A post in another thread just led me to the tale of ChristopherMcCandless, a young man who died in the Alaskan wilderness after discovering it was far more difficult to be a wild man than he thought. Reading it, I was struck by the notion that, in addition to starvation & hubris, what killed McCandless may have been that he did not truly believe that death was waiting for him in the tall grass, as it is for all of us.
McCandless died at 24; he was only slightly older than I. Reading the linked articles reminded me of myself at that age. While I can imagine having been friends with him in college, I can’t imagine myself doing what he did, because death has been real to me for a long time. Since I was about 10, in fact. My youngest sister was very sickly as a baby, and she had a bad brush with the Reaper when I was that age. I remember being afraid that she would die, and realizing that if she could, then so could I.
Which brings me to the thread question: how old were you when you realized that you were neither invulnerable nor immortal, and that death was something you would not be able to avoid indefinitely?
As far back as I can remember I was afraid of dying and had nightmares about it.
It kept me up at night as a child and was something I eventually had to get over.
It seemed I was paranoid about everything. Drowning, guns, hot lava, tornados, atomic bombs.
I probably got over it after age 10 and learned how not to be so uptight.
I was raised catholic and attended church every Sun before going to the USAF. After I joined up, I was free to make my own decisions about church and religion in general. I stopped attending, came to the conclusion that angels in the clouds was all just a fairy tale, and that one day I would die and be no more.
When I was about 16 I discovered that my grandmother and my dad both have a degenerative neurological disorder and as it’s autosomal dominant I have a 50% chance of having inherited it as well. My sister and I have been working with a neurologist to do a genetic study so we can be tested but I realized recently I’ve been living my life since then assuming I won’t last much past 50.
People often ask why I work so hard and don`t enjoy life more, but it really makes sense if you assume you’ve only got a couple decades. Not that it’s been exactly a conscious plan.
I was a little over 21 about to go on my second trip to Iraq. I’ve known that it was possible for me to die, and on my first trip I came very, VERY close to dying. So close that I should not be alive right now. My thought when it happened? “Man, that sucked. I think I want french toast for breakfast.”
So, about a couple of weeks before my second trip I ran across that mydeathspace.com website and saw all of those profiles of kids about younger than me who were dead. Then I’d find a soldiers (the worst was a Marine on his second trip with a countdown that said, "Days until I get to hold my baby girl) and that didn’t help.
And that’s when I realized, if I died, that’s it. Nothing. All what I have worked for, all of my plans, all of my wanting that fairy tale life, gone. Worthless. I won’t be here. I don’t have any kids so my traits will have died out and in thirty years people will forget that I even existed. It’s like I was never even born.
Yeah, feel sorry for my close friends during that week.
I was about 6 when I heard a thing on the radio about Mt Rainier being a “sleeping” volcano, able to erupt ant any time. It was framed in my bedroom window. I was sure it would blow and cover our house with lava while I was asleep. Somehow, It never bothered me while I was awake. I guess I thought I could run away.
When I was 7 it hit me, but in a kind of weird way. I found out a kid in our neighborhood had died, and that made me think about death. And what I thought was that the “person I am now” - IE that 7 year old - would be dead and gone even if I lived to grow up. Because I wouldn’t remember what it was like to be 7, and I wouldn’t “be the same person”.
Oddly enough, I do remember what it was like to be 7, sort of. Though I don’t think I was totally wrong.
I always understood intellectually, of course, that I would die someday. But it continued to be kind of an abstract concept for me, even after I knew several people who died. But it wasn’t until watching my own father go from healthy to dying of lymphoma 9 months later when I was 50 that I really came to grips with knowing that I would die someday.
I was about 24. Found out I had a heart condition that was likely not a big deal, but could turn ugly at some point. What got me was seeing my own heart beating when they did the ultrasound. Of course, I knew I had a heart before that, but watching it work, and realizing there was something wrong with it was a bit sobering.
Oddly enough, I was much younger when I became convinced of other people’s mortality.
I knew of death, but never associated it with myself … until … it was right after high school graduation. We all scattered to our separate jobs, colleges, travels, etc. Then I caught wind of a former classmate who just got killed in an auto accident. One day walking down the aisle to pick up a diploma, the next day in a coffin. That got to me. My own mortality got very real very fast.
Oh, since I was very small. At least 6, maybe 5 years old. I don’t remember the context it which it came up (how I learned of death as a concept), but there were times I’d wake up from a nightmare whose fear was simply that I would not wake up to anything ever again.
A bit later, when I learned of Descartes’ famous tautology I think, therefore I am, I reasoned to myself that life = memory. Human consciousness is not merely the awareness of existing in the present time; the concept of self, of having an identity, is predicated on remembering one’s life. Total amnesiacs and other brain damaged people who exist in the constant present, or who have long-term memories that stop abruptly at a specific point in time following a stroke or something (as depicted in a case study in the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Dr. Oliver Sacks), fascinate and terrify me.
So what happens at the end? I don’t have any reason to believe in an afterlife, but if my existence NOW is really only something I’m aware of because a microsecond or now in the future I will be remembering it, then… What will “anchor” my last thought? Assuming I don’t die in my sleep or in a traumatic event that kills me “instantly”, it’s going to be “…so at last, this is what it’s like… I wish I could remember this…”
Throughout childhood I’d been to several funerals of elderly relatives. But death didn’t really hit home until I was in college, and one of my housemates committed suicide. I was the one who discovered the body.
Then years later, I was part of the NYC gay community when the AIDS epidemic hit. Over the course of about 15 years almost everyone I knew was gone; death became an almost daily occurrence. Pretty much my entire generation was wiped out.
So now, I have an almost indifferent attitude toward my own mortality. I am enjoying life while I have it, but not too concerned about its end.
Intellectually speaking, I only comprehended my own mortality at about 11. Less than a year after that, however, I was buried alive in a natural disaster and forced to look death straight in the eye. Since then, along with a few other near scrapes, I feel as if I understand it on another level entirely.