I Collect Ways to Die
What's with our True Crime obsession?
When the Queen died a few years ago, my husband Ben was surprised by my reaction.
“A policeman came into the Prime Minister’s bedroom with a torch? That would have been a terrifying way to wake up,” I mumbled into my pillow after he came back to bed to share the news.
“The Queen died and that’s what you say?” he asked — I couldn’t see his face in the dark but I could feel his teasing smile.
The Queen’s passing left us thinking about all sorts of things — about our own grandparents, about the role of the monarchy and if there should be one, loyalty, wealth, and the list goes on...
Me? I thought about our PMs early morning home invasion.
I know why my husband found that a surprise. Someone died and normally I have a dozen questions.
But the Queen was 96 and had been unwell. She slipped away in a peaceful setting with her family. Her death doesn’t set off my anxiety.
In recent years, global anxiety has increased and I think it makes complete sense. Most of us are worried about the world, but some of us, like me, take our worry to the next level. Professional worriers? Passionate worriers? Whatever you call it, I fit into that group.
I collect ways to die.
I wish we could be worry free in the world
I’m just not sure it would make much sense right now. It’s hard to be completely worry free when we have wars, global warming, and various other major changes happening in our world.
My history of worrying started in my teen years. As it often does. Teens and women have been the worst hit by declining mental health since 2020 according to the WHO.
As a 16-year-old I spent my summer camping holidays hiding out in my tent, consuming near-death stories from my dad’s old Readers’ Digests.
In school, I opted to study large disasters: Titanic (of course), a fire in a French night club unwisely decorated with paper-mache and polyurethane grottos, the Hindenburg, New Zealand’s deadliest earthquake.
Now it’s not so much large disasters as personal tragedies that drag me in.
They’re my ultimate doombait
If I’m browsing online, I can’t pass by a true story of someone losing a loved one without clicking. I noticed it last week, after reading my fourth cancer story, and questioned myself.
I think there’s a logic behind it: If I read how other people grieved and got through, I feel reassured that I could too. Like somehow reading their story, I’m more prepared for my own traumatic story.
They’ve given me a step-by-step guide to grief and coping.
Maybe that’s what the disaster ones were about too? Preparing for every single situation.
Fall into a glacial ravine? Better have packed your anti-hypothermia blanket. Find yourself on a sinking ‘unsinkable’ ship? Make sure you’re first on a life boat because that water’s colder than you think!
When I hear about someone dying, I instantly want to know how so I can avoid a similar end. Isn’t that why all of us read them?
Just tell me how you die
Recently, I found a writer sharing various stories about her husband’s sudden death. She’d written a half a dozen for several different publications.
At the end of her second piece I got frustrated.
Her writing was beautiful and reflective, but she wasn’t answering my burning question. Why wasn’t she giving the details I wanted about how her husband died?! I Googled her and set her stories up in tabs, reading one after the other, almost rabidly. Searching for what I wanted to know.
Then I laughed at myself. I mean, really! What was this?
I was frustrated because she wasn’t sharing how he died? Why should she? And why was I so morbidly desperate to know the details of a stranger’s death?
In a workshop I was in earlier this year, another writer shared a story about her sister’s death by suicide and how even strangers ask, “How’d she do it?” She shared how inappropriate and awkward that was for her. Why did they need to know? What’s this morbid fascination with exactly how people died?
If we know enough, we’ll be safe, right?
It’s somehow less scary for us to know 1001 ways to die than to be surprised by a new way.
Just last week I found a new way in Rachel A Fefer’s personal essay: apparently, you can die running past a pesticide-sprayed field. My mind immediately formulated a plan of:
1. Avoidance. Watch for signs of pesticide spray or strange smells while out in the country.
2. How to survive if I get exposed.
But is it even relevant to where I live and the sprays they use here? Not likely. I’ve lived in the countryside and I’ve never heard of it being an issue.
Still, my brain collects it and files it in “Ways you could die” which apparently is quite a large and important file in my brain because it pops up regularly to remind me of all possible dangers. I know I’m not the only one, but that doesn’t mean everyone does this.
My husband, for one, thinks it’s ridiculous.
My husband’s ‘death file’ contains almost nothing
He keeps it stored on the dusty basement floor of his mind with other useless information.
Up the front, where my ‘death file’ sits, his mind has the capital of every country in the world, hundreds of facts on Rock band’s of the 80s and 90s even though he’s a Millennial, the symbol for each element and why Tungsten has the symbol W and not T. Those are the files he keeps alphabetized and accessible.
He works as a stonemason making headstones and hearing about deaths every single day, but even before working there he thought dying was no big deal.
My death list frustrates him. And me.
It frustrates him because I make worry-statements at him and the kids.
“Careful when you drive up there. The roads will be wet.”
“Are you sure you want to do that? I heard 3 people died doing something similar last year.”
“Did you know you have a 50% higher chance of heart attack if you sleep more than 9 hours a night?” (That’s a made-up fact by the way, just in case you’re like me and got worried.)
It frustrates me, not because I collect ways to die, but because it’s so intrusive in my thoughts and makes me anxious. I’m so sick of being anxious.
I’m not even scared of my own death.
Why does my mind insist on knowing every single danger to avoid? I think it’s more about the people I love than myself. I am scared to lose people I love.
I think that’s pretty normal.
There have been several times I’ve come close. I lived through a big earthquake in 2011 that killed 185 people and injured thousands more. I had a six week old baby at the time and held her in my arms in the doorway, watching as the hallway floor rolled and lifted, wondering if the roof would collapse.
Panic attacks I thought I had under control flared up again. It’s understandable. The whole city was anxious. Being a new mother made it more acute too. When you can’t trust the ground and walls to stay in place, it’s hard to feel safe.
After therapy and several years of solid, un-shaky ground, my anxiety has reduced and the panic attacks have gone, but I’m starting to think worry is in my DNA.
If there’s a way to stop noticing or caring, I haven’t found it yet.
I guess we could think of it as a superpower.
Surely we need the safety inspectors of the world? We need people who reduce unnecessary deaths. People like me, we probably make the best policy makers or teachers or engineers. Those jobs where safety is important — don’t we want overly cautious people in those jobs?
I would say yes.
My husband would probably disagree. It’s the one thing we disagree on most — the level of cotton wool the world needs to be padded in.
It might be the thing we can never agree on.
I’ll probably keep collecting deaths and making worry-statements. He’ll probably keep ignoring them. Although we do make concessions. I sometimes get brave and join him on his adventures. He often takes precautions I’ve suggested just to make me comfortable.
Maybe the world needs both kinds of people. We challenge each other.
But seriously though, wear your seatbelt, and sunscreen, and cut up your steak well, and keep up to date with health checks, and make sure….