Many people in my life have thought me a morbid person, focusing mostly on death and dying and decomposition and the bad. In reality I hate death. I think dying is an unfair part of life. I know one day all the people I love will fall ill and pass away or get hit by some random bus or maybe disappear without a trace only to leave me questioning what happened. Most humans have a fear of death, appropriately, since we don't know what, if anything, comes after. Death is the end of life, death is the end of everything.
The dying are often afraid because of the same reasons the living are afraid, they don't know what happens after. Then there are those who have accepted their fate, are fine with dying, are happy to take deaths skeletal hand in their own and move on. It happens, when you are looking into the secretive blackness underneath that hooded cloak, dying doesn't seem too bad. A lifetime of pain, emotional or physical, isn't much fun, so when death does arrive, scythe in hand, face unreadable, hand out, it's easy to take that hand and wander away, or let go. I'm not advocating suicide, I am absolutely against the taking of your own life, I am so against it that sometimes the anger boiling to the surface about it hurts. I'm talking about those already dying, cancer patients, those suffering from the debilitating effects of Parkinsons or MS or a variety of other diseases.
I'm not trying to be morbid when I talk about death, decomposition, dying, serial killers, murder, the end of life. I'm exploring. I'm trying to understand what may never be understood.
I write horror because I'm not afraid. I explore death because I'm not scared to face it. Sometimes I'm angry because I don't understand it, but I'm not scared. I learn about evil because there is so much good in the world and yet evil gets news coverage. I want to understand.
Plus I know, when I'm flatlining on that hospital bed, I don't want to be thinking about what is happening and what happens when I die. I want to think about how I'm going to haunt any loved ones I've left behind.