Throughout my childhood, I was crazy obsessed with Death. The nuns spoke fondly of Death as such a lovely place… joining the saints and our Father in heaven… It’s no wonder that I prayed every day that I would die and go there… where everything was perfect and I would be able to lie in the billowy clouds for as long as I wished, with no one calling me to come home.

The cemetery on the farm, it seemed to me, was as good a place as any to prepare for my dispatch to the great beyond.

“I had spent many happy hours there, fantasizing about Death, scuffing about in the deep leaves, running my fingertips over the mossy headstones, delighting in the engravings of willow trees that dripped their leaves like tears at my feet.”

from The Girl with the Black and Blue Doll, A Memoir of Childhood Depression.