I live in terror of getting a potentially terminal disease that requires constant monitoring and different therapies, most of which fail with great disappointment. I imagine spending hours in hospital waiting rooms and doctors’ offices, dreading the results that will ultimately be delivered to me.
I don’t know the best way to die. It is a very individual thing. Some people would like to die in their sleep. I don’t want that. I would like to say goodbye, but I don’t want it to be a long goodbye. Maybe a few weeks with just enough time to take my leave and tell those around me how much I love them. It would not be enough time to get my affairs in order, which is why I try to keep everything organized in advance. I don’t want to be dealing with those kinds of logistics in the last weeks of my life.
I no longer feel the urgency of having to complete anything. I am ok with leaving something’s unfinished like the novel I dreamed of writing or the songs I want to compose. Thankfully, I wrote my book, “The Flight of a Wild Duck,” in 2022. It does a good job of explaining my life up to about twenty years ago. So those memories will live on. The people around me now will remember these last twenty years so that doesn’t require much documentation. A some point I may up date my book and make it current, assuming I am still around to do that.
How and when I die is not really much of a choice, unless I were to take some action on my own. I try to be as healthy as I can. I’m not anxious to die. I would like to live another ten to twenty years, and I do everything reasonable to make that possible. But every once in a while I feel ill, and the vulnerabilities come back to haunt me especially my childhood memories of constant trips to the hospital to deal with my chronic asthma.
That is where I am now.
Two Thirds Done 
I share your goal of a long healthspan and a short, rapid decline. I’d add “and not too much pain.”
Getting to peace with what it all means, how to deal with existential anxiety … that’s work that can and probably should be done in advance. Like keeping your affairs more or less in order, which I conscientiously do.
And yet I procrastinate badly on the tougher task: coming to terms with the meaning of life and death.
This post is a good reminder to get back to those taller, more primitive questions.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I awoke from another very bad dream, yet another horrid reincarnation nightmare
where having blessedly died I’m nonetheless bullied towards rebirth back into human form
despite my pleas I be allowed to rest in permanent peace.
My bed wet from sweat, I futilely try to convince my dysthymic and traumatized brain
that I truly want to live, the same brain displacing me from the functional world.
.
Within my nightmare a mob encircles me and insists that life, including mine,
is a blessing.
I ask them for the blessed purpose of my continuance. I insist
upon a practical purpose!
Give me a real purpose, I cry out, and it’s not enough simply to live
nor that it’s a beautiful sunny day with colorful fragrant flowers!
.
I’m tormented hourly by my desire for emotional, material and creative gain
that ultimately matters naught, I explain. My own mind brutalizes me like it has
a sadistic mind of its own.
I must have a progressive reason for this harsh endurance!
Bewildered they warn that one day on my death bed I’ll regret my ingratitude
and that I’m about to lose my life.
I counter that I cannot mourn the loss of something I never really had
so I’m unlikely to dread parting from it.
.
Frustrated they say that moments from death I’ll clamor and claw for life
like a bridge jumper instinctively flailing his limbs as though to grasp at something
anything that may delay his imminent thrust into the eternal abyss.
They also tell me my incarnation may be an easier existence due to my suffering in the preceding life.
.
But how can that be? I retort. It’s the same world, regardless — Hell on Earth!
.
They wonder how I can in good conscience morosely hate my life
while many who love theirs lose it so soon.
Angry I reply that people bewail the ‘unfair’ untimely deaths of the young who’ve received early reprieve from their life sentence,
people who must remain behind corporeally confined
yet do their utmost to complete their entire life sentence — even more if they could!
.
The vexed mob then curse me with envy for rejecting what they’d kill for — continued life through unending rebirth.
“Then why don’t you just kill yourself?” they yell,
to which I retort “I would if I could. My life sentence is made all the more oppressive by my inability to take my own life.”
“Then we’ll do it for you.” As their circle closes on me, I wake up.
.
Could there be people who immensely suffer yet convince themselves
they sincerely want to live when in fact they don’t want to die,
so great is their fear of Death’s unknown?
.
No one should ever have to repeat and suffer again a single second of sorrow that passes.
Nay, I will engage and embrace the dying of my blight!
LikeLike
A lot of people fear a negative experience or hellish spiritual existence in the hereafter.
When despised public figures or once-celebrated people die, a plethora of social media posts will assert that those terrible people/souls must be (or at least we hope they are) in some section of Dante’s Inferno or Hell, etcetera. “Ding dong, Dick Cheney’s dead”, being a good, relatively recent example.
Yet, perhaps when all of us die, we lose that (corporeal) need for ultimate justice, which of course is suffered by the other guy.
Perhaps the spirit or consciousness is 100 percent liberated from the purely cerebrally based anxiety, agitation and contempt that may have actually blighted much of its physical existence. Therefore, free of the corporeal shell, the soul may be wondering, ‘Why was I so angry, so much of the time? Oh, the things I said! … I really hope I didn’t do damage while I was there’. …
A few decades ago, I (raised Catholic though not practicing) learned from two Latter Day Saints missionaries that their church’s doctrine teaches that the biblical ‘lake of fire’ meant for the truly wicked actually represents an eternal spiritual burning of guilt over one’s corporeal misdeeds. I cavalierly thought and said: “That’s it? Our punishment is our afterlife’s guilty conscience?”
During the many years since then, however, I’ve discovered just how formidable intense guilt can be. I’ve also considered and decided that our brain’s structural/chemical flaws are what we basically are while our soul is confined within our physical, bodily form. The human soul may be inherently good on its own; but trapped within the physical body, notably the corruptible brain, oftentimes the soul’s purity may not be able to shine through.
Ergo, upon the multi-murderer’s physical death, not only would they be 100 percent liberated from the anger and hate that blighted their physical life; their spirit or consciousness would also be forced to exist with the presumably unwanted awareness of the immense amount of needless suffering they personally had caused.
Then again, maybe the human soul goes where it belongs or where it feels comfortable and right — be it hell’, ‘heaven’, somewhere in between, etcetera.
Meanwhile, many people believe/fear they’ll eventually get bored in any eternal afterlife. However, if corporeal death totally relieves us from time — i.e., all-encompassing physical motion — there should be no boredom in the afterlife, perhaps even while playing the harp. Just a thought.
LikeLike