I’m currently reading Make Me a Monster by Kalynn Bayron and I’m about 17% into it. It’s set in a funeral home where the main character Meka and her family lives. While I’ve just begun the book, it has already creeped me out where Meka (through narration) is just describing what the body does after its death (pesky twitches, exhalations, and eyes or mouths opening)…well before the actual main plot has kicked in!

I am not a fan of death. I know it’s inevitable, but it’s always scared me. I think it’s because I don’t like it when things end. Although it wasn’t always this way (especially deep in the throes of bipolar disorder), I love my life dearly, and I want it to go on. I am afraid to die, and I’m especially afraid of my mother dying suddenly (that’s how we lost Dad). I pray all the time for my loved ones to be safe and that we all have more years with each other, and that we all go when we are really, really old and don’t have much left to do.

When I was 27, a major death in my life happened. I had just started graduate school at Seton Hill University (although the year before, I was seriously considering NYU and a completely different degree), and not long into that, I got the call in my Columbus apartment from my mother at a weird hour. “Dad has died.” I lost it.

I love my father very much. It was tough sometimes, living in a divorced household, because we couldn’t see Dad as much as we wanted (we lived in Ohio while he stayed in NYC), but I always felt his love. He was very kind, and very calm, and could also be goofy, which I loved. His death hurt.

Since his sudden death, I grew paranoid that I would continue to lose people I loved. About two years later, grandpa died, and then when I lived in Japan, so did my grandma, who I was close to. I’ll always remember her telling me, “I think you can do anything, Kristina.” She passed during the COVID times (although she died of cancer), so I couldn’t leave Japan to go home to the funeral and support my family or else I couldn’t reenter Japan to continue work. Because I never saw her before she passed, I’ve never really felt a sense of closure with her death.

That was part of the reason why I came back to the USA after falling in love with Japan. I got it in my head that Mom would be next, and became increasingly paranoid about it. I knew I had to go home once my teaching contract ended (because I hadn’t seen her in person in six years!) and I wanted to spend time with her and make sure she was ok, and that if her final years were meant to be, that she wouldn’t be alone, and that she’d be happy. So I came back, and I enjoy living with her very much.

Then my uncle died extremely suddenly not long after my return. A quick diagnosis of cancer, and then POOF! he was gone. Like, in months. That messed us up, too. I hadn’t seen him for months because I was busy teaching or writing, so the first time I’d seen him in ages was when he had already passed. I went to the hospital with Mom and we viewed his body, still propped up in the hospital bed. He didn’t look well at all.

I touched his hand and tried to hold it. As much as death scares me, I always try to touch the dead somehow, to make them feel human, and to show that despite my fear of the dead, I’m still connected to them. I touched Dad’s hand, too, when he died. I placed my hand right on top of his and held it there.

Not long after my uncle died, we lost another person close to the family. I didn’t get a chance to see him before he passed. We thought about going to calling hours, but changed our mind (for good reasons that won’t be mentioned here). I would’ve held Fred’s hand, too, if I’d seen him.

So, why this morbid stuff? Besides reading a book set in a funeral home to get me thinking about death, these feelings, these genuine fears about death that I have, and the sorrow of saying goodbye to both life and the living, are channeled in to The Name and the Key. While Lily is haunted by her mother’s death, Andresh has some deaths in his own life that have completely messed him up. To the point that he would make deals with demons, sacrifice himself through alchemy, and pursue a type of godhood where he could put a stop to death itself.

Not that I would go that far.

But a lot of Andresh’s paranoia and fear is my own. If I had godlike powers, I don’t know if I would stop death, but I would make sure people had a good death–no pain, no fear, no loneliness. The last feelings would be of love and comfort. This might be something more appropriate for Andresh to seek out as a powerful magician, but since he’s so far off the deep end, he wants to just keep people from dying altogether. He doesn’t even think of the repercussions of that, or all the other magic he might need to do to keep people alive, like keep them from aging and falling apart while living.

While I’m writing The Darkening Gate trilogy, I sort of have to think about death a lot. It’s a major component to the books. And in that way, I freak myself out a bit, and I also make myself very sad because when I reflect on death, I can’t help but think of my family, starting with my Dad.

It slows me down a little when I don’t want it to. I think that might be a little trauma coming through. I know I have to work hard to write through these scenes and not get sucked into my fears and worries, but at the same time, in a weird way it might make things seem more authentic to the reader in terms of character motivations and reactions. We’ll see.

Readers, how do you deal with books that focus on death? Do you think about death at all?