Three Thoughts - about Death

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest , of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? - from Shakespeare's Hamlet

I've had a handful of epiphanies about the eternal sleeping sickness - by Nick van der Leek

At the last moment tonightI decided to swim two lengths underwater. I've done it before, but I somehow doubted whether I had the same - the required - fortitude this time. After the first length underwater I turned, and I knew then, that I was going to have to dig deep. With 5 metres to go my lungs started screaming, and I looked into the halls of water remaining. And that's when it hit me, when I looked and saw how far I had to go, and how my lungs were bursting: the absolute certainty of death. I sputtered through on the other side, I completed the length, but felt a terrible sense of fatal depression wash over me.

You can't escape it, just as you can't escape the fact that underwater, your body reaches a limit. No matter what you may do, or think, or say, your body approaches a limit. Life has limits. Maybe you'll live a long time, maybe you'll check out early, but everyone checks out, and no one comes back, ever. In the same way, whatever we may think or do or say, all - of - us - will - die.

I sometimes find writing a form of drowning. It's the giving up of life in service of something else...observing, commenting, criticising, complaining about life. It's especially bad being a writer when your work is lost on a computer, or hard work and time spent compiling it is dumped by a ruthless editor. It's the same as taking that time, time that could have been spent running or soaking up the sun, or kissing someone, and pouring it down the toilet.

The second thought is an easier one to deal with, because it is almost the opposite of the gripping panic of a dark destiny, of non-existence. Some time ago I took a sleeping pill. I'm not in the habit of doing this, but I did this because thanks to a LOT of writing, my sleeping patterns had quickly fallen into disarray. I slept so soundly that when I woke I thought so that's what it's like to be dead. You have absolutely no feeling about it, one way or the other. Think about it, what was it like before you were born, before you existed? That's right. Nothing.

We can worry and fret about death, but when you're dead, you don't exist to know, or care - because you're not there. So that sort of takes care of death. It's your choice whether to be scared, and there's justification in being scared, or whether to not be scared, after all, the moment of death might be as quick and awful as a flu shot. After that, of course, oblivion. Least that's what I believe.

Now, the third thought concerns life. You may have regrets in your life, but if you're still alive, you still have a choice. And that's the beauty of it. Every single moment, you can seize the power you have over your life, or relinquish it. When you seize it, you live, and for as long as you don't, you're not quite here in the land of the living anyway. So what are you going to do? Choose now. NOW.