Here it is:
“If there is no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do. Because that’s all there is. What we do, now, today. . . . All I want to do is help. I want to help because I don’t think people should suffer as they do. Because, if there is no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world.”
(I love that quote, Jodi!)
I had a moment actually fairly recently, where I suddenly “got” that I won’t ever know the answers to most of the Big Questions. I won’t ever know, for example, what The Future has to say about George W. Bush’s presidency. I won’t ever know what the long-term effects of global warming are. I won’t ever know if the Cubs win another World Series. 
That’s just weird. I mean, I’m used to not knowing stuff, but I’m used to finding out the answers with more time and more information and effort. But the idea that I’ll never *ever *know the answers to most of this world is just…weird.
I started having similar awareness/fears of my own mortality moments with my second pregnancy, when I was 31. Strangely enough, I had fear around my husband’s mortality a few years earlier. I was fine with the notion of MY death, but the sudden “got it” knowledge that he is going to die was much more painful.
Hmm… The only “fear” of death I’ve ever had was that somehow, by dying, I’ll be letting down my family. I don’t recall ever being afraid of “what comes after”. The infinite universe has freaked me out since I was 6 or so, but death is fine. Dying, on the other hand, scares me.
**JUST THINK
Just think! Some night the stars will gleam
Upon a cold, gray stone,
And trace a name with silver beam,
And lo, 'twill be your own.
The night is speeding on to greet
Your epigraphic rhyme.
Your life is but a little beat
Within the heart of time.
A little gain, a little pain,
A laugh lest you ma moan,
A little blame, a little fame,
A star gleam on a stone.
-Robert W. Service**
Happy dreams.
Agreed. I sat with a friend who had terminal cancer. He was a mountain climber who kept himself in shape to go climb the Andes on a moment’s notice.
I noted that he started keeping a weight chart. At the beginning he came in at about 190 lb. When he stopped keeping the chart the last entry was down around 130.
You just hit on my one, secret, dark, never let anyone know, oh my god,I can’t sleep fear!
It literally plagues me some nights. The idea of eternal existence in any form is a terrifying concept for me.
Yes, it meets the definition of “coincidence”, and I’m well aware of the fallacy of confirmatin bias, and this wasn’t it. On the other hand, I know I would remember any other instances of being sure I myself would die, and there haven’t been any. Take that as you will.
As an aside, I’m curious–can you prove that you experience these things you call “dreams”?
This gets to me too, but I find an odd comfort in the fact that I won’t know I’m dead. I mean, if I’m dead–I don’t know what I’m missing, so none of it will matter.
Well, it sounds better in my head.
I regret that I’ll (now) never see Haley’s comet (it was cloudy the one night I tried) and other things like that. But what disturbs me most is the not knowing when it is coming. Then again, would anyone want to know their death date?
Lovely poetry upthread.
Oh, heavens, I see I wasn’t clear. In 2061 I’ll be 99. Doubt haley’s comet will be on my mind. What I meant was that it worries me to not know the timing of my death.
(or did I just get whooshed?)
Yes, I knew what you meant. But the way you wrote it, I couldn’t resist…
Phew! I thought early Alzeimer’s had kicked in!
A year ago this week, I had my gallbladder out. When you are put under, it’s different that going to sleep. You don’t drift off slowly, and you don’t dream. One second you’re lying in the surgery and the next you’re opening your eyes in recovery or your room with no knowledge or memory of what happened between.
I have muscular dystrophy, and as a result, my breathing is somewhat compromised. I’d tried to make that clear to the anesthesiologist beforehand, mentioning that I sleep with a bi-pap because I can’t get enough air when I lie down. I assumed I’d be entubated, but instead they just used a bi-pap on me during the surgery. As a result, I didn’t get enough oxygen, and it threw my pH out of wack. I’m no doctor, I don’t really know what that all means, but I was told that, at a certain pH level, your body’s cellular function ceases and you die, and I came very close to that level.
To this day, it kinda freaks me out to think that I could have died and not known it. I mean, I was already in blackness, and if I’d died, that’s it, I wouldn’t have come out.
Yet I suppose that, if you’ve just got to die, that’s probably the best way to go.
I’m not afraid of nothingness for myself, but when I think that I’ll never see my friends and family who’ve gone before, it makes me sad.
I’d like there to be an afterlife. I really really want to see loved ones again. But just because I want it, doesn’t mean it’ll happen. That’s a bummer, but that’s also the nature of life - wishing doesn’t make it so.
I don’t know how terrible it would be to die a slow, lingering death. But I’m pretty sure that’s how I’m going to face it. And the thought of it really doesn’t bother me.
But what I don’t want to face is a sudden death that I can forsee for all of maybe two or three seconds. It’s the sudden realization of “Well, that’s it. I’m out of here. I finally get to go on that long wished for date with Heather Locklear this afternoon, and I just won the lottery, and life was really looking up for me. And now I’ve got this damned bullet heading my way.”
That scares the shit out of me.
I try not to think about it much.
Isn’t that creepy? I’ve had one surgery, and I almost felt guilty about the anesthesia. It was almost like… I should have been able to account for that lost time.
I once had reason to believe that I was going to die within a matter of minutes. The only thing I was really thinking was that it was impossible, impossible and so unfair. I just couldn’t wrap my head around the not-rightness of my personal death, but I kept trying.
Then I didn’t die, but I can still call up that sense of utter bewilderment any time I think of myself having to die.
I don’t really feel afraid of death. I’m definitely not interested in just about all the events that immediately lead to death, but the whole ‘not being’ thing doesn’t really scare me. It’s more like annoyance. I have so much I want to do, I can’t die yet, this sucks.
Besides, I’m going to die until I finish painting all my minis.
Happens to me all the time. Well, once a week on average. I think it gets worse as you get older (and I have a heart condition which maybe makes me more aware of my inevitable demise.).
Perhaps one day you stop caring - I don’t know. My Dad says it still happens to him and he’s nearly eighty.
Philip Larkin’s greatest (and nearly last) poem Aubade is about that feeling. He wrote it and then set about drinking and smoking himself to death. Go figure. His last words were “I am going to the inevitable”.
I’ve been put under three times. The first time was just as you mentioned, and it freaked me out, too. The second time, I actually did dream. In fact, I remember telling the nurse that while I was in recovery, because it really mattered to me that it happened. Third time was the same as the first, but it didn’t bother me as much.
I try to keep it in perspective that when I die I just won’t know anything more. I hate the idea of nothingness, of not being, but at least when it happens I won’t be able to hate it.
