Sweating martinis and gin, Roger Sterling, the aging suave Executive Advertisement Account man of AMC’s brilliant sixties drama Mad Men, sits against a plush black leather chair; he instinctively reaches for another drink only to wave it away with his hand.  He sits across from his psychiatrist, not lying down on his back like most patients.  Roger needs to be heard.  Absentmindedly, Roger rambles an impromptu speech about death.

"Look, life is supposed to be a path, and you go along and these things happen to you, and they’re supposed to change you, change your direction. But it turns out that’s not true. Turns out the experiences are nothing, they’re just some pennies you pick up off the floor, you stick in your pocket, and you’re just going in a straight line to you know where."

The psychiatrist closed his pen and glanced up. 

When I first watched this episode, I was already in the middle of a Mad Men binge.  The episode really didn’t make an impact on me until a couple days later, when I eventually looked up the entire speech.   I read and scrutinized it.  Particularly hard-hitting was the phrase, “A straight line to you know where.”  It was another reminder that inevitably, every last one of us is going to die.  There are no shortcuts, no getting around it, no pay-offs.  Life and existence is the most precious gift we ever will receive.  The complexity of a single human being, the giant interlocking, interweaving, breathing and expanding organism that is society, the visceral, raw feeling in my gut that knocks me to the floor, it remains a gift to be thankful for.  Life is intoxicating, exciting, and heartbreaking; it is the one experience, the one journey that I will absolutely complete.  But it can and will end.  This seems like a simple and dull realization; however, we have the rest of our lives to come to it and to decide how we approach it.  For me, I have nothing in order, and at every corner a bucket of ice waits to be poured over my head, the reminder that it all is going to end some day. 

Sciophobia is the literal fear of shadows.  There is a common saying that alludes to someone “being afraid of his own shadow,” but it is always a hyperbole.  I’ve tried to imagine actually being frightened of my shadow.  I imagine strolling on the sidewalk, breathing in the pleasant and balmy air, and smelling the grass, and looking at the clouds.  After looking around, I return my eyes to the ground and my heart stops, paralyzed in fear as I notice the skewed profile of myself projected onto the concrete.   It seems extremely simple and almost comical, but being deathly afraid of something so constant would be an incredibly difficult life.  I’m not afraid of shadows, but I’m all too aware that every second I breathe is another second that counts down to my end.  This fear, this simple realization follows me around everywhere I go.  It is always there and leaves me suspended in terror. 
My grandmother and her family have lives deeply rooted in Christianity and music.  For years they toured locally as “The Singing ___ Family,” doing up to forty concerts a year in churches and other church related events.  They even produced four or five records and sold them while they toured.  I have a record player, and when I stumbled upon some of the old records, I instantly felt the urge to play them and hear what kind of voices my close family had three decades ago.  The archaic and lost process of listening to albums on vinyl has long faded from public use, so when I listen to music on vinyl, it is a very deliberate experience.  I generally listen lying on my back in the dark because when I commit to an album it is all I want to sense.  Dated musical mediums aside, I remember these records cutting me with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel.  What is going to happen after I take my last breath? Hearing someone so close to me sing lyrics of God, the afterlife, and lost souls through the equivalent of a time capsule caused hot tears to drip out of my eyes.  I thought of my aunt. “All I want is for my kids to go to heaven with me,” she had admitted.  Picturing my grandma, I heard her say, “Giving your life to God is the best decision that you or I will ever make.” Sobbing for half an hour with the fuzzy static noise of the forty-year-old record player in the background, I contemplated the fact that I am going to die and that I don’t know what is on the other side.  It doesn’t matter what I believe in, and I don’t even know what I believe in; even if I were truly committed to something, nobody knows for sure. The experience reminded me how people commit themselves to accepting death through religion or other means.  It was another reminder that over eighty percent of the world has convinced themselves that there is something better after this life.  I struggle to take this gamble, and try to focus on getting the most of what I know I have. 

The struggle of fearing death has been present in my life for almost two years now.  It’s a humbling and eye opening way to live.  I’ve learned not to take the simplicities of life for granted, and I’ve learned to look at the stars and remember that the chances of me being alive in the massive universe are infinitely small.  So what are the events in life? Are they as worthless as pennies off the floor?  No, they simply can’t be.  We don’t know how long we have, and we don’t know many events we are going to have.  Fate doesn’t give us that luxury.  The truth is, the events in life are all that we truly have.  Sure, the path of life is a straight path leading towards death, but the events give the path substance.  The events slow down the journey and force me to look out the window to enjoy the scenery. The events give inclines and declines, different road surfaces, and different temperatures.  Events, memories, experiences are the only true possessions of value in life.  Every human interaction remains unique and worth more than anything one could ever buy.  These events, these pennies, we cannot leave them on the floor.  We need to pick them up and put them in our pockets and save them, shining and cleaning them to be put into a display case.  We need to fondly remember the story of each individual penny and look forward to finding new ones.  This way, when we finally meet the elusive figure of death, we will have saved up a fortune with all of these pennies; we will have a treasure that is greater than anything we could have earned during our short time that we have been allowed to stay on this earth, on the wonderful experience that we call life and death.