I'm three or four years old. I'm sitting on the living room floor, playing with dolls. I look up at the TV and see a little boy. He's sitting on the floor, playing with toy soldiers. Then he's in Little League; he stumbles on his way to first base. He visits a doctor. His parents are sad. He's in a wheelchair. Then a bed. Then I see the toy soldiers. No boy. An unseen narrator says, "Little Billy's toy soldiers have lost their general." It's a commercial for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. As the narrator makes the pitch, a realization comes to me: I will die.

Is it really one of my earliest memories? Or was it manufactured by my imagination? I don't suppose it matters. Either way, it was my truth. It is my truth.

I accepted the reality of death so long ago itís hard to imagine life without it. But figuring out what it means is another matter.

I knew I would die, but I never said anything; I didn't want to distress my parents. Somehow, though, my mother realized. "That boy," she told me more than once, "has a different kind of muscular dystrophy. Girls don't get it." Maybe, I thought, but he looks a lot like me. And pretty soon I saw little girls on the telethon and heard that girls too had "killer diseases."

I didn't know the word, but I figured my mother was in denial.

By the time I entered kindergarten, I thought of myself as a dying child. I had been sick the year before. There had been some discussion before they decided to send me to kindergarten. I was glad they did.

When I die, I thought, I might as well die a kindergartner.

I'm in a courtroom, at the defendant's table. I look up at the bench and hear the judge sentence me to death. A gasp rises up from a faceless crowd. They're shocked, astonished. But I'm not. I've known it all along. There's no question of guilt or innocence, justice or injustice. It's simply a fact. It's hard to understand, but true. I will die.

How old was I when that dream first came to me? Eight, I think.

The death sentence hung over my childhood like a cloud. Beneath the cloud, I lived a happy child's life. How could I not? I was a well-tended child of graduate students; my big sister tolerated me with good grace; three little brothers came along for me to boss. The TV brought me Dick Van Dyke, Andy Griffith and Bullwinkle. I laid LPs on the turntable and soaked up the sounds of Joan Baez, Broadway shows and Los Hermanos de Vera Cruz. There were books with beautiful pictures. To fatten me up, I got black beans and fried bananas. To fry my brain, Alice in Wonderland. All these things were great joys that delight me still. But then as now, life had a certain edge. I knew it would not last.

When I was 13, I read Orwell's 1984 and calculated how old I'd be then. No way, I thought. I went to school and studied hard, but I had no fantasies of a future. I studied because studying, too, was a great joy.

And besides, I thought, when I die I might as well die educated.

I'm watching an old Dracula movie on TV. I'm 12, old enough to know this is cheesy pop culture. But still, it speaks to me. Like any preteen I pick up, without fully understanding, the latent sexual charge: The Count's perverse seduction of the Englishman's fiancée is weird sex safely disguised as weird violence. But for me it's not just about strange passions under the moon, bats passing through tight cracks, moaning in canopy beds or even all that neck-biting. For me, the best part is when Professor Van Helsing, the expert from Amsterdam, taps his pipe and explains, "They are called the Undead ... ." The professor's presentation has the dull rationality of a graduate seminar. Dramatically, it's agony. But I love it. It gives meaning to the crashing ending, that moment when they drive the stake through Dracula's heart. For Dracula, there is no heaven or hell, no rebirth, no haunting. It's just dust to dust and blowing away in the wind. Ah! Beautiful!

I accepted the reality of death so long ago it's hard to imagine life without it. But figuring out what it means is another matter. I looked to conventional religion and tried to think of death as a one-way ticket to a perfect place. With a legalistic mind and a smattering of Catholic doctrine, however, I concluded that the odds were against a straight shot to heaven, especially since Thought Crime counts. And anyway, who would want perfection, having known the gorgeous squalor of the Carolina Lowcountry?

There were plenty of mystical and occult alternatives. Hauntings, auras and energy fields. Reincarnation. Time warps, parallel universes. Returning to the Oversoul. But none satisfied me. It was Professor Van Helsing who spoke to the fundamental tragedy of refusing to die; it was Dracula's end that showed the way out.

And what of Dracula's bride? The feminist view is that she paid the price of breaking convention in a patriarchal society. For me, her story meant something else. When the tale starts, she is beautiful, healthy, engaged to be married--normal in every way. But she too gets a stake in the heart. To me, she shows that death is not just for people like me.

I can't hope to bring everyone around to my way of thinking. Sometimes I wish I could do what they do, pretend that death is something that happens to other people.

It came in a slow dawning, this idea that death is for normal people too. I was personally acquainted with only a few dead people, but there were lots of them around--they lived in family stories. At our Thanksgiving table, my mother spoke of Great Aunt Harriet's dinner rolls, which always came out of the oven just as the family sat down to eat. Great Aunt Harriet died nearly 20 years before I was born; the black people who made those rolls, and timed them so perfectly, were dead too. As we spooned out the oyster casserole, my grandmother told how Uncle Oscar found a pearl in his oysters and set it in a gold tie pin. Then someone, maybe someone who was born after Uncle Oscar died, remarked that of course it happened to Uncle Oscar, because he was rich and riches came to him easily.

