To Bindi and Robert Irwin, who have lived such great lives (both the normal and zookeeper kind) following the tragic death of their father. And for Robert specifically, who is scarily attractive, especially with his accent
I have a few questions in reserve for when I run out of things to say when I’m talking to someone.
Unfortunately, none of these questions are good to ask a person you’ve just met… or a person you’ve known for 20 years. They pretty much ruin any kind of burgeoning friendship in the space of about 3 seconds.
Why do I keep asking them? Because I can’t stop myself, and because if someone does respond, it’s bound to be the start of a long and interesting friendship.
One of the unhinged questions is: Would you be able to see a Thestral from Harry Potter? And if so, how? And would you please tell me the entire story in great detail?
(Only the first question matters, but the other two usually slip out when I start asking.)
A Thestral is a magical beast from the Wizarding World of Harry Potter ™ (trying not to get sued) that you can only see if you’ve seen death… If you’ve watched a person pass from life to death right before your eyes.
In Harry Potter, there’s this elite club of kids who can see Thestrals pulling the carriages to Hogwarts because they’ve had traumatic childhoods, and then everyone else who believes the carriages just move on their own because it’s Hogwarts and everything is magical… duh.
Usually, I’m dying to gain membership into elite clubs even if they’re in a completely fictional wizarding world from a book… but the qualifications for this one are a bit sad.
Apparently not sad enough for me to ask every single person I’ve ever met if they would be considered members!
I, Ari Johnson, would not be able to see a Thestral, fortunately and unfortunately, unless there was a death I saw that was not memorable enough.
Despite not seeing death with my own eyes… I’ve been around a CRAP TON of it.
I am a kind of orphan in that all of my grandparents died on me very early in my life..
In this, Harry Potter and I are actually very similar.
I get alot of hate for this take because I guess losing your grandparents is not in any way the same thing as losing parents, but for the love, can you please just let me have this!!
When I was 8, I realized that not only had my friends not been to 5+ funerals… they hadn’t even been to 1.
The reason this came up in conversation was because going to funerals as a child was a weird flex I used to show people how wise I was to be considering death at so young an age.
I actually stand by that behavior because I think there is something tragically dramatic about a young child attending so many funerals..
There was so much death in my childhood that it just seemed like a part of life, and I feel like I never really learned the proper way to respond to it.
This makes me sound as cold as the Arctic, but I have an explanation.
ALL of the funerals I attended as a child were for my grandparents and very old great aunts and uncles, who were in a great deal of pain and misery and very excited to leave this veil of tears.
Because I was the daughter of a 10th child (meaning my grandparents were already nearing the grave when I was born), I didn’t know them that well. So when they passed, I felt sad for their pain, and that they would be missed by people who loved them, but also kind of upset that I wasn’t really alive to know who they were in their prime. So, funeral Ari was sad, reflective, reverent, and excited for funeral potatoes and cake following the service.
Unfortunately, my Grandpa Johnson (or Grandpa JoJo as I sometimes call him) was so completely unknown to me as a person (due to family drama yay!) that I remember using all the force in my body to eek out one single tear at his funeral. Just one. It took 30 minutes and all the energy from my 8-year-old body.
As a child, I just figured that death was inevitable, and while sad, it was also expected and a normal part of life.
Then everything changed.
On September 4th, 2006, Steve Irwin entered the Great Barrier Reef for some documentary filming of the Ocean’s Deadliest and was pierced in the chest by a stingray.
Less than an hour later, the Crocodile Hunter was pronounced dead at 44 years old.
His death rocked mine and my sisters’ world.
My oldest sister, Miah, was 10, I was 8, Ella was 6, and Eden was just 4 years old.
It’s hard to remember how people discovered breaking news back in the 2000s. Nobody had a smartphone, notifications didn’t exist, and we hardly ever had the TV on in the mornings.
I don’t really remember how we found out that Steve Irwin had died that day, only that we did find out. We must have sat down to watch the Animal Planet that afternoon, or perhaps my Dad saw it at work and called home to tell us.
What I do remember is that for the first time in my life, I was very uncomfortable with the idea of death.
I knew that people could be taken from this life before they were old and sick. I had read about the concept in books for years, but it had never been a person I knew, a real person who was living in the same timeline as me.
