death

I used to believe…

When I was young my dad used to tell me that if I was very ill I needed to watch my left side. Because the Grim Reaper always comes to your left to claim you and if you see him, then he will run away instead. It's stupid, but for some reason I still look.

I used to believe…

When I was a little kid I used to believe that after you die you go to the next stage- which is being a zombie- and then you turn into a frankenstein guy- and then you split up with yourself and part of you turns into a walking skeleton and the other part turns into a ghost and then after that the skeleton dies and the ghost floats up to Heaven!

I used to believe…

In first grade the teacher told us that "Curiosity killed the cat." When I got home I asked my older sisters what "curiosity" meant. Much laughter and no answer. So I decided that curiosity was a cat that went to sleep under the hood of a car and got mangled in the fan belt.

I used to believe…

When I was younger, my grandmother kept a bowl of candy hidden and gave some to me whenever I came over. Well I happen to know where the candy was hidden, so one day when I was over at her house, I snuck some extra candy while she was upstairs. After she died a couple years later, I went to the funeral, but I was too afraid to go up close to the casket because I was worried she would punish me for taking the candy.

I used to believe…

This was actually a very common belief at my school-we thought that if you were passing a cemetary you had to hold your breath, otherwise an evil spirit would invade your body and you would die. You didn't have to hold your breath if you were touching metal, this was obviously because doing this gave the ghosts good luck, and they'd leave you alone. I strongly believed this, and so did all my friends. There was one cemetary that was very large, and there was a stop sign on the road going past it. I cannot say how many kids turned blue passing this cemetary.

I used to believe…

My mother told me that my cat had gone to live with an old lady who needed a cat to take care of her.

I sincerely believed her for a long time. As I grew up, it turned into a sort of a resentment.

Then she told me it wasn't true, quite a few years later, and that the cat actually met a rather horrible death.

I didn't know what to feel.

I used to believe that you died when you turned 100, the exact second.

I used to believe that I had to wash my hair 300 times a day because I thought I would die if I didn't.

I used to believe that if you didnt rush into an elevator fast enough, the doors would close on you and chop off your limbs, or even kill you. I only thought this because i remember watching television one day when i was very young and ill so taking time off school, and there was a programme where the subject was the dangers of not entering lifts fast enough, and there was a plastic model of a woman there with no arms, and she was suppossed to be an example of what had happened to a real girl. I really must have hallucinated the whole thing!

I used to believe…

When I was younger i heard all the stuff in church about 'eating christs body', but my mum was not religious so i never really had anyone to explain things to me, so I thought that we must be suppossed to literally eat EVERYONE we love once they died, but that we had stopped doing it here in britain because most people are not religious, but that in America, people still did it and that was what 'thanksgiving' was. All the people who died that year would be stored and then eaten by their family/friends on thanksgiving, and they would all be so 'thankfull' for the big meal they got. I also thought that spam was 'left over' dead people who died here in britian, who no one cared about, like tramps and stuff, and that they were made into spam so that the genral public would eat them as that would be the cheapest way of 'salivating' (salvating) them.

I used to believe that dead people were conscious and able to talk once they had been buried, and that the corpses used to yell to the people buried near them and have conversations and stuff, but that only other dead people could hear them because they were underground. I used to think they must get really bored just lying in their coffins forever.

I used to believe…

When I was in kindergarten, we used to listen to this moody song at naptime called Inchworm. A beautiful female voice sings solemnly, while a group of children whisper the chorus. I hope these lyrics refresh your memory.

Inch worm, inch worm
Measuring the marigolds
Could it be, stop and see
How beautiful they are

(Chorus of kids:)
Two and two are four
Four and four are eight
Eight and eight are sixteen
Sixteen and sixteen are thirty-two

So, one day at Grandma's house, I’m flipping through channels on the TV, with the volume down, and Inchworm is stuck in my head. I come across Pink Floyd's The Wall on one channel. It's the scene where the kids are falling off the conveyor belt, into the shredder, and being ground into hamburger meat. I instantly associated "Inchworm" with the image of the ground meat oozing from the shredder and believed that this was a documentary about kids who were bad at school.

I was given a hush puppy in a restaurant when I was very young and didn't understand what it was. I thought it was a puppy someone had killed and 'hushed' so I didn't want it.. I exclaimed loudly in the restaurant, "him dead!". I'm told they all laughed at me... for good reason I guess!

I used to believe…

When I was very young my older sist hurt her ankle so badly that she needed stitches. I didn't understand the concept and she told me that if you didn't get stitches then you could die. I thought she meant that if a person never got stitches (for any reason) they would die. I guess I never thought that there would have to be some age cut-off limit for actually getting the stitches with such a vague ultimatum. When I was 7, I finally got stitches and remember being relieved that finally - I wouldn't die because I had the experience of having gotten stitches.

I had an aunt who died when I was, um, four or five, I suppose. My mom told me when we would be going to the funeral and such. I was pretty nervous, because I was under the impression that, at the church, the body would be inside a glass coffin, suspended from the ceiling. To this day I have no idea where this bit of imagery came from.

i used to believe that when people said something like "so-and-so died when he was 84" or whatever age, that you actually died on your birthday. I pictured in my mind whoever it was with a party hat on in front of a cake and they just collapsed on the ground right there after they blew out the candles.