Death was always there.

I had been wanting to write about this for a long time. I had never put these ideas into words, but today I decided to do so.

My relationship with death has been, to say the least, peculiar.

At no point during my childhood did I come face-to-face with death. No family member or friend passed away. Yet, there was someone who lived with it every day: my dad.

I will never know if he suffered from depression or was simply a deeply tormented soul. For as long as I can remember, he constantly reminded me that one day we would die. The fear of non-existence has been a part of my life since I was very young.

I remember walking into a room when I was barely five or six years old and seeing my dad lying on the floor. He looked unconscious. I would call out to him, shake him, and touch his arms, but he wouldn't react. I would feel a heavy thud in my chest and start to tremble, imagining that he had actually died. After a few minutes, he would simply get up and ask me what I would do—being so small—if he were to die one day. Today, I understand that perhaps it was his way of preparing me. Back then, for me, it was sheer terror.

That anxiety haunted me throughout my childhood.

My dad had a paralyzing fear of death, and in his own strange way, he always tried to instill that same fear in me. If we went to the beach, the first thing he’d say was that I could drown. If I traveled to another city to visit my aunts and uncles, he’d mention that I could die in a car accident. If I played sports, he’d warn that a bad blow could kill me. To him, every possible path ended in death.

From a young age, I lived in a town considered a "red zone"—a high-crime area. It was normal to hear gunshots once or twice a week, and every now and then, rumors would circulate that someone had been killed. Almost every week, a new story would emerge about someone being shot to death. The period between 2014 and 2016 in Venezuela was, without a doubt, the hardest time of my life. When I reached what we call diversificado in Venezuela—the two years of high school prior to university—my proximity to death grew even greater. Many friends and acquaintances were lured by easy money and ended up joining the criminal gangs that controlled our neighborhoods. It was shocking how quickly someone could turn into a thug. In just a couple of years, I witnessed the deaths of so many classmates. They weren't close friends, but I saw them every day. I knew their faces.