A Millennial Memento Mori

When I was 16, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot up Columbine High School.   A fear grew in me then, a fear I had never experienced before, that at any moment something like that could happen to me.  The fear lingered in the back of my brain, its tentacles burying itself deep into my subconscious. But time went on. School rolled along.  I had other things to think about.  The fear was still there, though.  Always.

I turned 17 that summer.  By then all anyone could talk about was how the world was going to end on Y2K.  I didn't believe it, not really, but as December 31st drew nearer there was a very small part in the back of my brain that thought "maybe."  It was a small part, a silly part, and it went away as January 1st turned into January 2nd and on and on.  But it was a concept, wasn't it.  Not just that I could die but that everything could die, that the world could end.  It's a complicated thought for someone who is 17.  We had learned about global warming in school.  I had heard about the ice caps melting, about the hole in the ozone layer.  I would remember that as the years went on.  Maybe the Earth was going to die.

I was 18 when I campaigned and voted for Al Gore.  He lost.  I was worried about my rights as a woman, I was worried about Bush destroying our country, I was worried about the environment.  It felt like the end of the world.  It wasn't.  But I was confused.  What did it mean that Gore won the popular vote but didn't become president?  What kind of country was this anyway? Nothing seemed fair or right or as it should be.  I was afraid. I was angry.

I was 19 on 9/11.  That felt like the end of the world.  It wasn't, but it felt like it was for a while.  A new fear grew in me then, a fear that terrorists could bomb us at any moment, that the world was changing into something new, something scary, something I didn't understand.  The fear grew.  That fall I decided to lose my virginity.  Why then?  Because I was horny, because I was young.  All those things are true.  But the other part, the secret part, thought "What if it all ends?" Would I have waited if 9/11 never happened?  I can honestly say I don't know.  That day burned into me a sense of restless urgency, a need to do something quickly before it all went away.   As the years of war rolled on, as I grew accustomed to taking off my shoes at the airport, the fear dulled into something familiar.  I didn't live every day as if it were my last, but neither did I think all that long and hard about the future.

The years passed and there were more shootings, more terrorist attacks, more bullshit.  When Obama became president things felt differently but this fear of the end never really quite went away.  The Earth was still dying.  Global warming wasn't getting any better.  People kept killing people and nothing felt as safe and normal as it did when I was younger, in that time before I felt the fear.  Maybe that was part of growing older.  Maybe everyone looks back on their childhood as a time of hope and safety and normalcy and their adulthood as a time of fear and uncertainty. Or maybe it was the relentlessness of a neverending war, neverending hate, cable news.  I remember a time, long ago, when we wouldn't know anything until the 6 o'clock news.  And we would be anxious then, worried.  But the worry would end when the news did, and Jeopardy would come on and then the prime time shows.  You would go through your day and the horrible things would be out of mind until you saw it in those 30 minute increments.  Can you remember?  It is hard to sometimes.

I was 31 when my husband asked for a divorce.  That felt like the end of the world.  It wasn't.  In fact it was the best thing that had happened to me in a long time in the long run.  But it reminded me that nothing is permanent.  It reminded me that at any moment it could all go away.

I was 34 when Trump was elected.  It felt like the end of the world.  Maybe it will be.  I don't know yet.    It was the worst I had felt since 9/11.  Every day since has been a struggle, every day since the fear of the end grows stronger in the back of my mind.  Las Vegas, Florida, so many dead.  Our democracy at risk, our climate warming, my community on fire, floods destroying the highway, the doomsday clock ticking closer, Nazis, police brutality, pain, murder, death, disease.

Certainly those who grew up in the Cold War felt the world could end too.  The people who lived through World War II, who lived through World War I, who lived through the Russian Revolution, the Civil War, Napoleon thought that everything they knew could come to an end.  Was it any different?  Is this just what being in the world feels like?  But maybe this feeling is something that is unique to my generation, a generation who came of age at the dawn of the Millennium.  I think back, from time to time, to those three years 1999-2001 that seemed to define me, to define my generation.  I think something happened.  I think something broke.  I don't exactly know what.

I'm not anxious all the time, not in the same way I was when I was in my late teens and early 20s and went on medication.  A lot of people of my generation are on medication.  A lot of people of my generation are anxious.  I don't think its a coincidence.  I am stronger and feel more confident about myself and my relationship with my boyfriend than I ever did when I was younger and unhappily married.  I am happier now than I've been since my teens.  And yet... And yet.  One part of my brain thinks about my daughter 10 years from now, 20.  I think about her growing up and going to college and discovering who she is.  And then another part, the fearful part, the part that grew on my brain on an April day nearly 20 years ago and has only swollen since wonders whether hers will be the next school on the news, whether the future will even look anything remotely like the world now, whether we will even have country to live in, whether the Earth will have been warmed so much that our summers are intolerable, certain foods unable to grow.

I wish I could rationalize away my fear of the apocalyptic.  I wish I could tell myself that this too shall pass.  I wish I could remind myself that even in the time of Ragnarok, at the end of the world, the Norse believed there was a renewal, a rebirth, a new start.  I wish I could tell myself that its just anxiety trying to control me.  Then Trump makes jokes about nukes. The ice caps are still melting. The rich hoard their impossible amounts of wealth and children go hungry.  People are getting angrier.  It feels like eventually people are going to break.  Revolution?  Death?  What happens?  Maybe just another day.  Those are just thoughts.  Not new ones.

Cornelis Norbertus Gysbrechts
Vanitas Still Life (c. 17th century)

The Dutch masters created vanitas still life paintings, reminders that all things are transient, that all things must die.  It was an art form not made from fear of death but acceptance of it. How can you see friends and family die of plague, die so young, and not accept that death comes for us all?  We are a generation who has been forced to adapt.  We may have started our school years with no computers at all and ended them with internet.  We never had a phone, not even a pager, then we got phones and computers and smart phones and tablets.  One day there is a popular thing the next thing you know "that is so last year."  Then there is a meme and it is so last month, last week.  Constantly adapting, constantly changing, constantly having to change.  Everything is transient.  Everything dies. Sometimes I wonder if our morbid jokes about eating tide pods or "This is Fine" memes amount to much the same thing as Baroque skull drawings.  Perhaps we are a generation so inured to death that we have almost resigned ourselves to it.  So accustomed to constant change that changes almost mean nothing.  Another person shot, another day.  This is horrible, but we are joking it isn't.  So it goes.  Here is something different.  Here is something new.  Our Millennial Memento Mori looks like the schizophrenic nature of the online world:

A puppy

Someone's food

A dead body

A penguin wearing a sweater

Someone's children

Hate speech

A hot actor

A baby otter

A child covered in blood

In the Japanese tradition of mono no aware the beauty of a thing is defined by its ephemeral nature, by its impermanence.  Perhaps the path away from nihilism is an embrace of the fragile nature of our existence without fear, by seeing the beauty in the fallen leaf and not its tragedy.   Yet we have been asked to change so much, become so accustomed to change, that I think sometimes it is hard for us to remember that things can be different.  Sometimes it takes an external force to remind us who became jaded so quickly by all the horrors that we should not treat it as normal.  ICE isn't normal, its only 15 years old.  School shootings aren't normal, we were shocked by them just a few years ago.  War isn't normal.  We didn't used to always be at war. It is possible to recognize that death and impermanence are a natural part of life and also NOT accept that we must die at the whims of those in power, NOT accept that horrors are inevitable, but it is hard balance to find. It is that balance I am always striving for, for my sanity more than anything else.  I haven't found it yet.