I don’t fear death, it is natural. I fear the suffering society will put me through when I’m old and ill, because they can’t cope with death.
It’s good we are starting to develop dignified death laws. With the world population as it is, more people will die in the next decade than any other in history (even the plagues). Just looking at population graphs, 1B might die between 2050 and 2060. Much suffering can be avoided.
My SO worked at a nursing home which had several elderly with dementia cry out they just wanted to die all day long, day after day.
Yet they got their flu shots and got treated for any infections they might get. This went on for the two years my SO worked there.
My dad had cancer that spread to his lungs, and then he got pneumonia. The day after being hospitalized, he asked the doctor if it was a chance he'd ever get home and they admitted that no, that was not very likely. Later that day he asked them to turn off the oxygen, which they did after confirming his wish. He passed peacefully a few hours later.
I was so glad he was given the opportunity to make his choice, and that the doctors respected it.
Sure, I lost some months with my dad, but he'd be in a hospital bed struggling to breathe. I hope I get to make a similar choice when that time comes.
People are different. For example, my fear of death is in the from existential dread. It's an occasional thing.
We should probably try harder to make people healthier in general. Much of the frailty of the elderly can be avoided with rigorous exercise. Maybe heart disease and dementia doesn't have to be your fate. I don't know how much longer people will be able to live if they optimize the hell out of their biomarkers.
But I do know...I don't want to be in pain and frail when I die. The best way to do that is making health my priority.
Being "natural" doesnt mean anything on relation to fear. Being eaten alive by lions is 100% natural too. Death is inevitable. So there is little to gain from being too afraid of it, but i would never suggest that anyone not fear the unknown. That fear is what has kept us alive and evolving. The fear is natural.
Fear of death can be healthy (esp when one is young)! That said, courage is the first virtue, don't pay attention to people who complain about its signalling
This sort of utilitarian "unit of suffering" metric has never made much sense to me. 1B people die in a given decade, each perceives or experiences some amount of suffering, so we have say 2B units of suffering, 2 units per person on average.
Is anything better or worse if 2B people die instead of 1B with the same aggregate amount of suffering? Average suffering reduced by half! What about 100,000 people instead of 1B? Those people presumably die horrific, painful, suffering deaths but now there a lot more people alive. Is that better or worse?
> I don’t fear death, it is natural. I fear the suffering society will put me through when I’m old and ill, because they can’t cope with death.
Assisted death--one with dignity--is rare recent development about which I'm genuinely and wholeheartedly happy.
What unsettles me--as rational as I think I'm--is the thought of being born again (duh!). I lead a very comfortable life, but far from "perfect". I can say I'm content. What are the odds that I'll be content in my next life? How likely is it that I'll be born in the right country, to good parents, follow the right religion, and have a brain wired in the right way to make a decent living? I'm not hopeful. So, I've "decided" that I want to be a rock in all my next lives. No emotions, no feelings, no struggle, no pain, no indignation. Just a fricking rock.
I agree with your take. Very long story, while my family doesn't talk about feelings, we're pretty good at talking about end of life.
Separately, some years ago spent a good amount of time listening to what Atul Gawande thought about medicine and doctors and dying. He wrote Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End and there's a Frontline documentary (Being Mortal) about his experience and his book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQhI3Jb7vMg. I've not yet read the book.
I think you do fear death, given that you plan to live until it is physically impossible for you to do so painlessly. If you don't fear death, an easy and reliable way to avoid suffering in your old age is to painlessly commit suicide right now. But be aware that we treat people who don't express a preference for staying alive as having a serious mental illness worth locking them up for.
Fear of death is not just natural, it is the most fundamental instinct of any creature besides reproduction. Those who don't have it, don't last long. Perhaps society's attitudes towards it could profitably be improved, but don't make out like it's an irrational personality flaw.
You can’t honestly say you don’t fear death until you face it directly. Tell someone they’ll be executed tomorrow, then ask if they fear death, some people lose their minds when told they’re terminally ill. It’s not as simple as just saying, “I don’t fear death.”
Overworked nurses and suicide booth technicians on night shift will greatly dampen this utopia where dignified death isn’t usurped by lower-cost-at-all-costs reality.
That was a difficult read for me - after watching my father die peacefully, and with dignity in a wonderful hospice I can't help but admire the doctors, nurses and other practicioners who dedicate their life to caring for people at the end of theirs.
