It must come to an end
When I saw burials, corteges passing under the windows of the house where I lived, I asked my mother what it meant for someone to be dead. “Why is he dead?” “He’s dead because he was ill.” I ended up believing that one died because one had had an illness, or an accident, at any rate that death was accidental, and that, on taking care not to be ill, to be well-behaved, in wearing a scarf, in taking medicines properly, in paying attention to traffic, one would never die. That worried me, because I could see that one grew older. I said to myself, “Up till when can one continue to age? Where can it lead to?” I imagined a man growing older, I saw him growing up, becoming tall, his beard becoming white, that his beard growing whiter and whiter, and longer and longer and that it dragged in the street, that he himself was more and more bent over. I said to myself, “No, it must come to an end, it’s not possible for it to go on.” One day I asked my mother, “Are we all going to die? Tell me the truth.” She said, “Yes.” I must have been four, five years old, I was sitting on the ground, she was standing in front of me. I can still see her. When she saw me sob—because all of a sudden I started to cry—she looked at me, disarmed, powerless. I was very frightened. Above all, I thought it was certain that she would die one day, that haunted me.
[Eugène Ionesco, qtd. here]
