Novella Chapter 1C – EA Part 1: Dread of Death

Chapter 1C – Existential Anxiety, Part 1: Dread of Death

He was twelve when the question first started haunting him.

Where do people go after they die?

It wasn’t a philosophical musing. It was a child’s fear, raw and personal, born not from books but from silence. His father was always busy. His mother too. But unlike his father, she had time—she just chose not to give it. She wouldn’t answer his questions. She wouldn’t listen to his thoughts. She wouldn’t allow his fears to breathe.

His parents had no religion. And so, by default, neither did he.

But around him, the world brimmed with the unseen. Neighbors, classmates—they carried invisible systems of belief: some Buddhist, some Muslim, some Christian. He was thirteen the first time he saw a Bible, tucked quietly in a neighbor’s house. He longed to read it, to hold it, to know what it said. But he didn’t own one.

When he was fourteen, a friend invited him to church. That first visit was unforgettable. There, in the stories of Jesus and redemption, he heard something no adult had ever told him: that death was not the end, that someone had already paid the price of sin. He left that day changed.

But his father was furious.

In the Chinese tradition, a son must offer prayers to his ancestors—especially to his father after death. Christianity disrupted that. A Christian son wouldn’t bow to ancestral altars. His father banned him from going to church.

But he went anyway. How could he not? The church offered something his own home never did: an answer to what comes after the body stops breathing.

By sixteen, he had made a decision. He was baptized without telling his parents.

He believed—fully, without hesitation. Every sermon, every passage of scripture, every word about heaven, hell, and salvation entered him like truth from another world. When his mother once asked how much money he gave in the offering and he answered honestly, she erupted in rage.

“Stupid boy,” she snapped. “Why would you give that much money to church?”

He had offered three days’ worth of allowance. And he had done so with a grateful heart. He didn’t understand her anger. For years, he would remember that moment—confused and hurt.

It would take him twenty-five years to understand.

She didn’t believe in God. To her, that money didn’t go to heaven. It went to the pastor. But he, at sixteen, truly believed the money went to God. That’s how sincere his devotion was.

One year later, he stopped going to church—not because he stopped believing, but because he needed to forget Lisa, the girl he had fallen in love with. Two years passed. The feelings faded. At nineteen, he returned to church.

This time, he went deeper.

He read the Bible daily. He served in ministries. He even joined the pre-dawn prayer meetings—twice, sometimes three times a week—riding his bike to church at 4:30 a.m. to pray with the other believers from 5 to 6 a.m. before school or work.

He wanted to be holy.

He wanted to be like Christ.

He even tried to stop “cleaning” — his private code word for a bodily act that he, like many teenagers, struggled with. Even before falling in love with Lisa, he had done it almost every day. After returning to church, he managed to stop for three or four months. But his lust—his intense, relentless lust—overpowered his will, and he slipped back into old patterns. Still, he tried.

He grew kinder. Warmer. More generous. His family noticed.

At twenty-one, after tutoring late into the night, he was asked to drive his aunt home. He had ridden his bicycle to save on gas, but didn’t hesitate. His mother had told his aunt, “He’ll take you. He’s a follower of Christ. He’ll do what Christ would do.”

And he did.

Everything he did in those years came from one place: gratitude. Gratitude to Jesus, who had saved his soul. Who had answered the terrifying question that had burned in him since age twelve: Where will I go when I die?

His devotion mirrored the zeal of Van Gogh in his early religious years, after reading The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. Like Van Gogh, he believed salvation came not just through faith but through a life modeled after Christ—poverty, purity, self-denial, service.

He didn’t question then.

He simply believed.

But beneath that belief was a fear so deep it shaped everything: the fear of eternal nothingness, of nonexistence, of being forgotten.

And now, decades later, he could look back and say: Yes, I was a believer. But I was also afraid.


---