What angers me is that not everyone gets to experience a dignified death; the hospice where my father stayed relies on charitable donations to do their vital work - a death like this should be table stakes for an advanced economy, but alas, it's not.
When I reach that point in my life I’ll probably just put a bullet in my own head. And I don’t want a fancy burial or cremation… toss me in the ground and plant a tree on top of me.
I genuinely think death will be conquered, for all practical purposes, within this century. In our vast 300 thousand year history, we are likely in the last century of mortal humans, and in the last millennium of biological ones.
Future generations will wonder at our coping mechanisms for something so tragic and horrifying as death, and wonder why we didn't try harder, earlier.
Why isn't the longevity problem our #1 tax expense? Because the culture believes the problem is insurmountable, inevitable, and not worth solving. Our parents try to hide their grief and dread at the inevitability, telling us it's okay, but the tears at a funeral disagree.
As an aside, I would pay vast sums of money (millions of dollars) to live my final days at an old folks' home that was capable of monitoring my health on a frequent basis, catching things early, and integrated SOTA cryonics facilities to maximize my chance of revival in case LEV doesn't become a possibility in my lifetime.
I'm not too confident that mortality will be cured this century. Even if we cure some of the big targets (dementia, muscle wasting and cancer come to mind) there will inevitably be a long tail of problems.
If it were just that, I might still be hopeful, but the latency on aging cure experiments is inevitably going to be quite long, and that won't change without massive advances in biological simulations.
I agree, likely the first immortal person has already been born. Perhaps even large swaths of the population are already effectively immortal, but they just don't know it yet.
Sadly, my main fear is that immortality will only be available to the extremely rich and powerful. Generally historical progress is made when the old guard die, be it in science with the leaders clamoring to old theories, dictatorships falling when their leader does, companies setting a new course when their founder/CEO retires.
I shudder at the thought of living in a world where everyone still dies like before, except an entrenched immortal powerful elite.
Never going to happen. We don't have the technology, we're not going to get the technology, and nobody benefits by having wealthy people around forever. Your body parts will eventually wear out regardless of what you try to do to mitigate the situation, and everybody will get terminal cancer sooner or later regardless of anything else. And even if THAT doesn't get you, an accident eventually will. Doesn't matter if it's a car wreck, a plane crash, someone coughing on you at the wrong moment, or you sneezing and bursting a blood vessel in your head.
We've wrecked our habitat and keep most of humanity in some form or other of slavery, and there are exactly zero credible social movements aiming for another course. Why would we want to watch this deterioration and tyranny go on for centuries more?
As for 'non-biological' humans, I'm assuming you believe in some soul that could be transfered from your body to a computer? If so, that's clearly into deeply religious territory. You are an analog being, you view the world as analog projections onto a mammal cortex. That is fundamentally, ontologically very different from digitally virtual environments. The digital lacks identity, which is the source of security issues in the computerised society. There is no difference between 1011011001 and 1011011001 regardless of source, it can be a biometry reader sending an encoding of your thumb print or another computer hooked into a network sending the same bytes.
If we for the sake of argument ignored the problems with the transfer, then you still propose a deeply restricted existence, a machine prison, where there is no way for you to discern whether your experience actually comes from your sensors or some other source feeding digital signals into your machine. At best it is a simulacra of a dream you can't wake from. You'd be absolutely cut off from any possibility of freedom and immediate engagement with the universe.
Now, I do understand that many people enjoy living almost their entire adult lives mediated through digitally transmitted images and sounds, but at least they still have the option to look away and out of their own bodies and into the remnants of the world that birthed our and many other species. Removing that option entirely and replacing it with the most intimate and absolute form of imprisonment we have yet been able to imagine does not seem at all attractive to me.
Regarding "longevity", currently billions are suffering under the rule of a few generations that refuse to let go of power even though they are well beyond what is the common age of retirement in vast parts of the world. If allowed they will for sure continue this refusal and they signal clearly that they are going to kill and maim a lot of people just to try and stay in power now. Locking borders against climate refugees, taking resources from things like education and art and medicine and pushing it into war industry, inventing new insidious forms of surveillance and control to try and make sure dissent becomes impossible.
If you get to watch them follow through on this, how do you expect to keep some semblance of sanity? Are you hoping to be able to ignore it, sitting on a server in a bunker being fed a constant soap opera of fiction and simulated conversations, humming away at some 200 watts or so?
Great book on the topic is "Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death" by Irvin D. Yalom. I suggest that anyone who struggles with fear of dying read it.
