If Death is a real being, it is no skeleton wrapped in black, it is a living mushroom whispering you sweet half-truths, a guardian of both the end and the beginning. There would be a cloak that would wrap around his big dome of a head. I guess Death would kind of look like Toad from Nintendo… but like maybe more badass. Or, maybe not.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t think about death constantly. Like there was never an aspect of me that didn’t think it was fascinating. Isn’t it amazing to you that like everything you ever do will add up to the same thing? Like we all die regardless of who we are. Hitler is inside the same death as Mother Theresea. There I go again with Hitler. He’s just interesting, I don’t know what to tell you. I personally think that we talk too much about religion when we talk about death.

I am not talking about who is right about what happens after death, because I don’t care if you’re Jesus, the Dalai Lama, or blue-faced Shiva himself, you don’t know for certain what the afterlife might bring.

I definitely don’t want it to be like what Colonel Custer said, just rows and rows of infinite people sitting there like a million Thinker Statues pondering every goddamn thing that they’ve ever done wrong, and then thinking about every re-decision they could have or should have made― that sounds terrible. Plus maybe it’s only like that for certain people, you know? Maybe each person gets their own version of the after life―no wait, but that’s not what I wanted to talk about. You’re distracting me now, and I think you know it.

Death contains all of us. I don’t mean that in a religious sense. I just mean it because it’s true. At the end of each of us, comes the same black emptiness. Or maybe it’s white, or gray, or yellow emptiness. Whatever it is, it contains us all. From Hitler to Mother Theresea, to your dog, Sparky. In the end they are equals.

I watched this mushroom documentary which makes me reimagine death as a mushroom man with a dark black cloak. For some reason in my head, I kind of picture him like Treebeard from the Lord of the Rings, except he’s made all out of mushrooms, dressed in a bathrobe like The Dude from Big Lebowski, and he’s smoking a cigarette. Yeah, it’s fucking crazy, but it makes sense, doesn’t it?

So much of humanity has always thought about death like the third ghost from A Christmas Carol. I mean, we think death is always the end, but isn’t it really always the beginning, or at least, the in-between? Look at the death of any mouse or rat. A dead thing just lying there, all bloated and full of hot gas. That thing will get devoured by fungi, and then a million new little organisms will grow from it. From one death comes more life. 

I think mushrooms are the gatekeepers before everything loop-de-loops back to the start of something. Maybe something new gets loaded into that dead thing. I don’t know, I’m mainly talking out of my butt-padded-ass. But death is totally not a skeleton in a black shroud. He’s a mushroom smoking a cigarette waiting for you, probably a bit impatiently.

Think about the Civil War. Well you don’t have to if you don’t want to, but Clara Barton, some nurse dealing with all this death right, she forms the Red Cross, and now it’s one of the world’s largest Non-Governmental-Organizations, it’s in a million countries, right? There’s birth from death right there.

How about the death of Crispus Attucks? First casualty of the American Revolution, a black man, gives birth to a new nation? The death of Hitler gives rise to the United Nations and the modern state of the world. New vegetation from old death. That’s mushrooms, baby. That’s mushrooms. Just regroup and rebirth. Hell, even the death of Colonel Custer gave rise to the colonization of the Dakotas and Montana, to some degree. I mean growth doesn’t always mean good, it just means continued life, or new life from the old. Mushrooms, mushrooms, mushrooms.

I remember one time, when I was very little, my mother had come outside to the driveway where I was riding around on my bike with training wheels on―remember those days? The first time you had your bike? And you felt like a magician, even though you knew it was just because of the training wheels, but you were riding your bike on your own, living it up like a real person, didn’t need anyone guiding you. The world was yours…
Anyhow, I was out on the driveway alone, maybe I was seven years old, something like that, an oversized helmet on my head, just making loop-de-loops in the blacktop driveway. It was still morning. 

My mother came out in this red bathrobe, and she put her coffee down― I can still smell it―and she said, “Raphael,” which is never good, coming from mom. She always called me Lewski. And I stopped pedaling. My little Huffy scooted a little forward from momentum, and I looked up at my mother with her dark hair. She haunted me from across the driveway. She had the haggard haze of remorse bleeding upon the paleness of her cheeks. 

I cocked my head, and she came over to where I was, crouched down, put her coffee on the blacktop, and my mom―she held me by the shoulders and she looked at me. All quiet. She gulped down a stone guilt through her gullet. “Aunt Leanne’s dead, Ralphie. Aunt Leanne’s gone.”

It was the first time I ever felt a burning in my chest. I remember then I started crying, and I leaned forward on my mom’s shoulder, I looked down at her black coffee, where I see the swirling steam dancing in a quiet doldrum. 

I can still feel the soft plush of my mother’s bathrobe on my cheek. I can still see the steam of her coffee dancing along the brim of the mug. I remember the confusion in my head, the chest pain, the tears, the discomfort of being hugged while on a bike.

To this day, I have no idea who Aunt Leanne is. I swear to god my mother had never mentioned her to me before in my life. I’d never seen a picture of her, not even like a weird second hand comment in my entire Bender family. I think she was like my Mom’s uncle’s divorced wife’s landlady’s neighbor or something. It was like, even when I was old enough, I still didn’t know who Aunt Leanne was. My mom didn’t even remember this story happening, years later. 

I know what you’re thinking, and no it couldn’t have been a dream because I remember feeling really sad. I wasn’t just fake sad for my mother. I was scared of that word in the world, I guess. I was scared of the “Dead.” I think I started to realize that all of this, all of this good stuff in life comes to an end, and that it would slowly, just as a matter of existing, be eaten up by my moments of life. I had a lot of anxiety from this, and I didn’t want to waste any more time. I didn’t know what to do to not waste it, but I remember knowing that feeling that I couldn’t waste anymore. That feeling has come back very often lately.

My mother stayed with me until it seemed like I was ok. She sipped most of her coffee by then and went back inside. Meanwhile, I went into the garage, found a wrench, and took off my training wheels. I went to my driveway, adjusted my oversized styrofoam helmet, and pushed off of the stone curb. I was shaky on my little Huffy, and we used to live in the middle of this hill in the suburbs, and I was gliding out of the driveway and into the street. The sun glared down upon me like an angel of the heavens.

About two minutes later, I had made a car swerve out of the way and crash into garbage cans and bushes. A man, who in my memory I have replaced with Jim Carey from Dumb and Dumber, came out of his yellow car with a tan suit on and began screaming at me. He might as well have been speaking Chinese, and he might as well have been complimenting me, because though I was strewn sideways, splayed spastically, splattered shockingly all over the foamy-spongy front lawn of a down-the-block neighbor’s, and though my helmet lie beneath my skull like a pillow, and my body slumped crucified upon the over-sprinkled front lawn, my clothes soaked from both sprinkler water and urine, I was smiling like Lucifer the day before Easter. I had not wasted that day. 

Though death was one day coming―is one day coming―as it always is for everyone, I think I knew that the Mushroom Lord of Death would be smiling in his black bathrobe as he smoked a Lucky-Stripe. I had scored one point against him, for that day was well-lived. I have since ridden my bike every day of my life, knowing it to be one way to beat death, to enjoy a moment and to steal it back from the Mushroom Lord, who will one day remold my death into some new germination. We are all decaying into new beauty.