Of the channels my sisters and I fought over, the Animal Planet was always a top contender. This was tough for me because I never liked animals and still don’t. We’ve never had any sort of connection at all, ever, except wanting the other to die. However, the Animal Planet wasn’t the worst thing ever, and sometimes, even I learned a few things about animals that made them maybe slightly interesting and a little less deadly.
Miah and Ella though really took to the animal kingdom and felt deeply about animals in a way that I still now do not comprehend. Miah LOVED the show The Crocodile Hunter. In the 2000s Steve Irwin and his crocodile friends ruled the Animal Planet and honestly, the world. His show was so good that even I fell in love with him and the deadly beasts. His accent, his love for wildlife and nature, his cute zookeeper family, his fearlessness and courage, his insane obsession with all the deadliest animals, all made us love him and what he did. There was no other show like The Crocodile Hunter on the Animal Planet or any other channel. It was unique and it was wholesome as crap. Even my cold-blooded animal-hating heart couldn’t help but soften just a little bit when he would be cuddling a koala bear at the Australia Zoo.
So, when we discovered that such an animal-loving person had died via animal… we were quite thoroughly devastated. I was shocked, stunned, and confused but I knew that Steve’s death would hurt Miah the most. For most of that day on September 4th, I stayed not too close but nearby, making sure she was coping alright.
The leaves were just starting to fall in Utah, and I remember looking out my bedroom window, watching her sit in a massive pile of leaves for hours as she processed Steve Irwin’s death.
I think we all wanted to show our parents in our own way that we were devastated by the news. While we as a family had been to many funerals and said goodbye to almost all of our grandparents, we had never experienced a death that truly rocked us. Our family was never overly emotional or dramatic. I had only seen my dad cry twice in my life. Once, when he was bitten by a brown recluse spider while fixing the sprinklers, and the other when he discovered his father had died.
So while I didn’t join Miah in her pile of leaves, I still processed my sadness in my own way. I spent a long time sitting on my blue sleeping bag, folded in a perfect square in the corner of my room thinking through everything I was feeling. I was particularly devastated about a few things.
I was devastated to think of his kids hearing the news… Bindi, who was the same age as me and little Robert. I imagined what it must feel like to go to sleep that night, not having a dad anymore. The thought was almost too much for me to even consider at 8 years old, and I said a little prayer for my same-age friend from Australia that she would be able to sleep without nightmares of stingrays.
I was devastated that the best show on the Animal Planet, the only one that made me think positively about animals, would be over forever leaving only the boring shows like Animal Face-Off and Animal Icons… bleh.
And I was devastated, actually more enraged than devastated, at the AUDACITY of that stingray to kill THE Crocodile Hunter instead of having the respect to let a Crocodile take him out.
It was a dark thought for an 8-year-old… but I knew that I would have been less sad if he had been killed by a crocodile, since it at least would have made sense.
It was one of the only really clear days I can remember from being 8. It was the first time I had ever truly considered that people can die in unexpected ways. Perfectly healthy, not very old, and in the prime of life.
Looking back, it was an important experience to have at 8 years old, because the number of deaths like Steve Irwin’s that I experienced only increased after that. Deaths that made no sense, that seemed completely absurd. Deaths that you have a hard time believing are even real.
After turning 9, the number of funerals I attended only increased. But instead of anticipated and expected deaths of very old people, they were funerals for neighbors in perfect health, friends with mental illness, young mothers leaving behind 5 kids, and relatives taken much too early by cancer.
So when I ask: Would you be able to see a Thestral from Harry Potter? What I’m really wondering about is your relationship with death and how it’s evolved since your childhood. I’m wondering how you’re coping now and if you’ve ever had a moment in your life where you were forced to confront the reality that death doesn’t really make any sense.
Because inevitably, your Steve Irwin moment will come and you will have to confront the reality that any one of us could die at any moment without any real reason. You can be afraid of that reality… Or… you could be as brave and good and excited and passionate and committed to living a full life as Steve Irwin was, who said when he held his son Robert for the first time, “It’s like the whole reason you’ve been put on earth… is to do this… or that’s what it seems like.” Or when he said, “I have no fear of losing my life – if I have to save a koala or a crocodile or a kangaroo or a snake, mate, I will save it.” Or maybe it’s just best captured in the famous words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who wrote, “Life is real! Life is earnest! and the grave is not its goal.”
The End