Death

OK. Let’s face it. We all gotta die sooner or later. What are you going to do about it?

Starting clinical postings in school means that we see people who are dying all the time. People who slowly lose their bodily functions one by one, until they have nothing to call their own anymore.

First a lung cancer patient starts having shortness of breath. And you know he’ll never be able to breathe comfortably for the rest of his life. Ever.
Then he loses the function of his lungs so badly he needs to be on oxygen supplementation, having tubes routed from a tank or wall socket to his nose. Forever.
Then he becomes so breathless he can no longer talk. Whatever he wants to tell his kids, it’s too late. He’ll never be able to speak again.
Then he has to have a tube placed in his chest to remove all the fluid the cancer is leaking into his lungs, or he’ll literally drown in the fluid. The doctors don’t plan to remove it.
Then he becomes too ill to even sit up.
Then he becomes too ill to even swallow his food.
Then he becomes too ill to even breathe.

The family would say he died in his sleep. But that’s bullshit. The dying process was a long and painful one. It just so happened that the cancer killed his consciousness before it killed his organs.

This death thing, it’s going to happen to you, and to me, and to everyone you and I know. It’s a painful process, and no-one knows what comes after death. At least, if you aren’t religious. Religious as in, living, breathing the religion and truly believing it.

Not just grabbing onto the most convenient religion when faced with one’s mortality. It’s as stupid as trying to keep oneself afloat by holding on to a soggy pillow. And with so many mutually exclusive and contradictory religions around, most of them got to be wrong, or even all of them. You can’t have 2 religions that are both opposing and true at the same time.

It’s especially creepy when you think about it. When you reach adulthood, your childhood is literally dead. Gone. Just like the man with the cancer. All that’s left are some mental photos hanging on the wall, some vague recollection of what cartoons you used to watch on that old TV. When you reach 21, your 20 year old self dies. When it’s Friday, your Thursday self dies. The me that started typing out this sentence, is already dead by the time I key in the full stop.

Live every day like your last they say, but it’s never going to happen. The thought of living in a manner that prepares you for death, is depressing enough. So we distract ourselves, thinking about other things such as career, entertainment and other things that are as distant as the idea of death as possible. That, while parts of us die continually. That’s the only choice we have.

Thinking about death makes one miserable. I’ve had sleepless nights trying to imagine what it was like not to exist anymore. How does one reconcile the fact that one is simply unable to perceive non-existence? If you don’t exist, you can’t perceive.

Best to keep on distracting ourselves, at least we won’t be as miserable until we die. But. Easier said than done. I wonder how many people on Earth with chronic insomnia are being kept awake by this death thing. We are so accustomed to life, we can’t imagine ourselves dead and nonexistent. For me, death’s such a big unknown I don’t even know if I ought to fear it. But then, we all die anyway. So even if we fear death, what good does the fear do?

I wish you all the best for distracting yourself from the fact of your eventual death.