Death and Superman.

I suffer from major depressive disorder, with a side helping of anxiety. That's the easy part to explain. What it did to my heart, my mind, or my sensibilities is a bit more involved.

To be honest, I don't know exactly when it started. I was five, just shy of six, when I realized that there were skulls under all the faces of the people around me...people I loved, revered, relied upon for food and shelter. I doubt that's more than a fleeting symptom, but it's as far back as I can go.

Skulls were death. The cartoons were quite clear about it, whether it was the wispy skull-and-crossbones from a newly-opened bottle of poison, or a warning sign in an abandoned mine, or the glowing fright-mask of a Scooby-Doo villain.

Of course, it didn't help that my great-uncle, Neil, and his wife, Gert, died within a year of each other, right around this time. One moment, blurred as it may be in my failing hindsight, we were piling into the car to drive an interminable fifteen minutes to go visit them. There would be a smell of age, inane adult conversation that seemed more focused on the pre-parental world, and ribbon candy. Then, after a brief eternity, we would invert the process and go home. If it was a particularly banner day, we might stop somewhere exotic, like McDonald's, for dinner.

So they were dead. I was told in somber, condescending tones; my grandmother, a very seasoned and not quite functional alcoholic, didn't want to upset me. Of course, the concept of never seeing these decent, if bland (to a five-year-old) octagenarians was heavy. Sure, there had been times when I'd have rather given up ribbon candy for life than sit in the car with my obnoxious older sisters, but...but dead. Gone.

At this point, I had only really been to church (my parents were vaguely Episcopalian, at the time) for holidays and Sunday school. The idea of sitting through an entire hour of sitting, standing, singing, and kneeling was predictably hostile. They wouldn't even let me bring toys, although I often managed to sneak them in. There was always one pocket they forgot to check. I didn't think Jesus would mind; we knew nothing of his childhood, certainly, but every depiction of him, either visual or anecdotal, indicated that unless I was a moneychanger, I would be welcomed at the right hand of the right hand of the Father.
But other than in spirit, no pun intended, he wasn't there. Death was, and I could touch the absences it granted, both in the congregation (our church skewed old or unhealthy, demographically speaking, to the point where it was forcibly merged with another dyspeptic and geriatric operation across town) and at home. Death had dominated the market share of my attention, and for lengthening sojourns, I sought his address. I just wanted to know where everybody was. They were missing, leaving these jagged punctures in a very small life, and I had to find them.

I don't think my grandmother meant any harm, but we spent a lot of time together. She was my primary caregiver, during the day, despite needing increasing amounts of supervision herself. She, much like my father and sisters, was bipolar and self-medicating. That magical combination led her to pop off whatever was on her mind, and usually with all the diplomacy of a cruise missile strike.This was never easy to attend, but it quickly proved horrific as that age, or that era, was the first time I could feel the end coming. It was like my brain had fallen off the high side of the seesaw, and while it was a long way down, the bottom could not be avoided. In my youthful curiosity, I asked my grandmother if I knew any other dead people.

This was an inopportune moment to be watching The Little Rascals, I tell you. I think only Spanky McFarland was left, at that point (as he would be for at least a decade more; I met him in college, but didn't think to offer my condolences about his legion of deceased co-stars.)

And then she told me that Superman was dead. This was just before Christopher Reeve burned his spitcurled visage into our collective consciousness, so other than the cartoons, George Reeve was all we had.
And he was dead.Death was bigger than Superman. Death always won. Always. He was the 1972 Dolphins of cosmology; undefeated, even if the wins were by narrow margins.

Perhaps in supplication, I started wearing my Halloween costume, a skeleton suit, around the house. Whenever Grandma was having company, I assumed I should wear the home team's jersey. I'd seen grownups do it with the Yankees and Jets; why should I not foreswear my Joe Namath pajamas and let the world know who I was rooting for? It seemed like acquiescence, really. In my neighborhood, it was expected that you would worship a New York or Boston sports team. I was simply focusing on a bigger game.

This was poorly-received, to put it mildly. My parents, understandably perturbed by my new fandom, may have commissioned my sister to throw the costume away while I was at nursery school, or perhaps while I was locked in a closet, a favorite pastime of my sisters. I often just curled up and went to sleep, which failed to entertain them. I considered it nothing but a waiting game anyway. They always let me out eventually, and if my mother's strident calls turned into coarse invective when the truth was exposed, so much the better. I knew I was going to die, but I didn't want to be, or get in, any trouble on my way.

That was something that came to me before I found about Death, ironically enough. Attention, even in the smallest doses or closest quarters, was something I wasn't always interested in. I wasn't always doing anything remotely questionable; sometimes I just disappeared with a book or toy, or, when my mother went shopping, there were a number of times when I would walk into Sears with her and we'd go our separate ways. Granted, that started around the age of seven, by which point it was obvious, even to the casual shopper or seven-year-old escape artist, that Sears had a completely awful and barren concept of toys, except for during December. The record department was next stop, and then it was back to Mom. We had a flow, a routine. Despite both of us suffering from anxiety and depression, we really functioned quite well as diverging teammates.

It may be worth mentioning that I used the most direct routes possible, clambering through display racks of clothes or over lawn tractors in the home improvement section. I was on a very tight schedule, after all. My mother was a notoriously fast walker.

And that was six, and parts of seven. I discovered Death and Star Wars, in that order. It offered no comfort that Jesus, like a more terran Obi-Wan Kenobi, could be expected to whisper guidance in my ear as I approached the Death Star trench of second grade. I couldn't believe in the Force anyway. A week after we saw Star Wars, I saw Alec Guinness in another movie. And then Elvis died. Elvis and Superman. Death was getting more and better guests than Dinah Shore, and she had Burt Reynolds on speed-dial.

By the time I was seven, I was convinced that I was going to die someday.

Now, I'm not saying whether I will or won't, but seven is a bit young for that information.