Now I Am the Circle

Joystick to graveside—how we brace for the inevitable.

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I’ve always been a worrier.

As a kid I was good at soccer and baseball, but if worrying had been a sport I would have made the Olympic team.

I stressed and suffered over all the standard-issue phobias: fitting in, standing out, making friends, monsters under the bed, and my parents getting divorced. But I saved most of my fretting energy for the “Big D”—Death.

My favorite pastime was staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night, wondering when my time would come. It was an irrational exercise—completely divorced from reality—but that didn’t make it any less terrifying.

To self-soothe, I’d burrow deep under the covers and think of Star Castle.

Star Castle was a knockoff, one of dozens of D-list space-themed arcade games that followed the success of Asteroids. There were plenty of others to choose from: Space Fortress, Cosmic Barrier, Meteor Zone, Alien Bastards—I might be misremembering that last one—but Star Castle stuck with me. Not because it was better, but because it gave me a structure. A logic. A defense system.

You were a tiny ship, tucked inside three concentric rings. The rings weren’t just barriers—they were protection. They shielded you from aliens at the edges of the screen, relentlessly firing, trying to punch holes through each layer. The more rings you had intact, the safer you felt. But once they were gone, you were exposed—just a blinking triangle in open space, one false move from destruction.

The “colors” were fake, by the way—just a circular cellophane sticker slapped onto the screen. A low-budget illusion to distract you from the otherwise Pong-like graphics.

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Everyone has their theory about death. Even 8-year-olds.

The only problem with an 8-year-old’s theory of death is that it’s an 8-year-old’s theory of death.

Mine went like this:

My parents were closest—the inner ring. My grandparents were next—less present, less visible, but still a solid bulwark against The Reaper. On the outer edges were my great-grandparents. I barely knew them, but they counted. They were out there. They’d still take the first hits.

As long as all the circles stayed in place, I figured I was good.

But life isn’t a video game.

Certainly not one from the ’80s, with hard-coded rules that never changed.

If you got hit, you lost a life. If you stayed within the rings, you were safe. There were no glitches. No surprises.

For a while, it felt like life’s rules were similarly fixed. First, my paternal great-grandmother passed away. Then my maternal great-grandfather. Outer ring casualties. It hurt, but not in a structural way. The system held.

A mere flesh wound to my cosmic existence.

I still had two full inner rings—parents and grandparents—and even a few scraps of the outer one: my great-grandmother, and her sister, my great-aunt. Or great-great aunt? Whatever. At that age, I wasn’t asking for ID. Every relative between me and Death counted.

Then the rules changed.

My dad died.

Before his own parents.

Even before my great-grandmother and her sister, the aforementioned great, or possibly great-great aunt.

Turns out, The Reaper didn’t care about my rings.

He just stepped over them.

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Time passed. The rings thinned.

My great-grandmother eventually passed. Then her sister. Then, slowly, my grandparents. And my mom.

I even lost a cousin or two along the way. Not to death, but to jail or marriage—in some cases, indistinguishable.

One by one, the outer circles dissolved. Yet I barely noticed. Life kept going, distractions multiplied, and the concept of safety started to feel more theoretical than urgent.

Very soon, just past where a grid of tract housing gives up trying—in a place called Sylmar, where the San Fernando Valley’s suburban logic breaks down—one last broken arc of my circles will be laid to rest.

The cardinal sin of the elegist is making it more about you than them. But this isn’t an elegy. That will come at the burial, a mountain of tissues at the ready, for my grandmother—who passed away this week.

When we gather at her graveside, I’ll see the sisters, the brothers, and the cousins—oh, so many cousins. Some with strollers. Some with toddlers. Some with teenagers.

All of us, now the outer circles.

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