By Jennifer Wang

Even in death, we remain.


A Titan’s anatomy is strangely mortal. Their children are not.

Kronos’ godly offspring didn’t feel the burn of stomach acid when he swallowed them whole. When it came time, they clawed their way up his trachea to escape the prison that was his mouth, leaving his insides to bleed gold.

At least, that’s how I imagine it happened. As a child, my imagination ran too rampant to be constrained.

When I was around seven, my mind created this nightmare that came back to haunt me every other month.

It always started out in this oddly familiar restaurant. It was a dingy diner, the type I recognized from vintage American sitcoms. The entire place was dimly lit in a wash of putrid yellow lighting, and the booths and tables stretched on for as far as the eye could see, aligned in perfect geometric sequences.

No matter where I looked, the same weary rows of vintage diner booth seats and worn down floors stared back at me, unchanged for miles. There was no visible entrance or exit to be found. It sparked a feeling of unease deep within my subconscious, and an overwhelming impulse would possess my legs, forcing them to run.

Then, a familiar voice would reach my ears. My uncle would materialize in a booth in front of me, beckoning me closer. Something sinister seemed to simmer beneath his smile.

He wasn’t my real uncle.

Before my body allowed myself to flee, I would shrink to the size of a pill. My uncle, now looming over me, would pick me up by the collar of my shirt and swallow me whole.

The journey down his throat engulfed me in endless darkness. Just like that maze of a diner, there was no way out. My attempts to crawl back out were futile.

Then, a panic would seize me by the neck. My panic was alive, living inside of me, colonizing my organs like a parasite. It had a mind of its own, and grew to block my nostrils so that I couldn’t breathe. It killed me gradually from the inside, leaving me to wilt to nothingness in the abyss of my uncle’s stomach.

Then came rebirth.

A blinding light would burst from behind my eyelids to offer me salvation. Somehow, I’d reawaken in one of the booths at the diner.

I greet the familiar sight of sickly yellow lights and maze-like tables and chairs yet again. Sitting opposite of me is someone who’s not quite my uncle.

I stopped trying to run the second time around.

I always found the nightmare to be strange, because my uncle had always been nothing but kind to me.

My uncle wasn’t a bad man, but I knew he was no saint either. He shrouded himself in a haze of short-term happiness, the smoke of Marlboro cigarettes blinding his world.

He was always trying something new, always seeking the next thrill. While others existed, he lived.

Life was a test of endurance, but he bolted from the start. He didn’t care much for consequences. He thought if he ran from them fast enough, they wouldn’t catch up to him. And they didn’t — at least not for a while. But you tire with age, and he set himself up to lose the marathon.

His passing was a shock to the entire family. The hospital told us his cause of death was kidney failure. We knew he hadn’t been doing well, but no one thought he would leave us so soon.

Death had always seemed so far away from me. The day my mother heard the news of my uncle’s passing was the first time Death graced me with its presence. I saw it sneak through the cracks of my apartment’s front door and felt its chilling touch trace the surface of my skin.

That day, Death came one step closer to me and painfully reminded me of my mortal limits. Someday, it will claim my parents. Eventually, it will take my friends. I pray it comes for me before my sister.

After my mother returned from my uncle’s funeral, she sat me down at the dinner table.

“Your dad and I are not going to be around forever,” she said, eyes bloodshot. “You’ll need to know a few things. For when I’m gone.”

We tried to cover everything: life insurance, bank accounts, burial arrangements, how my sister and I would split their belongings. While she looked at a spreadsheet, my eyes were fixed on her. I wanted to commit every inch of her face to memory: every gray hair, every smile line, and every crinkle in the corner of her eyes.

Don’t give me your legacy, I almost told her. I’m not ready for it just yet. You won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. I have been mourning you since I was six years old, but I can’t imagine a life without your presence in my home.

Instead, I nodded as we went over numbers and technicalities. I stomached the pleas, and killed the beggar in me.

After my uncle’s funeral, my family sent his body to the flames. He came back as ash and splintered bone.

They returned him to the earth. My cousins scattered pieces of him into the dirt, mixed with the roots of a tree sapling. Today, his limbs stretch towards the sky in tree branches. He grows taller every year, towering over me still, just like he did in my nightmare.

Somewhere in the grooves of the trunk, I think he lives on. He breathes through the leaves and moves with the wind. He’s not gone — not completely.

When I think of my uncle, I am reminded of Kronos.

After Kronos was overthrown, his children banished him to Tartarus, a realm so deep under the earth it was beyond the Underworld. I often wondered if that was all there was to his story. After all, a god so ancient would not simply cease to exist. Perhaps he still lingers — not in a physical body, but in the dust of the legacy he left behind.

And what of me?

When I eventually surrender to my own demise, will I also find a way to continue living as dust?

As a child, I harbored a curious obsession with mythology. I hungered for tales of great deities from ancient cities that once stood tall and are now crumbled to ruins. I was captivated by stories of death, and of where our souls passed onto after death.

In every culture, life seemed to stubbornly persist somewhere beyond the mortal realm. The examples are endless: the underworld, heaven and hell, the Duat, Hel and Valhalla, Swarg and Narak, YīnJiān.

It brought me a sense of comfort to believe that I would not simply cease to exist after dying. I hoped that I would have somewhere to go. Even if I’m condemned to an eternity of damnation after death, at least I would still be.

These days, I often find myself in nature. I lie on beds of grass, feel the dirt under my fingernails, and try to reach for the expanse that is the sky. I tell myself to breathe in, then breathe out. My ribcage hums with the cicadas. Is this the view I’ll have when I’m lowered into the earth?

The more life I try to instill in myself, the closer to death I feel.

I’ve started running from Death. I don’t think I will stop anytime soon, but someday my fear might subside. Maybe I will learn to slow down my footsteps.

The day I inevitably stop in my tracks, I will ask my children to turn me into dust and infuse my remains into the roots of a tree sapling.
Until then, I’ll grieve each time Death takes one step closer to me. I’ll fling myself at anything that makes me feel alive. I’ll die a million little deaths. But in the end, I’ll live on — not as flesh and bone, but as dirt, bark, and the very air you breathe. ■