. work for a great company in my I’d in
have a shelter, the process of
I now field.
a home. I’m now buying a house.
I thought somewhere down the line I’d have a chance to start a family, but the details of that have always been blurry. There are contingencies. Conversations about ethics and morality. The realization that even though it’s my body alone that will carry a baby, it’s not my decision alone. My life so far has had its struggles, but it’s been mostly pretty great. How do we make room in our lives for other exsperiences that are equally as challenging and as gratifying as bringing life into the world?
I’m coming to terms with the fact that I might not die at the age of thirty, though I know I will have to get on a plane.
Do I create more goals for myslef? What are they? Or should I write another short story of the variable ways that I might die?
I know that I want to have a child. My resons for this are selfish. I want to know what it is like to not be so in my head. To let my body take precedent over my actions. To experience something that is innate to my senses. When I see my life without a child, it’s hard to see past my life as I had imagined in at age fourteen: goals fulfilled, my upward trajectory the same--a steady rise into the clouds and a plateau to some unnamed place.
The guy at the restaurant asked if I had any children. I said “no,” and that I didn’t think my Husband wanted any. He replied, “You should have a child. You look so strong.”