Due terzi compiuti

Pensieri e esperienze di un’anatra selvaggia di ottanta e un anni.

Avram Miller by the sea
EN | IT

587 post pubblicati dal 2006

Tag: death

  • Non è la morte che ho paura, ma il processo di morire

    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.

    (altro…)

  • My first two digit birthday

    I remember that day. I had just turned ten and was walking down the street close to my home when I realized that my age would be two digits from now on. The result of that insight was asking myself, would it ever be three digits?

    Thinking about that then made me think about death. I realized it was unlikely that I would ever reach a hundred. The implication of dying swelled up in my mind. I wonder what my life would be like if I didn’t know that I would die. I felt that something had been stolen from me. 

    As I reach the end of my 70s, I have become more aware of my mortality. Death itself is something I find almost incomprehensible. I don’t mean the death of others, which I observe more and more, but my death. How is it possible to imagine yourself not existing? Dying is something far more understandable because you’re alive while you’re doing it. Death is beyond comprehension. 

    After our death, we leave behind for others memories of our lives, but our memories no longer exist, no past, present, or future. We have joined the beginning and the end of existence and perhaps the experience of awareness of all the possibilities.