The Diplomacy of Death

And the politics of life afterwards

Before we get started, I have to tell you two things:

I have a weird psychological relationship with death.
I have never told this story so openly to the world.

Ever since I was younger, I contemplated suicide for several reasons. Sometimes it was depression, other times it was curiosity about this “God” people talked about. More often, however, I simply wondered what it would be like to be dead; and the answer was never far away at any moment if I truly chose to seek the answer.

I don’t know if this weird relationship with death also came because I spent my childhood in Mexico and we have the “Day of the Dead” (meaning we actually celebrate death, in a way).

Or maybe it was because, as a young adult in Kansas, I woke up one September morning in 2013 to realize that my grandpa in Mexico had “finally” died. His health had deteriorated for years thanks to Parkinson’s. And the most tragic part about that story was that my own dad had not seen his father for 7 years when he died. There were some… “political obstacles” (short story: my dad had become “illegal” and wouldn’t be allowed back to his wife and kids if he left us to go see his dad one last time, so my dad had to choose between his family and his family).

That morning, I actually felt a double-whammy of death:
1) my grandpa dying, and 2) the realization that I too, would some day experience what my dad was thinking/feeling right…