I have always--since my earliest remembered childhood--tried to imagine my death. The whole thought of it has quite simply fascinated me and as I sit here pondering my recent ongoing bout with illness, I find that fascination still grips me.
I don’t and have never looked at death as an ending. It is an event we all experience--every life that has ever existed on this planet eventually dies. It’s one of the most natural things all of us do.
That it is shared universally among all of us, whether we are animal or plant or whatever makes it fascinating. Name for me, if you can, another event that ALL LIFE experiences.
That we don’t understand it only serves to make it that much more exciting. As our lives progress the ‘new’ seems to gradually fade away until much of life is boring. When was the last truly NEW thing you experienced? The nature of death ensures its newness, at least for most of us.
And yet, death frightens us more than anything else. It's the ultimate Unknown Unknown. So we do what we can--whatever it takes--trying to avoid it or any path that seems to lead to it. Even those of us who find it so fascinating, who spend their lives wondering. Even me.
A thousand tiny gnats
are biting me at once.
Pressures build on all sides.
There are no good decisions
sometimes. I walk eternally
raw between life and death.
A million monstrous rats
are begging me to follow.
Why do I feel so afraid?
Image by de:Benutzer:Janekpfeifer (Uploaded by author to German Wikipedia) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons
