I am known and admit to being a bit too emotional. Up and down, depending on what I’m thinking about. Sometimes, life seems so damn wonderful, to be here doing this along with everyone else and everything around me. Given the knowledge we have of our universe, I’d say being here and doing this is nothing to take for granted.
Other days, everything seems so pointless and futile. Nothing holds the luster it had before, nobody matters, nothing seems worth my time (except sleep, something I will always adore). These times are remedied by remembering the former, but are never completely healed. The bitterness of mortality, limitations, and a lack of understanding is impossible for me to ignore.
The people I care about and that care about me only live a short moment in a time-span of phenomenal duration. I’m only going to be here another 50 years or so. The finality of death is something I fear intensely, primarily because I/we don’t know if there’s anything else other than life. Expect the worst and hope for the best.
While I can certainly think of a few ways I wouldn’t want to die, I’m not afraid of death itself. I tend to agree with Second Guest’s view that it will be welcome rest after a long and tiring life.
Not afraid, at times in my life even hoped for it. Having had several relatives who died slow, painful, agonizing deaths I honestly fear that more than death. In a morbid sort of way my family almost considers sudden deaths good luck.
In many traditions, death appears to one who is about to die. The apparition differs from culture to culture, but I am MOST apprehensive about the western one…you know, the skeletal guy with the black cowl and scyth…creeps me out! Supposedly, you can never escape this guy…all attempts are futile (as we jknow).
Would YOU LIKE to have a visit from death, or prefer that it all happen in a flash?
I have seen a lot of dead people, and they carry some sort of information to you that your conscious mind wants to repress. There is something about standing next to a dead body that isn’t your relative, isn’t your friend, isn’t somebody you know of, who hasn’t been made pretty by a funeral home: you find yourself absorbing something on a level you can’t prevent and don’t like. Not just me, but all the police officers, forensic techs, medical students, and lawyers who come to see an autopsy, have felt this.
Over time the experience changes. You start getting a sort of pre-verbal, deep comprehension from looking at dead people. What you comprehend is that this isn’t optional. What you comprehend is that you are an animal. You may be more than an animal, I’m not arguing that. But your body is an animal’s body. Your organs are kin to animal organs. Your muscles are steak on the hoof. Your life is temporary.
After the three hundredth or so body, you start picking up a different set of messages, which can be summarized as “Don’t do this.” If you want to live out your possible years, don’t fight over women when you’re drunk. Don’t buy and sell drugs in bad areas. Don’t get fat and unathletic and then take Tums when you feel a disquieting pain beneath your breastbone.
I started thinking a few years ago that the course of an animal or human life was a lot like having a great pitcher throw a softball into the air. Babyhood is when the softball leaves the hand. Eighteen is halfway up the steep arc, when it feels as if you could live forever, and you don’t see why you shouldn’t be immortal (as if the softball could achieve orbit). At thirty-five or forty, you feel, not death, but the slowing of the softball. You appreciate that you are at the top of the natural arc. You realize it’s going to turn into a descent. That at the end of the descent, there will be a crash, no matter what you do. That the pause at the top of the arc, and the descent, and the crash, are implicit in the moment of the throw. If you’ve been a baby then you are going to be a corpse someday. The only question is when.
I don’t want to die. But I will.
I’ve often wished, in fact prayed, for death. It worries my doctor, but all my life I’ve felt that this one wasn’t much fun, let’s cash in the chips and move on to another table. I’ve known people who’ve gone fast, and people who’ve gone slow, and although fast seems the easiest way, there’s no doubt that my father found value in that last year, stoically dying of lung cancer and growing more dependant on his family. And also no doubt that helping to care for my father, being at his bedside when he died, made me a stronger person. Whatever way death comes, I’ll be ready and waiting.
StG