Thoughts turn to my own mortality

By Karen Johnson
Spring 2003 Scholar

Posted: Feb. 6, 2003

I wasn't sure exactly how to feel.

I barely remember Challenger, except that I wanted to be an astronaut and then suddenly the idea of space travel was terrifying.

My first instinct was as a news person. Saturday is my day off. I called the office, but they said they didn’t need me. I called my friends to make sure they were watching the news. One was in shock. She lives in Louisiana and was worried about the debris. My mother, too, was worried about debris because her best friend lives in Texas.

The last person I called was my best friend from grade school. She just said, "So what?"

How to answer? She couldn't talk, she said, because she was going shopping. Maybe she was right, I thought. After all, this isn't my grief.

I always thought it selfish to take someone else’s grief. So I, too, went shopping and blew half my paycheck in less than two hours.

It reminded me of a scene in Don DeLillo's White Noise, a book about a man who fears death. One day the man is so wrapped up thinking about his own mortality that he goes on a shopping orgy, saying that with every purchase he feels "bigger and more important." He fills his life with objects of permanence in order to forget his own impermanence.

I realized that was what I was doing. I was not so much upset about the people in the shuttle as I was worried about my own death. What would it be like?

I felt selfish. Add wasteful to that; I had buyer’s remorse. And then I was back to thinking about the shuttle. I spent an hour trying to get in touch with my fiancé, but couldn’t find him. I worried the rest of the night about him, about how horrible it would be if he were in a high-risk job.

Later, I went out to meet Heather, who worked with our design department at the News-Press all day and told me what it was like.

She told me that they found a skull, a torso and a thigh bone in Texas. Strange how vast Texas is, but how much more vast space is.

She asked me why the shuttle didn't burn up in the explosion. My stomach turned as I pictured myself burning and tumbling through the sky.

I wondered how long the astronauts were conscious, knowing that they were going to die.

I stayed out well past 2 a.m. On the lonely half-hour drive home, I felt guilty that I enjoyed my day as others suffered. Not just the families of the astronauts and the people involved with the space program, but everywhere on our tiny planet.

One day I will suffer a loss, and it will be my grief I'll have to deal with it. It will not be this selfish grief I take from others. I don't want them to die -- my loved ones, my friends, my family. I don't want to die either.

I'm not a religious person. At times I haven’t believed in God; at other times I didn't want to believe in God for fear of hell. But Saturday night, I turned to the Christian channel for comfort because everything else seemed frivolous.

I still don't know what I believe. I'm still afraid of death. I'm still selfish.

I guess that means I'm still alive.

Karen Johnson is a Spring Scholar at the News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla. She is a senior at Auburn University. Reach her at johnskp@mallard.duc.auburn.edu.

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