...I do fear dying! This is part of a comment left by A Thinking Man to a post on the blog, On Leaving Fundamentalist Christianity. In a nutshell, this really defines my feelings on the topic. One day dying or being dead is not scary to me at all; it's the path from here to there that scares me.
In many ways, I view death as going to sleep forever. All the pain and misery from this life will melt away to nothing. My guess is that all forms of unique consciousness will end. There will no longer be an "I" to contemplate my demise or to look down on the still living. The energy that made up me will return to its source and fuse with it to generate new life.
But the process of getting from Point A "Life" to Point B "Death" is what keeps me up at night. If I have my druthers, I hope that I will be able to slip silently into death. You know, die in my sleep or, as the result of an illness, slip from consciousness under a heavy dose of morphine or something similar.
My nightmare is dying of a heart attack or stroke -- Having the essence of life squeezed out of me as I try in vain to cling to life. Fighting and clawing to breath, while the Grim Reaper sucks the air from my lungs. These are the kinds of images that haunt me.
How about you?
In many ways, I view death as going to sleep forever. All the pain and misery from this life will melt away to nothing. My guess is that all forms of unique consciousness will end. There will no longer be an "I" to contemplate my demise or to look down on the still living. The energy that made up me will return to its source and fuse with it to generate new life.
But the process of getting from Point A "Life" to Point B "Death" is what keeps me up at night. If I have my druthers, I hope that I will be able to slip silently into death. You know, die in my sleep or, as the result of an illness, slip from consciousness under a heavy dose of morphine or something similar.
My nightmare is dying of a heart attack or stroke -- Having the essence of life squeezed out of me as I try in vain to cling to life. Fighting and clawing to breath, while the Grim Reaper sucks the air from my lungs. These are the kinds of images that haunt me.
How about you?
Wow - an anti-semitic ranter.
ReplyDeleteThis guy can't be a taoist :)
I would prefer he turned his caps-lock off.
Eh, I don't worry about it much. I mean obviously the final process will either be terrifyingly slow or so quick I don't even notice, or somewhere in between. Mostly I hope not to be a burden to anyone to care for or to figure out what to do with whatever stuff I leave. I hope to leave good memories for other people, and take good ones with me. Beyond that, it's just not much of an issue for me...
ReplyDeleteAny type of slow death would be horrible for me, though in a sense, we are all dying slowly.
ReplyDeleteI specifically fear drowning, being burned alive, buried alive, in a car accident where I don't die immediately but in a hospital bed after months of suffering, dying of cancer, etc.
If dwelling on the past and worrying or fantasizing about the future are the 2 main categories of thought that keep us from being awake to the present moment, than I sometimes think that although we all do both at various times, most folks are more prone to one over the other.
ReplyDeleteMe, I am a dwell-on-the-past person--to a frightening degree. I really realized this while reading your post, because I can honestly say I have never once worried about what my death will be like (and I remind myself I will die all the time--it's a useful meditation). In fact I rarely worry about the future at all. I am too busy mulling over the past. Ha.
Thanks, this was thought provoking.