According to mentalfloss.com, Thomas J. Grasso, convicted murderer, had some interesting last words. “I did not get my Spaghetti-O’s; I got spaghetti. I want the press to know this,” he said when talking about his final meal. I sort of doubt that these would have been the words he would have really wanted to say in his last breaths, but here we are.

Most students I know (and probably ones I don’t) get touchy at the thought of dying. We laugh and make up last word ideas, like “I left a million dollars in the…” and then passing away. We make jokes about how we’re going to live forever, given the power from somewhere or something. We believe we are going to make legacies that will live for centuries, like Shakespeare, Newton, and Van Gogh. And that’s okay. That’s great, it’s one of the reasons I love living in this time, because we feel immortal.

But that’s also another fault. We never really realize that we’re going to die or at least don’t fully consider the prospect. Teenagers, young adults, some people younger than 40; they all have this strong feeling of, “I won’t die yet, death is something that I really can’t imagine happening to me right now.” So we get reckless. We drive through red lights, we scale walls, we play with fire.

It’s a common belief that we are the immortal youth, a belief that we will all be old and grey, with a million stories of how we survived these crazy things as kids. That we will have these glorious last words that will resonate with our loved ones for generations. Because we simply cannot seem to fully comprehend that dying, and getting hurt, are all not our decisions to decide when and where.

There’s a lot of lore around dying, and death itself, really. Upstairs, downstairs, ghosts, spirits. It’s all mystifying. I believe it also supports the fact that we begin to believe in this stuff at a younger age, because we’re scared to not live forever. We can’t imagine a world without ourselves, because that is all we’ve ever known. We’ve been with ourself our whole lives, and it seems ludicrous to some to not have that once you take your last breath because of this. But I see it so much more in the young ages in the people who don’t really have to face death. An afterlife or a soul that doesn’t die easy is a relief to us.

Our folklore, and our casual phrasing of moving on, and our constant belief in our abilities to not be nothing but gone in the end. They all are symptoms of the immortal youth, of our strong will to not be let go of. And that’s a point ingrained in society, that sticks with us throughout our young years. We believe our last words will not be the last, and many dream of a different life beyond

And, hey, maybe that’s going to happen. As long as we’re aware that skydiving without a parachute will probably result in death and don’t think we can survive that fall easily, I think we’re going to be fine.