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When I was nine years old, going on ten, I experienced a true metaphysical crisis. Maybe
this seems young for such a thing, but I was always a precocious child. It all happened over
the summer between fourth and fifth grade. I was going to be turning ten years old in July,
and there was something about the transition from nine to ten—from single digit to double di-
gits—that shocked me into a genuine existential panic, usually reserved for people turning
fifty. I remember thinking that life was passing me by so fast. It seemed like only yesterday I
was in kindergarten, and here I was, about to turn ten. Soon I would be a teenager, then
middle-aged, then elderly, then dead. And everyone else was aging in hyperspeed, too.
Everybody was going to be dead soon. My parents would die. My friends would die. My cat
would die. My older sister was almost in high school already; I could remember her going off
to first grade only moments ago, it seemed, in her little knee socks, and now she was in high
school? Obviously it wouldn’t be long before she was dead. What was the point of all this?
The strangest thing about this crisis was that nothing in particular had spurred it. No friend
or relative had died, giving me my first taste of mortality, nor had I read or seen anything par-
ticular about death; I hadn’t even read Charlotte’s Web yet. This panic I was feeling at age ten
was nothing less than a spontaneous and full-out realization of mortality’s inevitable march,
and I had no spiritual vocabulary with which to help myself manage it. We were Protestants,
and not even devout ones, at that. We said grace only before Christmas and Thanksgiving
dinner and went to church sporadically. My dad chose to stay home on Sunday mornings,
finding his devotional practice in farming. I sang in the choir because I liked singing; my pretty
sister was the angel in the Christmas pageant. My mother used the church as a headquarters
from which to organize good works of volunteer service for the community. But even in that
church, I don’t remember there being a lot of talking about God. This was New England, after
all, and the word God tends to make Yankees nervous.
My sense of helplessness was overwhelming. What I wanted to do was pull some massive
emergency brake on the universe, like the brakes I’d seen on the subways during our school
trip to New York City. I wanted to call a time out, to demand that everybody just STOP until I
could understand everything. I suppose this urge to force the entire universe to stop in its