John Steinbeck wrote that although he didn't want to die, he had always felt that he would rather have never existed.
I understand that.
I feel the same way about vacations.
Don't get me wrong, I just last week held a baby alligator in my arms, saw Hemingway's house at Key West, bought To Have and Have Not and Hemingway on Writing, and read them both while my kids played in hotel pools (their favorite part of a long road trip), and had some of the best orange juice I ever tasted. There is always something to getting out into the world (even to Florida - ha ha - just kidding).
But I find vacations taxing. My son's the same way. It won't stop him from telling his friends that he saw alligators and an astronaut and rode an airboat through the Everglades. These things he enjoyed (and I have the video to prove it) despite the fact that the alligators didn't, as he expressed his hope that they would, "wake up, to eat the birds."
But he will no longer admit that he liked anything about the trip.
Perhaps he is like me, in that from the moment the excitement started, was also looking forward to being back home. And then at the end, rundown from it all perhaps, I got sick and had to take another day off work to recover, from my vacation.
Travel, though fulfilling, is hard work.
My dad used to take every July, lie on the beach all day, play tennis, basketball or just relax at home with a book, didn't even read the NY times, which he read religiously the rest of the year, or take any calls from work whatsoever. I'm sure he credits those vacations for much of his success. In August he would go back to work, while we all stayed at the beach for another month, a great way for him to ease back in, by himself, to the inevitable backlog that awaited.
But what do we need that for? We can rest when we're dead, right? And I'm kind of looking forward to that, actually.
For while I don't, like Steinbeck did, wish I never existed, I do look forward to the end of responsibility and expectation. I have written poems echoing this sentiment, one about the end of life called, A Beautiful Day, and another, about the beginning, called, Judgment Day, and that about says it all, so now you don't have to read them.
I don't mean to make light of a serious subject. I've suffered from a chronic minor depression most of my life, though fortunately have never succumbed to thoughts of ending it. I can't explain why not, I may just be lucky, for which I'm grateful. So while I can't say that I truly understand people who do, I know that it must come from a great sense of hopelessness and I don't mean to belittle that. People say it's selfish, too, and I don't disagree, but I think to hit the nail on the head, I would have to call it, simply, impatient.
It just seems to me that you can't stop death, so feel good about that, at least. It's coming for all of us, in its own sweet time.
Just give me a day of rest, before I have to show up at the pearly gates.