So rich uncles and hospitable aunts die. I will die. It was just one more step to infer that everyone at our table would die too. What amazed me was that the others seemed oblivious. They seemed to think that dying was just for the terminally ill, just for people like me.

I don't think I was morbid or obsessed, but I thought about death a lot. I knew it wasn't normal, but my relationship with death became part of me. I came to see it as a path to wisdom. Maybe normal people couldn't handle it, but I could. So I decided to be discreet, like Dracula, and live quietly among normal people. No need to trouble them with details. No need for them to know about the coffin I kept in the basement.

I started being vague about my medical diagnosis. Rather than owning a specific label, I told people I had "a muscle disease." I didn't want them to connect me with the dying people on the telethon, just as I didn't want them to know what was in my basement.

I figured if I let people peek in my basement, they'd jump to the wrong conclusion. They'd define me as one of the Undead, an unnatural creature, not really alive but feeding on the life blood of others. Or, alternatively, they'd make me a pity object, one of Jerry's Kids--someone to make them grateful they are not like me. By setting me apart as a death-totem, they could avoid looking in their own basements where their own coffins waited.

I knew they were wrong about me. I was as alive as any of them, and they were just as mortal as I. I was set apart not by any basic realities, but by perceptions--theirs and mine. They insisted on dividing the world between the living and dying; I insisted on both at the same time. Why not?

I studied, worked, played, found a place in a family and a community, and enjoyed the many delights that continued to fall on me. As my body continued to deteriorate, my life looked more and more normal.

When I was 25 I left the cozy comfort of home and family to go to law school. I figured, I'll be 27 when I finish; if I go now, I can probably practice for a couple of years.

By that time, the thought was almost subconscious: When I die, I might as well die a lawyer.

I've just turned 30. I've been lolling in bed for nearly three weeks; I say I've strained my neck, but really it's major depression. Just before my birthday, my mother had brain surgery; she's come through it beautifully, but I'm terrified to think I could actually outlive my parents. I'm put further adrift by the sudden death of the crazy German doctor who nursed me with pea soup and sausages when I refused to go to the hospital with pneumonia. Now I remember how he kept vigil at my bedside so my parents could sleep, and then fell asleep himself. As I listened to his deep barrel-chested rumble, I imagined he was snoring in German. In the middle of the night, in the middle of a medical crisis, that snore made me smile and know again that life is a great gift, worth hanging on to. Now, in my depression, the memory makes me smile again. But then I sink back down.

Maybe "sink" is the wrong word; it feels more like "rising." It has that kind of intensity. Is this a mid-life crisis? Should I now take stock? Deal with my disappointed expectations? My thoughts race by, but I manage to grab them and take a look. I find they are coherent. I'm bonkers, but rational. I know what's bothering me: My plan to die young just hasn't worked out. I wonder, what would I have done differently if I'd known I would live so long? What do I do now? My thoughts take on the structure of a song, a song with too many verses. But there's a simple chorus, repeated over and over: It's too late to die young.

The time came and I told them my neck was better. I went back to life's routines, but some things had changed. I'd gone in agnostic and came out atheist. When the next medical crisis came, I found I could hear the death sentence without dread. The lessons of Little Billy and his toy soldiers, of Dracula and his bride, had gone from my head to a deeper place. I'd taken death into my heart.
I decided to talk about the coffin in the basement. As an experiment, I confided to two nondisabled woman friends that I was genuinely surprised to be alive at age 30.

"I had no idea," one said. "I've never thought of you that way."

"Absolutely not," the other agreed.

Despite all explanations, they refused to believe I was under a death sentence. I was pleased my reticence had been so effective, but I also wondered if it would ever be possible to get real.

I reconsidered my childhood death sentence and decided I was the victim of a fraud. Sure, I am mortal. Yes, I will die. But I had never been terminally ill the way I'd been led to believe.

I studied the telethon and tried to understand its peculiar power. It spewed out the same old messages--"killer disease," "life ebbing away," "before it's too late." As I heard the death sentence pronounced on another generation of children, I wondered how many had actually been killed by it. How many had suffered pneumonia without vigilant parents or a crazy German doctor with pea soup? How many had died for lack of a reason, when a reason was needed in the middle of the night, to hang on to life? Worst of all, how many had lived and died without finding meaning? How many had failed to value their own lives?

I joined the telethon protest and opposed physician-assisted suicide. I wanted people to know our culture is playing fast and loose with the facts. While anyone may die young, it's not something you can count on. You have to be prepared to survive.

Among allies in the disability-rights movement, I started hearing things I didn't expect. "We're not dying," some comrades said. "We're disabled, not terminally ill." Even in the movement, denial ruled. I learned it's not just nondisabled people who shy away from what's in the basement.

