My home refrigerator contains several berries to promote a healthy lifestyle, a birthday cake to celebrate the coming of a new age, and some water to replenish my dad after a couple of hours in the blazing hot sun while he makes produce for my family in his small yard garden. The items occupying the shelves in my fridge have changed over the eighteen years that I’ve lived there, but somehow I always failed to notice the one item that sat lonely on a shelf, experiencing more lifetime than my eyes have seen to this day. It sits as a sublime presence in the corner of the fridge, serving as a constant reminder to my family the arduous mission it failed to complete. That daunting object is an unopened bottle of 200g Progesterone pills, and because of it, the cake sitting in the fridge contains one extra slice than nature intended, and an opening of the fridge for a delicious dinner comes a constant reminder that my mother is cooking for four servings instead of the intended five. The unopened bottle presents a perpetual aide-mémoire that my unborn family member could not be saved; she traveled into the arctic hands of death instead of taking the pill’s gateway into my mother’s warm, open arms.

Somehow, the ominous pills did not meet my inquiry until I was sixteen years old. When I finally pestered my mother as to their purpose, she instantly broke down into tears and the strong woman than I know collapsed before my eyes. In between her gasps to regain her breath, she informed me that I had a twin; a twin who never made it out of the womb. The pills came too late to save her. My mom presented me with ultrasound pictures—one baby labeled as “A” and the other as “B.” Though they had only been swimming around in life for a little over a month, the qualities of life were evident by juxtaposing the white background and the definite, black bodies that appeared in the ultrasound. The two fetuses were indistinguishable from each other. The only way to tell them apart was by the labeling, yet my mind could not postulate how I—then only known as “Baby B”—could have developed into the complex human that I present now as a freshman in college where as the other decomposed into simple molecules that never saw the light of day. It all seemed like a cruel, sick gambling game with 50/50 odds that ended so appallingly for one and propitious for the other.

The flip of the coin started when my mom knew her hormone levels were too low to sustain two children, so she pleaded with doctors to give her the necessary medication. By not giving my mother the medication in time and handling the prescription with a mundane routine, the bottle of medicine came too late; “Baby A” already perished into the hands of death. Despite their failed purpose, my mother kept the bottle of pills inside our fridge as a memoir to the notion of my twin and what could have been. It seemed so absurd that a bottle of unnatural, synthesized chemicals produced in a lab could be the influencing factor as to whether the baby was headed down the path of mortality or life. Several questions kept bothering me; why did the pills have to come too late? Why did the crude gambling game result in Baby A’s loss instead of mine? The unpretentious answer my mom bequeathed to me was simple and straight forward: God meant it to be that way (my mom was innately religious and she held a dogma that “everything happens for a reason.”). Being not of religious nature, I started searching for an explanation that would better explain why some creature would be created and promptly destroyed in such a manner.

Through my search to find a satisfactory purpose to life, I could not find an explanation except for creating the notion that death is a personified creature that is ready to prey on its most available victim. In my senior year AP literature class, I encountered John Donne’s poem “Death, be not Proud” and it began to comfort the arduous enlightenment that I previously reached about the personified Death. I found refuge in the idea that Death, something that conquers all, can likewise be conquered itself through accepting the fact everyone will one day parish into the unknown land where Death plays king and the dead become his puppets. The key is finding out how to conquer death and be ready to die at any moment. This notion is not as grim as it sounds. Leonardo Da Vinci once stated, “While I thought I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.” Da Vinci alludes to the idea that life and death come hand in hand; in order to live one also has to die, and one cannot partake in the action of dying without having lived first. The words are defined and thereby come into existence solely because of their opposites; there would be no “warm” without “cold,” just as how there would be no “life” without being able to juxtapose it to “death.” In other words, one has to learn how to live in order to learn how to die, which begs the question: how does one live the proper life? How does one make their life worth living? Thus, my quest to surmount profound philosophical questions began.

The search for the answers to these philosophical conundrums brought me into the midst of a little red book titled The Big Questions: A Short Introduction to Philosophy. Reading its text instantly brought me into a world of critical thinking unlike I ever experienced before; I became exposed to the ideas of utilitarianism, determinism, and the different viewpoints on the mind-body divide. I found a friend in several philosophers that were trying to conquer the same philosophical enigmas that continued to perplex my mind after learning about my twin who passed on into another world before she was born.

One philosopher I especially related to was Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche created brilliant concepts that he introduced to the world about living and, therefore, dying. He presented the world with the famous quotation “God is dead,” which was not meant to be a cynical statement. Instead, the quote employs the notion that people can no longer rely on God to bequeath them an objective, definite meaning of life. Nietzsche argues that there is no innate, intrinsic meaning to life (an idea some call nihilism). The meaning of life, therefore, is subjective and people are given carte blanche to invent their own meaning and carry out life as they please. However, one still has to live their life with core morals and values. Nietzsche commends these people who are able to rise above society and become superhuman, also known as Übermensch. He states that the ultimate goal is to become one of these super beings, for the serve as role models to society because they have found a definition for their life instead of following the crowd. I also discovered the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre who defends Nietzsche’s ideas by stating that “existence precedes essence.” Man is born out of the clay, creates himself, and then defines himself. It is this definition that one bases their life upon, and if they can live that definition out, they are truly living and ready to pass on into the outer world.

I then spent a long while trying to figure out what my meaning of life is, and I am still trying to figure it out to this day. I have thus far figured out two things about life: one is that I should live my life to the fullest because I never know when it will be taken from underneath my grasps; the other that I know I am living my life for a purpose. I am living my life for my twin. Since I won the atrocious lottery of life, I want to make sure my life does not go to waste and that I am someday able to leave my mark on the world and accomplish something. Again, the role of opposites is coming into play to form definitions. My life is beginning to derive its meaning from the event of my twin’s death that all started when the bottle of pills arrived a little too late. The pills inaugurated my quest that lead to the discovery of the death in my life, which ultimately helped me discover the meaning to my own life. In other words, John Donne was correct; Death should be not proud. Ultimately, Death failed his task at taking my twin’s life. Physically he succeeded, but metaphorically she is able to live on through the way I define my life and bring meaning to it. She lives on as my person Übermensch.

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