It's time I was honest with all my fans and the people around me. I haven't wanted to out myself, I knew in my heart it would be bad business, but sometimes truth requires us to have the courage to admit the worst of our shortcomings.
I am dead.It's true, I know people around me will say, "I can't believe this. She seemed so alive every day."
Well, it's easy to live a double life when you can't face the shame in people's eyes, or worse, the pity, if they think you're actually dead.
I haven't told my family yet, instead I choose the anonymity of my blog to tell the millions out there my best-kept secret.
How did I die, you ask? It was a car accident, a rainy night, I don't remember much, blinding headlights and then an absolute peace (the white light story is completely true, by the way. I have died and experienced it). Forgive me while I wipe the tears from my keyboard. Even now, ten years later, I still have trouble admitting the truth of that one fateful event that led to my downhill spiral.
I don't know how I'll tell the kids. I don't know if they'll accept me as a dead person, but if they hear the rumors on the street, or if they see a picture of me on the Today show, with the caption: ROMANCE AUTHOR ACTUALLY DEAD -- well, I couldn't bear that they wouldn't hear from my first. As for my husband, my darling necrophiliac husband, I'm sorry. I don't know if you'll still love me if I'm dead; you'll want to move on to someone who's living and breathing -- sob -- and I understand that, but it doesn't diminish the hell that I will live through -- watching the world go through the daily motions and knowing that I'm watching from behind my glass lenses of death. It seems so unfair -- so effing unfair. But I know I have to go on. I have to exist in that half-existance of the netherworld, cursed by own hellish weaknesses -- and an unused seatbelt.
If you're a dead person, I invite you all to share your stories. Let me know that you've overcome death as well. People say death is an illness, well, screw that, death is a permanent way of being. Once you've cut the white line of death, that's all she wrote. It's an uphill struggle to beat death, but it can be done. With courage, a little bit of stupidity, and luck.
I know because I've done it and lived to tell the tale.
-- an excerpt from the upcoming memoirs of Kathleen O'Reilly: "OVERCOMING DEATH: LIVING EACH DAY AS IF YOU'RE ALIVE"
