What happens when all’s said, done and dusted? I imagine death falling as a calm blackness. Like turning off the tap and lying back. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do. No one to see. This peace enveloping you is all there is and all there need be.

 

When, as a child, I asked my mother what happened after we died, she tried to give me some version of this narrative. Whether the right words escaped her or they were beyond my young mind’s scope of comprehension, I did not find her description of ‘eternal nothingness’ very comforting. I flew into panic in fact, my tears mingling with the surrounding bathwater as Mum did her best to calm me down.

 

We were in the South of France visiting her dear friends Hilary and Thomas. They lived in a mediaeval village among the mountains above Monaco and were close enough with Mum to have earned the titles Aunty and Uncle. Castellar boasted dramatic alpine views stretching to the Mediterranean sea and timeless architecture that I was far too young to properly appreciate. None of the buildings where we lived in Sydney’s North – with its knockdown-rebuild culture of boxy geometries and showy walls of glass – were that old. Put simply, Castellar gave me the creeps. I felt like I could see the ghosts of bygone townsfolk stalking the flagstone alleys and peering out of the shuttered windows.

 

With these apparitions, I was confronted by the reality that I would one day be like them, a spirit dismembered from my corpse. And what would be then? The answer to this question only aggravated my disquiet. Eventually, after fumbling through consolations, Mum managed to alleviate my hysteria. But only after blaspheming against her atheism by suggesting that all I had to do was embrace our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, for a golden ticket through those pearly gates and into the comforting bosom of the afterlife, forever. It was so simple!

 

Even at the age of six, something smelt fishy about this idea, although I was too relieved to interrogate my mother’s claims any further. The notion of a single thought baptising me of sin and freeing me into heavenly immortality was an alluring one, though I don’t think I ever truly believed it.

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Strangely, this wasn’t the only bathtub that was the venue for an infantile existential crisis. And I’ve come to learn that others have experienced similar phenomena. A friend and I were recently discussing the opening passage from Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory: ‘The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.’ As we traded stories from our own histories, Lucia remembered her first comprehension of that so-called abyss. She recalled sitting there, soaking solo, the eerie rhythmic drip of the tap percussing a symphony of tear-inducing bathtime realisations:

 

I am alive → I will die → I face this fate alone → Yucky.

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Confronting the limitations of existence is a messy business, even in the hygienic locus of a bathroom.

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Like narcissus staring into the pool, I saw myself in Lucia’s story and began to reflect. 

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In many ways, an existential crisis like this befalling someone at such a young age, with so much living ahead, seems counterintuitive. Another point that warrants interrogation is that such feelings could flood a person while in an environment so similar to the womb. Riffing off Nabokov, one might suggest that the embryonic state exists right on the edge of a void surrounding life on all sides like a moat does a castle. And while we cannot willfully recall this liminal time and may not have been conscious as it happened, we were alive, with a heart beating like the leak of a half-closed faucet. With this in mind, a fear of the unknown after death may have assailed me as a bathing child due to a kind of déjà vécu. In that moment, I was a proto-baby once again, vulnerable in the face of surrounding danger, a chicklet without its shell. You could even say that I was more vulnerable than my prenatal form, umbilical cord well-and-truly severed. 

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Old Sigmund would no doubt have something to say about all this, between sips of his pipe and wisps of misogyny. Indeed, the Freudian implications of a bathtub uterine flashback are low-hanging fruit ripe for the picking. I will, however, leave these berries for the reader to reach for on their own time. Suffice to say, as a child, that return to a simulated foetal state was probably too close to home. This coupled with an intense dread for the loud, horrifying slurpy-sucky sound of the plughole whirlpool made the bathroom a vortex of anxiety for me.

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