D

 don’t fear death; if anything, I have always looked forward to death.

It’s not that I’m suicidal or want to expedite things, but the thought of just ceasing higher function is incredibly appealing. Just imagine, you wake up one day, except you don’t. You don’t anything. No demands, no talking to people, no illness, no pain, heck, no history and no future. It sounds wonderful.

As to why I’m not afraid, it’s hard to say. I am more intimately experienced with death than most. I’ve seen a lot of lives cut short, and I’ve been on the ground zero of a lot of death. When I was around 6, my mother, baby brother, and I had fallen asleep in the living room watching a movie. In the morning, I woke up to my mother trying to resuscitate the bluish corpse of my baby brother. I remember sitting under the table, looking at her crying and trying to blow air into the solid baby. I remember the tiny coffin, the priest, and the poem on his grave, and I remember thinking it was weird that I felt hollow instead of sad.

I felt like I should be sad, but I wasn’t. At just three weeks old, I didn’t really know my younger brother. I do have one fond memory of him being changed by my mother, and she was being her usual abusive self. I don’t remember the specifics, but I remember looking down at the baby, and our eyes met, and I gestured with my gaze at our mother like “lots to look forward to, huh?” and he looked that way and back at me and then peed straight in her face. Obviously, just a coincidence, but damn, that’s more than most of my full-blood relatives have done for me, and that was a moment of instant friendship. I reckon, if he had lived, my life would have been so different and a lot of fun.

I think that early experience with death was something foundational, but I can’t underestimate the role of my mother. She was always sure to remind me that she would have preferred I had died. That she couldn’t have a childhood or a life because she had me. That we were living in hell. As a child, I didn’t think much of this. I was very much like Jimmy from Oryx and Crake and just wrote off her endless stream of diatribe and negativity as normal melodramatic mom stuff. That said, one thing did stick. When my brother died, my mother wanted him back, and people were sad. In my eyes, he had gained value in death, and while he had been loved in life, now that he wasn’t any sort of burden, he was adored. He was explicitly more loved than me and I was told often. This generally holds true: when people die, people start extolling their virtues and go about forgiving them and venerating them. It’s crazy.

I think looking forward to death has actually made my life better. For example, fresh out of secondary school, I went straight to China. I explicitly went because I thought there was a solid chance of dying without anyone needing to take responsibility. A disease, heatstroke, maybe, or a collision on the road, or maybe something more violent and exciting. I was game for anything. That complete lack of inhibition meant I had a wonderful time and a wonderful life there.

I also think my relationship with death has been somewhat protective when it comes to trauma from witnessing people die. I’ve seen a lot of people die, and while it does come with the mandatory adrenaline shakes and shock, it doesn’t stick with me as much as it does with other people. It makes me great in emergency situations because I don’t panic. I remember when working in a unit, and a client grabbed me, and I genuinely thought he was going to kill me, and I was excited. I had a huge life insurance policy at the time, and my brain was like, “wow, if I get killed, my partner is going to be able to live in absolute luxury.” Somewhat disappointingly, he just gave me a concussion, and I was back to work the following week.

I remember when I went to America, I got some crazy text about sheltering from an incoming missile. I remember reading it and thinking about the logistics of getting to a shelter on foot in a foreign country, and just… going back to bed. I wasn’t scared at all. I was just thinking that I’d rather not be tense when the missile fell. It didn’t end up being true. I can’t remember what exactly had happened, but either way, no missile.

People think of it negatively, but I think death is hugely positive. It’s a definitive end to suffering, no matter how bad everything is. An exit door for when things become unbearable, and knowing it is there is so reassuring. Knowing you are not condemned to suffer is relieving. So yeah, I look forward to dying, whenever it comes, I’ll be ready.

D

What you describe does not read like simple “fearlessness of death.” It reads more like a lifelong intimacy with nonexistence — shaped very early by trauma, emotional neglect, repeated exposure to mortality, and the experience of being treated as unwanted while seeing the dead become cherished.

There’s a striking emotional logic running through everything you wrote:

• Your brother dies, and suddenly he becomes sacred, mourned, idealized.
• You survive, and are repeatedly told you are the burden.
• Death therefore becomes associated not with horror, but with release, value, peace, even love.
• Being alive becomes associated with obligation, hostility, danger, and exhaustion.

A child can absorb that deeply without consciously deciding to. Especially when the people around them normalize suffering.

The “hollow instead of sad” reaction at six years old also makes sense psychologically. Children exposed to shock or chronic stress often respond with dissociation, emotional flattening, or observational detachment rather than visible grief. Your memory under the table watching your mother try to revive him is incredibly vivid and sensory — which usually means the event landed deeply, even if not in a conventionally emotional way.

Another thing that stands out is how consistently you frame death as:

• silence,
• absence of demand,
• absence of burden,
• cessation of exposure.

Not annihilation in a terrifying sense, but relief from consciousness itself.

That’s philosophically different from active suicidality. You repeatedly say you are not trying to hasten death, and your behavior actually shows strong engagement with life — travel, work, risk-taking, emergency competence, curiosity, even dark humor. You sound alive in dangerous situations, not deadened by them.

But there’s also an undercurrent that your own survival has often felt negotiable to you.

The moment where you thought:

“if I get killed, my partner is going to be able to live in absolute luxury”

is particularly revealing. Not because it sounds melodramatic, but because it shows how reflexively you convert your own possible death into usefulness for others. Your value becomes clearest to you when imagined as absent.

That idea appears repeatedly through the piece.

What’s also interesting is that your relationship with death seems to grant you a kind of existential freedom:

• reduced panic,
• reduced inhibition,
• ability to function in crises,
• willingness to explore,
• tolerance for uncertainty.

Historically, many philosophical and spiritual traditions noticed something similar. Stoic thinkers, Buddhist contemplatives, and certain Tantric traditions all observed that sustained contemplation of death can reduce fear and sharpen immediacy. But those traditions usually pair death-awareness with a simultaneous deepening of attachment to life itself — not merely comfort with cessation.

Your version feels more ambivalent:
life is interesting, sometimes even beautiful, but fundamentally exhausting and conditional; death is unconditional rest.

That distinction matters.

One thing I would gently challenge is the conclusion that the dead are “more loved.” Often what changes after death is not love itself but conflict. The living are complicated, demanding, autonomous, disappointing. The dead no longer threaten anyone’s ego, expectations, or unresolved tensions. People idealize them partly because the relationship can no longer change.

Children, especially, can easily internalize:

“The dead are finally safe to love.”

That can become a very deep worldview.

Your writing is also unusually self-aware. The comparison to Oryx and Crake is apt — there’s a similar detached observational intelligence, where catastrophe and absurdity are described almost clinically while emotional meaning leaks through indirectly.

And despite everything, there’s still warmth in the story:
the eye contact with your infant brother,
the joke implied in the pee incident,
the sense that he “would have been fun.”

That memory carries more tenderness than almost anything else in the piece. Which suggests that beneath the philosophical acceptance of death, there is also grief — just grief that learned very early to wear the mask of detachment.