My first encounter with death...
...occurred when I was about two and a half.
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My mother had two butterflies on the wall. The kind that are long dead and gone, impaled on a pin and mounted in a frame. I remember admiring them, and lacking a very well developed concept of depth, I assumed they were 'flattened' butterflies - just like the flowers my mother flattened between the pages of books.
I desperately wanted one of my own butterflies, because my mother didn't allow me to touch the ones that were on the wall. So, one day, I thought I'd go and flatten a butterfly so I could have my very own.
Off I marched into the springtime garden, the smoothest rocks I could find in either hand, and set off to find a butterfly that I would have for my own. It was not long before I spotted a small white butterfly, and after several attempts, I finally managed to trap it between the two rocks. I could hardly contain my excitement at the prospect at having captured a butterfly just like my mother's. A anticipatory grin on my face, I slowly pried the rocks apart to discover... death. It was at that moment, as the butterfly waved its little legs for the last time, its white wings crushed to a pulp, that I realised that it was no longer a butterfly. I ran crying back into the house, dismayed at what I had done.
It was from that day onwards that I started seeing 'dead people' in the house. Or perhaps it had been from earlier on, but I never recognised them as such. I didn't so much see them, as know where they were, and duly avoided them. In particular, one of the closets in the cellar contained a dead person, and I refused to look into it ever, to my parent's bemusement - and to this day, I have no idea what was actually contained in that closet.
Another place I found highly disconcerting is a blank wall on the third floor. I believe that's where the butterflies used to be. But for some reason, I get mixed memories of there having been a door there. I feared that spot in the corridor between my room and my parents. After the butterfly incident, my parents had to alter the walk-in closet in their bedroom to become a little annexe that I would sleep in. I slept there until I was six, when we moved to Ethiopia. The ghosts didn't bother me anymore, but a fear of the dark followed me until I was well into my teens.
My mother asked me once whether I remembered why I was so scared in the first house we lived in, and I told her "because there were dead people everywhere".
.jpg)
My mother had two butterflies on the wall. The kind that are long dead and gone, impaled on a pin and mounted in a frame. I remember admiring them, and lacking a very well developed concept of depth, I assumed they were 'flattened' butterflies - just like the flowers my mother flattened between the pages of books.
I desperately wanted one of my own butterflies, because my mother didn't allow me to touch the ones that were on the wall. So, one day, I thought I'd go and flatten a butterfly so I could have my very own.
Off I marched into the springtime garden, the smoothest rocks I could find in either hand, and set off to find a butterfly that I would have for my own. It was not long before I spotted a small white butterfly, and after several attempts, I finally managed to trap it between the two rocks. I could hardly contain my excitement at the prospect at having captured a butterfly just like my mother's. A anticipatory grin on my face, I slowly pried the rocks apart to discover... death. It was at that moment, as the butterfly waved its little legs for the last time, its white wings crushed to a pulp, that I realised that it was no longer a butterfly. I ran crying back into the house, dismayed at what I had done.
It was from that day onwards that I started seeing 'dead people' in the house. Or perhaps it had been from earlier on, but I never recognised them as such. I didn't so much see them, as know where they were, and duly avoided them. In particular, one of the closets in the cellar contained a dead person, and I refused to look into it ever, to my parent's bemusement - and to this day, I have no idea what was actually contained in that closet.
Another place I found highly disconcerting is a blank wall on the third floor. I believe that's where the butterflies used to be. But for some reason, I get mixed memories of there having been a door there. I feared that spot in the corridor between my room and my parents. After the butterfly incident, my parents had to alter the walk-in closet in their bedroom to become a little annexe that I would sleep in. I slept there until I was six, when we moved to Ethiopia. The ghosts didn't bother me anymore, but a fear of the dark followed me until I was well into my teens.
My mother asked me once whether I remembered why I was so scared in the first house we lived in, and I told her "because there were dead people everywhere".