Godfather Death

She's down, she says. Very depressed. She thinks about ending her life.

"Why?" I ask.

"Because I'm afraid I'll die."

At first, the logic escapes me. She's beautiful. She's smart. She has been given much, but she seems to struggle with that, to squander it. She could do more, I think. But she is attracted to dark things, bad things, things that can only harm her. It is reflected in her language, the words she uses and the way normally pleasant things sound coming from her. Her language is a threat, a danger. She prefers metal and ink to her own lovely skin.

But after awhile, I begin to get it. I remember my favorite line from "Bram Stoker's Dracula" when Mina is lying with the Count, he struggling with the idea of making her like him, one of the un-dead. Her plea resonated so greatly when I saw it that first time:

"Take me away from all this death!"

As Bukowski said, "Shit and death are everywhere." It can be depressing. Especially if one contemplates her own death too much too often.

There is a line in the Grimm's Fairy Tale "Godfather Death" that escaped me too long. A father with twelve children has his 13th, and not knowing what to do, he runs out on the great highway to ask the next person to come along to be the son's godfather. After rejecting God and the Devil, he meets Death who tells him, "He who has me for their friend shall want for nothing."

Death, of course, seems an unattractive character, but he performs admirably in the story. And one day it occurred to me that those who do not fear death are the truly liberated, for what else can you do to them?

That is the trick, I guess, to living fully. But the fear has taken hold of my friend, and who knows how to liberate her? She lives in the shadow of certain annihilation.

And what is it that I fear?

"It was not a fear or dread. It was a nothing he knew too well. It was all a nothing and man was a nothing, too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order."*

I have to keep that in mind as I make these pictures and these stories. A certain cleanness and order. They are a light for the night.

*"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," Ernest Hemingway.