I decided to embrace the death sentence. No need to fear it; no need to hasten it. Mortality is something all people share, a unifying force. Every life, whether long or short, is a treasure of infinite value. These things are true, I figured, and it's my job to say so.

When I die, I decided, I might as well die honest.

I'm 39. A man has come to my law office for a will. He has AIDS. I start explaining the options: "When you die ... " I'm horrified to realize I've dropped the polite circumlocutions, and make a quick substitution. "When your will takes effect ... "

I'm flustered. He looks at me with a wise, weary smile. "It's OK," he says, "I know what's going to happen. That's why I'm here."

He has unlocked the door. He too knows about the coffin in the basement. We can get real.
"So explain what happens when I croak," he says.

By the time the final documents come off the printer, we're laughing so hard I wonder what the lawyer in the next office will think. "I can't tell you," he says, "how great it is to work with someone who can deal with this stuff without freaking out. Most people are so ... compassionate."

We shake hands. "It's been my pleasure," I tell him. It really has.

Life still demands circumlocutions. Concealing my diagnosis remains the easiest way to deal with popular fears; I can't hope to bring everyone around to my way of thinking. Sometimes I wish I could do what they do, pretend that death is something that happens to other people. But denial is not an option. Death is too much a part of me now.

In youth, I came to see death as the end of things. But now I know it is more. It is part of all we are, all there is. Wallace Stevens wrote:

Death is the mother of beauty, mystical
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers, waiting, sleeplessly.

An awareness of death fosters appreciation for the stuff of life. Those structures of material creation, webs of relationships, cultural institutions, language, thoughts, memories--become marvelous. How extraordinary that they exist, yet are no more permanent than soap bubbles floating in the air! Their fragility is central to their very nature.

Now I am unexpectedly middle-aged. My physical deterioration has been slow, downright gentle. If the next 20 years are like the last, I'll be looking toward old age. I know it could happen. However, in my heart, the old death sentence remains in force. It still doesn't feel likely that I'll go on much longer.

Hardly a day passes without some thought of death. I hear a future date and wonder if I will be alive. I clear out clutter and think this will be a bit less for my heirs to deal with. Giving up some old grudge, I say, "Life's too short," and it feels literally true.

Sometimes the death-penalty dream comes back, just as I created it in childhood--the same anonymous judge, faceless spectators, nondescript Perry Mason-style courtroom. I wonder, why doesn't the dream story happen in one of the real courtrooms where I work? Why not use a real judge? How about a ghostly visit from the late J.B. "Bubba" Ness? Shouldn't attorney David Bruck be there beside me? He might get me off.

Why is it so abstract? I'm not sure. Maybe a plain dream is sufficient to keep in my mind a plain truth: I will die.

Now the dream typically comes after a loss. It tells me that death remains mysterious. My mind continues to struggle with what it is, what it means. How can I imagine a world without me? How have I survived so many friends, so many family members, so many heroes? How many more losses will there be? Why can't Mel Brooks live forever? For someone so funny, even 2,000 years wouldn't be enough! Death is natural, but not just. It is a random force of nature; survival is equally accidental.

Each loss is an occasion to remember that survival is a gift. I owe it to others to make good use of my time.

When I die, I might as well die alive.

It's late October. I'm with my sister in a Mexican airport. She gives me a little poke: The Aeromexico ticket counter is decorated with paper skeletons to celebrate the Day of the Dead. We wait in line and I contemplate the skeletons. Our plane might crash. Not likely, but possible. We get on the plane and experience the miracle of an uneventful flight. I remember those skeletons with joy.

I shouldn't care what happens to my bones. When I'm dead I'll be past caring. Yet I think about it sometimes. I like the way it is for wild things. It would be good to be swallowed up in a swamp, feed delicious crabs, nourish the fetid fertility of pluff mud. Over centuries the weight of earth and slow growth of roots could grind my bones to powder. I might give strength to the cyprus trees.
But I am not a wild creature. There are rules.

The rules don't suit me. I don't want my body preserved by chemicals, sealed off in a box, set apart in a graveyard. A body, no longer living but artificially tied to a life that once was, becomes hideous. I don't want that.

Most of all, I don't want my name on a tombstone. It's enough to have my name recorded in dull public records, with the names of generations of lawyers appearing in lawsuits and writing wills. Let my tale-telling family connect me with a few good stories. That way, Aunt Harriet, though dead, will have a place at the table.

Yet even in my family, memories will fade. I may be confused with the other Aunt Harriet, the one who served the hot rolls. Then, I'll be forgotten. Even ghosts must die to make room for new ones.
That's fine. A little immortality--for a little while--is good enough. As for my body, let it go, dust to dust, and blow off in the wind.

Harriet McBryde Johnson lives in Charleston, S.C., in a 19th-century house. Invasions by bats are not uncommon, but there is no basement. She recently learned that the medical records containing her diagnosis were destroyed by Hurricane Hugo 10 years ago.