Maybe I would still remember that summer day after decades for its irreplaceable influence to my life afterwards. There was nothing special happened in that day. But it really changed a lot and impressed me deeply. From that day, what I talked, what I thought never got away from the brand of what I experienced at that day.

It was a heated summer noon. I was about twelve. I spent the day in my aunt’s home for my summer holiday. It was so hot that people all enjoyed the relaxing time in their rooms with air conditioners. I was ready to have a noon sleep. I didn’t like the air conditioner. So I shared a hot but ventilated room with my uncle who had a serious cancer at that time and was ascertained to die by doctors. I lay on the other bed near my uncle but being hard to fall asleep. I could view my uncle’s fluctuant chest and wizened arms because of the disease he was suffering from his back. Surrounding was quiet and you could just hear the cicadas bustling. I always returned to that daytime when I was alone in a similar summer day after years.

I looked at my uncle’s waxy face. He had an operation what made him lose his nose not long ago. The excessively flat face made him grisly and unusual. I suddenly realized he was a dying man. Death was too far for young me. I was rather clear that my uncle would leave me soon but never thought it deep. I began to imagine the scene after dying. Something special struck my heart. I suddenly realized I would go into nothingness after death what I couldn’t escape. I wouldn’t talk, laugh, even wouldn’t think anymore. Me, as an existing object would disappear. I couldn’t feel what happened after my dying because “I” wouldn’t exist no longer. I realized dying
meant perishing totally. That was an enormous crash for the young atheistic boy. This comprehending created a mighty fear what I couldn’t bear. I ran out of the room, seeking my relatives for help. Air seemed to be hotter. I was sweating like a pig.

After that day, this world changed to a new world that had only “right now” but no history or future. Everything became far away from me, my soul that I couldn’t touch in a real way. I talked with a lot of people about that, the close or strangers, parents or friends on trips. Nobody seemed to be able to understand what I felt in that day. They would smile or stare me in perplexity:” You are too young to think about death”, or show their understanding on the surface:” Everybody thinks like you”. People don’t get what I fear is the nihility sense of life, not death itself.

I experienced several people’s death after that. I saw people, who included my grandparents, my two uncles, dying, ending the last breath, like they never existed in this world. I suffered the deep feeling of loneliness and hollow of life. This feeling was buried by me so that I can live in a normal way. I won’t think of it mostly now. But sometimes the experience still bothers me. I deem this may be a common feeling for every people that though not many realized in they mind. But death is a topic that everybody needs to face. I know it’s an embarrassing and personal feeling. I share this just for those people have the same feeling to get a little comfort: We are not
alone on the earth.

Limiting by my English expression, I explain too little my real feeling in this essay. But I tried my best.