My Experience with Death and Yayoi Kusama
I was a sick child growing up—not the kind who gets the sniffles and sneezes with their mouth wide open, as if inviting everyone to share in their misery, but the kind who spent a lot of time in the hospital. Halfway through one of my high school years, I was in and out of the hospital, battling a sickness I wasn't sure I would survive.
In three months, I tried eight different antibiotics, had a spinal tap while under ketamine, underwent surgery on my fifteenth birthday, and visited the emergency room more times than I can honestly recall. I grew so thin that doctors began giving me that look—the one they give to the dying, or the one a vet gives to an old dog nearing the end. It was then that I realized: maybe I was going to die.
At fifteen, facing the very real possibility of death, I had a unique experience that I now realize most people don't confront at such a young age. At that time, I remember wondering if I would die, and if I did, what I’d want to happen. I thought about leaving my DS games to my sister, and I hoped my cat would see my lifeless body before they buried me, so she’d know I was gone. But I made it to sixteen, then seventeen, and now twenty-three. Although my physical health has recovered, the mental weight of those early years has never left me. The experience of survival, while unique in some ways and simply about endurance in others, has left me contemplating death more often than I probably should.
That’s why I have a special place in my heart for the work of Yayoi Kusama. Her pieces tackle existence with the same kind of fever I’m familiar with.
Kusama has spent most of her life in a psychiatric hospital since the 1970s. She struggles with anxiety and hallucinations, which she manages with medication and an obsessive commitment to her art. That obsession shows in her work, especially in the repetition and replication of polka dots, using vibrant colors to create sculptures and paintings that are visually arresting and deeply evocative.
Kusama, Yayoi. Death of A Nerve. 1976.
One of her most striking pieces is Death of a Nerve, which consists of one hundred meters of stuffed fabric painted with black polka dots and hanging from various points. It’s large, imposing, and tangled. Where the piece ends or begins is unclear, but if you look closely, you can see “Yayoi Kusama” etched into the side of one of the fabric tubes.
Death of a Nerve is about the never-ending cycle of life. The piece suggests that in death, we don’t find an end, but rather a kind of unity in the afterlife. Life and death, for Kusama, are part of an ongoing process of rebirth. Death, in her view, is a constant loop of renewal. And while that idea can be terrifying, it’s also something we all share. But does accepting death make it any less scary?
In Manuel Domínguez Sánchez’s The Death of Seneca, Seneca accepts his fate with stoic calm, more on that piece here. For him, acceptance of death equals freedom. But for Kusama, acceptance seems more like continuation. There’s no liberation from death—only a cycle that keeps going. So, are we trapped in the life-death cycle, or are we freed by its inevitability?
Life’s fragility finds permanence in art, as art transcends the limits of time. Fear is an unavoidable part of the human experience, and the sooner we learn to accept all aspects of life—both the good and the bad—the sooner we can shape our lives into the ones we truly want to live. Kusama’s art blurs the line between obsession and creation, with her dots endlessly swirling, never resting. This relentless repetition reminds us that even within these infinite loops, we can find meaning and even beauty.
