I was in my teens when i read a quote from Nasser that went something like, Until you have built your tomb , you can’t really live… I had no idea what that was about but began to think about it. I figured out that it was his way of saying that life is really short, It left me with a sense of urgency about getting out and doing things, letting people know that i love them, and trying to help where and when i can.
It’s a good thing to know that there is a clock running. It still motivates me.
This reminds me, the Issac Asimov book The Last Question scared the everloving sh*t out of me.
I can’t remember not knowing that I would die someday, and I’ve known people who’ve died in the past, but when my friend Cristi (Persephone) died earlier this year I think it gave me a new perspective. Because she was the first friend I’ve ever had die. Her death was so shocking to me I think that it added a new level of understanding that I hadn’t previously had, that life can end suddenly, doing something ordinary, safe in your own home and there’s no way to predict it. Right now, I feel perfectly safe. Based on past results, I’ll feel perfectly safe tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the day after that, and it’s easy to assume that I’ll live a long life and die in a bed somewhere, wrinkled and gray. But I assume Cristi felt the same way, and now she’s gone. Who can say what will happen tomorrow?
The uncertainty of it all scares the hell out of me.
I couldn’t tell when it hit, but I’ve been quite early familiar with the concept of death.
I’ve been brought up by my grandmother. She was past 70, and in a poorer health with each year passing. During most of my childhood, I was affraid she would die soon (she did when I was 13).
Besides, the little village where I was living and where I knew everybody was mostly populated by old people. Several times a year, the knell was sounded, announcing the death of someone I knew fairly well. I also had a large number of great uncles and aunts, and saw them passing away one by one.
So, though I was accustomed to death early on, I can’t remember when the idea entered my mind for the first time. I was 5 y.o. for the first funerals I remember attending. Since I don’t have that many memories from this age, and remember it, maybe it was the first time it struck me.
>Of course, not having died yet, I actually can’t be entirely sure that I will…
So, the one thing we’re all certain is part of our lives, none of us has done.
Exactly. White light stories aside, I have not spoken with anyone who has come back to tell about what it’s like.
IMHO, it’s when you lose those close to you, and have health troubles of your own, that the idea of death becomes not only a certainty, but is quite final–and much less abstract.
That said, people live on in many ways.
When my husband killed himself I realised how odd life was. Some fight to hold on when it seems they have nothing left to live for. Some fight to die when it seems like they have so much to live for.
None of it makes sense.
I secondwhat clairobscur said: I had much older parents (when I was born, my mother was 42, my father 66), and I honestly can’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of mortality. My mother having been a very high-strung worry-wart probably contributed to this too.
Aware in the sense that I knew, 1) Everybody (including me) would die eventually; and 2) Anyone can be alive and well today and dead tomorrow.
As for dating it, it would be a little like asking me at what age I first started to understand words: I was so young when it happened that I can’t pinpoint it.
I was conscious of my mortality from an early age…my older brother died in infancy…I always wonderd what kind of man he would have been.
Anyway, I am not planning on dying…I’m hoping that the celebrated “coldsleep” will be ready for me, when I draw my last breath.
I plan to emerge sometine in the 25th century…and I will have a great time regaling the people I meet with stories about the goodold days!
I guess I realised sometime before I was 10, and it caused paralysing fear to engulf me at night from time to time in my teens. The idea that I would cease to be was unbarable, and I was terrified by it.
What took me longer to realise and accept was that all my acquaintances, all those background people in the scenery of my life, they were all going to die too. I was nearly 19 when this blinding realisation hit me, following the death of a former classmate in a car accident. I hadn’t seen her in years, hadn’t thought of her in years, but she’d been getting on with her life just like I was getting on with mine, and then her car ran off the road and she was dead, and I was looking at her name in the paper in disbelief. Don’t know which was more shocking… the concept that she’d continued to live after I’d forgotten her, or that she’d died.
Then I got an attack of The Guilts. I hadn’t always been as nice to her as I should have been in school because I didn’t think she was very bright, and I had no time for people who I thought were dumb. I wondered - if I had known that she only had four years to live, would I have been kinder? I told myself “Yes”, but I honestly think “No”, because the idea that she would die was still a foreign concept to me at that point. I couldn’t appreciate then the way I would feel once her death was a fair accompli. I began to feel a great deal of remorse and anguish over the way I’d treated others, and the idea that I might not get a chance to apologise to them before they died, and I think that was a major turning point in my life. Now, I have taken the opportunity to make amends, and I feel as if I learnt a valuable lesson with my only regret being that I never had the chance to apologise to Suzanne before she died. It will be nine years in December since she died, but I do still remember her and the hard lesson I learnt at her expense.
I don’t know when I first realised that I would die some day, but it was pretty early on. What I do remember very vividly is the day I was in a bad car crash and thought I was just about to die right then - my car was being violently propelled into the oncoming traffic, specificly a 4WD.
I’m so sorry for your loss. Talking about it will help, a little. I understand. My son died 4 years ago, and I know I will never be the same.
A few months ago, apparently triggered by my friend’s dad’s death. It tends to hit me more in the summer when I’m not working as much and have more time on my hands.
You have just provided us with an iron-clad, boiler plated, double rivetted argument against “coldsleep.”
Wait! What!?!
I’m going to die someday?!?!
My father died when I was 11. For months after that, I would lie awake at night, terrified of death. Can’t say I’m terrified any more. Maybe a little uneasy, I guess. Oblivion is an uncomfortable concept.
Part of me will live on, at least for a little while, in my decendants. And my work - leaded glass windows - has the potential to live on for many hundreds of years.