I don’t think I’ve ever seen a person die.

I’m quite aware of death, thank you very much. I know mortality is a fact of life. As certain as taxes, as they say. And I’ve seen countless depictions of death, on the big screen and the small, from the quick and thoughtless to the slow and agonising. Death is everywhere in the news, from the train derailments to the wartime atrocities. I’m aware of many, many people who have shuffled off their mortal coils, from public figures to distant family members of mine.

But I’ve never seen a person die, in person. I’ve never been in the room where it happens. Nobody has kicked the bucket while in my presence.

I’m twenty-five years old. I feel like this kind of traumatic experience should have happened to me at least once by now.

I think that the closest person to me who has died was my grandfather. He died in the middle of a winter’s night when I was thirteen, of a stroke. My grandmother and my father, who had driven over on short notice, were present at the time of death, which was 2:45 a.m. I only learned of it the next morning (Kids, we have something important to tell you). At the moment he slipped the surly bonds of life, I was fast asleep and fourteen blocks away.

I know of classmates in high school and college who have departed from this earth. Some accidents, some suicides. All offscreen.

I don’t think I’ve even seen a stranger die. Surely, in some statistical sense, there ought to have been some street I’ve walked along where some poor soul on the other side of the street clutches her chest and keels over, but that’s never happened. I’ve never beheld a fatal incident with my own eyes—no car crashes, shootings, falling debris from construction sites.

Maybe I’m insulated from in-person death by virtue of not working in the medical field. I imagine that hospital workers, especially those involved in end-of-life care, must see death with their own eyes so often that they become desensitised to it. Each death would mean someone has to fill out a few forms and certificates and inform next-of-kin, but otherwise it would be unremarkable, utterly commonplace. But I am not these people.

Then again. There are many life milestones that I’ve been pushing myself like crazy to hit, but see someone die is not one of them. Altogether I’d say I’m not much in a rush to check that off.