One day when Kenny was in fourth grade a lizard epidemic broke out in South Park. Long story, the crux of which is that it was Mephisto's fault. For a while there were a great deal of flattened bodies glued to the pavement. If one looked closely they could have distinguished who'd run them over by examining the tread marks still indented on the bodies, from the wheels of Craig's skateboard, to the tires of Token's ten-speed bike, to the soles of Cartman's tennis shoes; however, Kenny never looked at them closely. Corpses unnerved Kenny, because he didn't understand death.
Oh, he understood dying. He was very familiar with the cessation of life, the pain-beyond-pain that was the severance of body and soul, the last hallucinations that fire off in the brain before it shuts off permanently. He knew all about the assembly line of the afterlife, and even the resplendence of resurrection.
But Kenny had no idea what real, unwavering death was. He'd never experienced the End, never would; conception had been denied him, and with it one of the most fundamental aspects of being human. He could not empathize with the pain of loss, couldn't cry at funerals when he couldn't comprehend true eradication.
He wanted that. Kenny wanted his humanity.
He went searching for the answer to his question in the dying, wondering what defect set his apart from others. He visited hospitals and homes for the elderly, but all he found were those who were dying from age or illness. It wasn't abrupt, or bloody, or even painful, the way his was.
Kenny picked up a drunk man at a bar one night and drove him out to the hills the cows grazed on. He used an old pocket knife to slice open his jugular in the mud on the hillside and stared at his eyes while he died, but he didn't see anything. He picked up a girl two weeks later, and an forty-something woman after that, and then some boy his age... someone from his graduating class whose name he should have remembered but didn't.
He sat down heavily in the dew as the light faded and wiped his face off, eyes red. When they died he always thought he saw something—the answer, right there and tangible—but it would always evade him when he reached for it. Kenny sat over the area where he'd buried the bodies in shallow graves and puzzled over why he couldn't care about death.
... Kenny began to understand that, in looking for his human affinity, he'd lost it forever.