Right now, I’m flying to Hawaii to visit my sister, because I began to worry if something happened to her, we’d never see each other again. But lately I’ve realized something could happen to me.

On the playground of unnecessary thought, my monkey mind likes to dig in the sandbox of regrets and anxieties, then climb the jungle gym of what-ifs and if-thens, and I have often performed the same part over and over in the orchestra of fret or the theater of insomnia. So yes, I have feared my own death, usually by fiery crash or cancer, and have worried about losing loved ones, especially my husband (age 71) or my daughter hiking mountains in Switzerland.

Yet it wasn’t until seeing Bernstein’s opera Candide that I swallowed a shot of reality: Holy shit, someday I’ll cease to exist! Now in Candide, you may know, characters indubitably murdered often reappear miraculously alive, so I’m not sure what gave me the flash in row J seat 114 at the Cobb Performing Arts Center, March 12. Don’t we all wonder how—when tragedy slams into our lives—cherry trees can still wow us with candy-pink flowers and thrashers can still thrash in leaves? Well, this nanosecond vision was not of my life replaying, but of life going forward for everyone but me: the opera performing Tosca, the neighbor’s Maltese fussing at a German Shephard.

And oh, my husband, getting by somehow, drinking coffee at 6 a.m.

It was also the fear of my brain stopping. Ms. Monkey, pondering this later, tried logic to reassure me: If I don’t recall anything before I was born—including anything bad (despite epochs happening)—then death must be a big okay nothing, like those hours we’re asleep and don’t know it until we wake and the clock astounds us. Or maybe death really will be filled with the glorious peace of no-thought I often seek. That would be my El Dorado!

What quiets the symphony of dread in my simian head is recalling a recurring, but reassuring nightmare: an imminent plane crash, nose hurtling down (everyone screaming and praying), from which we all recover by walking off the jet, which was, after all, able to land, gentle as a dragonfly, in the middle of a plowed field.