From the time I was ambulatory until I was fourteen and refused to participate, every year on my birthday my father would video me going around an immense organ-pipe cactus in the city’s botanical garden. The cactus is practically under lock and key now. It could never survive elsewhere, certainly. Some miscreant would shoot it full of arrows or smack holes in it with a golf club.

My father would splice the frames and speed them up so I would start off on my circuit, disappear for a moment and emerge a year older, again and again a year older, taller and less remarkable. I began as a skipping and smiling creature and gradually emerged as a slouching and scowling one. Still, my parents appeared unaware of the little film’s existential horror. My mother claims that she no longer has it, that it no longer exists, and I have chosen to believe her.

She appeared a somewhat older version of one of the paramedics who arrived at the house the night my father died, though it was unlikely that anyone would go from being a paramedic to being an employee at a resort that had seen better days and was, in fact, in foreclosure. Though perhaps she had accumulated a record of not saving anyone and had lost her position as an emergency responder.

“Do I know you,” I asked. Or maybe it was “Have I seen you before?” because I had never known her, even if she’d been the one to feel my father’s last breath leave his body. She threw me a dismissive look and returned to her station to greet and seat a party of four, whom she’d evidently been expecting as they had planned ahead and made a reservation.

My point is that however fortunate your life or—considering the myriad grotesque ways one can depart from it—your death, it’s usually strangers who have their hands on you at the end and usher you down the darkened aisle. Or rather that was one of my reflections as I waited for my friends with whom I would commence a night of serious drinking.