A Debut Novelist Imagines Life After Her Own Death

I was 17 years old when I died.

In the years after my death, I liked to use this line as an ice breaker in conversations, always enjoying the disturbed reactions. Even alone, I found myself compulsively scribbling the same sentence again and again—I was 17 years old when I died. Over the proceeding years, one sentence eventually became two, two became three. Seemingly outside of my own choice, my brain, desperate to process my death, forged the beginning of a story. The story evolved, as most stories do. It wasn’t about me. Not exclusively. It became a story about a woman in the throes of true love with a promising life ahead of her who dies of lymphoma, cryogenically preserves her body, and is resurrected 100 years later in a world where it is illegal to be a resurrected human. Ultimately, it became a story about the repercussions of cheating death—the way I had.

The truth of my death is much more common. I died in a car accident on the way to take my junior year biology final. I don’t remember any of it, the moments before my death or the many minutes I was without a heartbeat. In fact, that period where I wasn’t alive distinctly stands in my mind as a stark nothingness, a vacuum of time where I didn’t exist. I can still feel it, the scar of not existing, as real as I feel the scars on my face that I try to hide behind thick bangs. It was mere chance that my life