I close my eyes, then I open my eyes. It’s worked that way since the day I was born, and if the time comes when my eyes don’t open I won’t be there to notice it.
I’m going to live forever until the day I die.
I’m 55 and I’m still pretty happy/healthy/etc. I’m all about quality over quantity, so I’d be surprised to last another decade, but I’m totally cool with that.
Are you my long-lost twin?
The first fleeting memory I have of life is like a light turning on in complete darkness. The sky is grey, and something cold is falling on my face, though I had no words for all this then. I am convinced that death will be like the light turning off. I don’t fear it, but I fear and mourn the loss of those I’ve loved and love.
For now, life is a damn miracle, and I would rather be aware of all this wonder than the alternative…
When I was younger and lost my religious beliefs, I lived in fear for a few years. Then I read Camus’s The Plague, and I found his views reassuring: the swimming scene of the main character, Rieux, and his friend was particularly meaningful to me. In the midst of suffering, pain, death, there is some happiness in accepting the limits of life and choosing to live our lives as well, fully and as freely as we can. Friendship, harmony, peace are values we share with our human brothers/sisters and that are a source of happiness. I would add that though our lives are but passing shadows, to paraphrase some guy, we can leave traces of our existence by adding our little bit for those who follow us, be it through our children, our search for knowledge or works of creativity. We all live and build on the wonders others have wrought,
But perhaps over the years, I’ve stretched his meaning until it was unrecognizable and became my own.
Frankly, the idea of immortality has always freaked me out considerably more than the idea of death. Not getting into religious aspects, even as a child, I remember seeing movies and stories with immortal characters and it was profoundly disturbing to consider the thought. The idea of seeing everyone around me die, seeing the world change drastically over centuries and millenia. I’d wonder about the point when my past has become so long that it becomes myth even in my own mind. Really, life is a story, and stories need to end.
Admittedly, I can understand why people have a fear of death, though I don’t share it. The only fears I have about death are leaving certain things undone and dying in a horrible way. Though I do have my beliefs about what happens when we die, as everyone does, short of being horribly wrong, even most of the alternatives I don’t believe in don’t seem all that bad. If I simply cease to exist, I’d imagine it would just be very much like going into a dreamless sleep from which I’ll never awaken. That’s about the least scary thing I can imagine. Or if there’s some sort of afterlife or reincarnation, it’s a whole new story, so maybe the context of eternity is different then.
To me, the idea of fearing death, regardless of what one believes or not, is really just a fear of leaving things incomplete. Sure, it’s always sad to end friendships or for loved ones to die, but they’re so much sadder if aspects feel incomplete. That is, we have an easy time accepting an older loved one dying, who has contributed, lived a long and fulfilling life, in a “it’s his time” sort of way. But when someone young dies, or someone with untapped potentially, I always feel more robbed. Even for just ending relationships, I feel much the same, hardly sad at all at ending one that has run it’s course. So, really, that fear of death should drive us to make the most of our lives while we’re here.
I used to help people take baths and wipe their butts. It’s surprising how well almost all of them coped almost all the time. Even those whose minds were not all there still had a full quality-of-life spectrum, good days and bad days, joy and sorrow.
They made movie heroes look as shallow as they really are: They had had something unimaginably heavy laid on them and they just kept on, without much complaining or posturing.
It’s weird, you can’t wash or feed yourself, you’ll never see the outside of this building, and you are (with justice) really upset because it’s franks and beans again tonight.
Winding up like that in my end days used to be my greatest fear, too. Now, not so much.
After spending a lot of time talking with my grandmother, father, before they passed away and now my mother, and hearing the stories about how they felt about dying. My grandmother knew her time was near when she saw my grandfather waiting for her, according to my dad and my sister her last words where “Bill I’m coming” then she breathed her last. My dad started to make ammends and asking for forgiveness for his treatment of us kids when he had been drinking. 2 weeks before he died he had spent the day with almost all of us when he said that he “Wanted to go home”, everyone exept me thought he wanted to go back to Connecticut. I got chills down my spine because I knew that was not the home he was talking about, he wanted to go to his Heavenly home. My mom has already has seen her dead mother and she is tired of living, she is 83 and on heart hospice, she is looking foward to dying.
As for myself when it’s my time to go, it’s my time to go, I will go with open arms. I am a very spirtual person and I’ve read a lot of books on death and dying. I want an “Irish Wake” like my grandmother’s, a burial mass like my father’s, and my ashes dumped in the ocean like my mom, maybe donate my body to science like my mom too. I will leave some of my ashes in a small urn for my son if he wants them.
Denial, really. Thinking about death freaked me out as a teenager. Eventually I realized that my thinking just went in circles, and made no forward progress, and therefore was useless. Since then I don’t think about it much, and for the most part it doesn’t bother me, but occasionally I’m reminded of how I felt then, and I get chills. Anyway, every moment I waste on thinking about that stuff is a moment I’m not doing something more entertaining.
Beer.
Cheers!
I have a sign posted downstairs (in what my gf calls my “man cave”) that consists of nicely hand painted MODERATION. That way I can tell people that I drink in moderation.
I don’t really have much time to think about my own mortality. I’m too busy living life!
Grew up during the Zep Rules era. Heaven didn’t want me, Hell thought I’d take over, and I would be reincarnated as Lee Harvey Oswald doomed to eternally publish a spy novel revealing that JFK was having sex with my wife while I was forced to have sex with Kruschev
Our death sentences weren’t very interesting back then.