Growing old physically is tough, but growing up on a mental or an emotional level is the most difficult battle of all, because it is a battle that has to be fought daily and it is a battle that goes on for just about as long as life itself. I like to think of my life as a series of eye-opening experiences where I learn and grow from each one every time, but the one that left the most profound impression on me was the notion of human mortality.

 

Death used to be an abstract, faraway idea when I was a little girl. A magical, ineffable quality bestowed upon most kids, childhood innocence was a bubble that had me ensconced in its warm embrace and whispered comforting words in my ear. Everything that I could see within my bubble seemed to signal that the world was a beautiful place filled with rainbows and butterflies, where only good things happened. My ideas of pain and suffering were limited to the scrapes on my knees from when I fell, or the toothache from eating one too many bars of chocolate. Death was, of course, not even a word that existed in my vocabulary.

 

Cracks first started to appear on my protective barrier when I was four. One fine morning, I woke up to my parents watching the news on the television with stunned faces. It was September 11 in the United States, and terrorists had driven planes into the Twin Towers in New York, sending them down in flames and burying thousands under the rubble. I remember sitting on the floor and watching the chaotic aftermath being broadcasted on the screen, but not really registering any of it. I understood the basic facts - some evil men wanted to hurt many people, so they tried to and definitely succeeded in taking lives. But my understanding never went beyond that. I stood up and went back to playing with my dolls midway through.

 

Things hit a little closer to home during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that affected places like Indonesia, Thailand and India, the very places some of my friends came from. I was older, and considerably more taken aback by this disaster than I was about the 9/11 attacks. I found it terrifying and absolutely tragic that people could just die for no apparent reason except that they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. There wasn’t even an “evil man” that had wanted to hurt them or make a statement this time and I found this unsettling fact to be something I couldn’t wrap my head around. But still, to a little girl like me, the death toll was just a statistic. It never fully occurred to me that these were lives, very much like mine, being cut short and whole lifetimes’ worth of emotions, aspirations and possibilities being completely obliterated.

 

But as I grew older, the weight of mortality grew heavier. I was slowly beginning to grasp the absoluteness of death, and the frailties of human mortality.

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When I was 14, I nearly got into a car accident. It was my fault; I knew better but I had jaywalked across the road anyway, and I didn’t realize it was a two-way street. If my friend had not screamed out my name, causing me to whip my head around and see the oncoming car, I would have definitely stepped forward into the path of the vehicle. Until today I would never forget the way the car whizzed right past me, close enough to skim the edges of my personal space. People frequently use the word “reckless” to describe youths, and it is true. When we are young, we are utterly unconcerned about the consequences of our actions, not because we don’t know of the consequences, but because it just never struck us how real these consequences are. Things like death were real - we knew that, but it was always something that happened to someone else, and never yourself, until it does.

 

My grandma passed away when I was 18, in the middle of my A-level examinations. She had been battling pancreatic cancer for a really long time, and I saw how the illness ate away at her health and spirit until the day she finally left. The initial shock never subsided for me to grieve properly until weeks later, when I sat in her room to clear out her things. The whole time it just felt as if she went on a trip to some other part of the world, soon to return. Except of course, she was never coming back.

 

The sudden loss hit me like a ton of bricks. It wasn’t just the physical loss of my beloved grandma, but rather the loss of everything that left me reeling in shock. How could a person who loved watching Animal Planet on television, who loved cooking and travelling and many other things just like me just cease to exist all of a sudden? How could a whole lifetime of memories, of emotions, knowledge and ideas just vanish into eternal oblivion?

 

I’ve come a long way from being an innocent child who saw death as something that existed only in the news outside of her sphere of life and death tolls as a yet another number. When you are young, your ignorance allows you to be numb and write away things like death as distant, fluctuating population figures, but growing up has a way of prying your eyes open to make you see the things you couldn’t. I started to understand how it was no longer merely about human bodily functions wearing down and stopping over time. My horror and eventual empathy is amplified when it finally dawned on me that death takes away more than just lives. It, too, takes away whole lifetimes of experiences and relationships, of love and hate, of habits and ambitions and possibilities, amongst many other intangible qualities, and this is what unsettles me the most.

 

My mind was stretched – not by a single, lone traumatic experience, but rather slowly pulled apart over time with a constant, unyielding force to hold the painful awareness of the frailties of the human condition. There was no going back. The knowledge of the transient nature of life rests heavily upon my shoulders. When I cross the road, I look both ways now, sometimes more often than it really is necessary. I think twice before riding rollercoasters. I worry incessantly if my brother gets home from school later than he usually does.

 

Sometimes I crave the freedom and ignorance that comes with the innocence of being a child. There was no way I could ever live with reckless abandon anymore. At the same time, it has made me all the more grateful and appreciative of the little things in life, knowing that everything I could ever love and treasure could be cruelly ripped from my grasp for reasons out of my control. 

 

Truly, a mind stretched by a new idea can never go back to its original dimensions. Once you hurdle past the edge, it is impossible to return.