I suppose that Catholic hospitals were in the business of "treating fear of death" effectively through evangelization of all patients. At this point in history, hospitals, whether secular or religious, stand between us and death at all times. They are practically the only portal to the other side, whether or not we are willing.
For me, perhaps I do not fear death so much as infirmity. Dying, for me, would be entrance into glory and bliss (at least that beginning of that process), but to live with illness, to be incapacitated, to suffer helplessly, that's a terrible and frightful thing.
So being admitted to a hospital, the beginning of that infirmity or incapacitation, that is definitely a traumatic experience for me that requires accompaniment and soothing. Unfortunately, modern hospitals are woefully equipped to allay our fears, but instead just run us through a meat grinder of paperwork, finances, poorly-informed decisions, and disappointment.
So it's laudable that palliative care and hospices are making efforts like this one.
On my own part, I'm gradually overcoming a visceral fear of hospitals and facilities by just waltzing in while I'm perfectly healthy. There are a couple nearby and so I've taken to eating in their cafeterias when it's convenient (very cheap, great selection of healthy food!); and the chapel where the Eucharist is reserved is a focus of peace and prayer; and there is actually a lot of art and history to admire in them, so it's become an interesting and unexpected diversion.
Humans don't have a self-preservation instinct. Instead, like all life, they properly have a reproductive instinct. We only have self-preservation instincts as far as is necessary to make reproduction possible. In an age where many are deliberately "child free" it might start to look as if terror management is the name of the game, but that's just an artifact of a bunch of other neuroses that have taken hold.
I need to die so that there's room for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
The way Dutch people combat the admittedly scary process of dying is by treating it as an event.
I think the best comparison is a wedding. You do your rehearsals, pick out music and clothes, train the bridesmaids, pick a venue, call the catering.
And then ofcourse you have the administrative stuff to take care off- banking, house, taxes.
Time flies until the big day happens.
My Dad a blue collar worker all his life died of IPF. He stayed strong for decades but the last six months were hard and the last three weeks in palliative care the worst. The disease he handled the anxiety he couldn't.
(Edited to add: Sorry, too long of a post here. I didn’t bother to renew my domain this year)
A timely piece I can relate to. currently starting my second week in a (US) hospital oncology ward after my 11th cycle of chemo. I was first diagnosed with stage iv colon cancer and after chemo, surgery, resections and stubbornness was NED from 2018 to 2025. The return is inoperable and I was given “six months to a year”.
I asked if I’d be in pain when death came, and he said that I wouldn’t likely be - it would just be feeling more and more tired. That’s basically what’s been happening.
The chemo itself hasn’t given me direct side effects like skin lesions or mouth sores, nor much nausea. The secondary effects on my kidneys (which were already doing poorly before this started) and liver (cirrhosis) plus the metastases in lymph nodes and lung leads to edema. Diuretics helped but flushed out my potassium, so there several months where they trying to balance those electrolytes.
Anyway, a lot of my swelling was reduced (and they took 4L from two rounds of draining my lungs) but for some ungodly reason my scrotal sack decided it wanted to play too, and became the size and consistency of one of those half size basketballs you can win at fairs. it’s so bad that I actually requested a catheter. The swelling makes walking or anything else really painful.
The oncology wing I’m in doesn’t seem soaked in the kind of depressing, institutional green malaise of slightly older hospitals but it isn’t a “nice place” to die (I don’t expect to do that this visit in any case). The older woman (70?) two doors down though - seems to be in constant pain and in and out of lucidity, shouting at everyone. Usually a phrase gets stuck on repeat for a few hours - the most heartbreaking was “mommy get my mommy I’m sorry mommy I’m a bad girl mommy stop it” yelled loudly for hours.
This is a generic hospital though. Memorial Sloan-Kettering in NYC has a patient day lounge and lots of projects for child patients and patients families. Still not even approaching the quality described
Sorry, rambling. Probably my way of compartmentalizing the anxiety.
The other thing I wanted to say is that I really liked Christopher Hitchens “Mortality” and that Terry Pratchett’s very relatable death character shows up in all of his books. My favorite quote is from “Small Gods” as Death comes for the protagonist at the very end:
> “Ah. There really is a desert. Does everyone get this?” said Brutha. WHO KNOWS? “And what is at the end of the desert?” JUDGMENT. Brutha considered this. “Which end?” Death grinned and stepped aside.
Maybe I’m not afraid of death because as a devout atheist - well yea, we all get to do that at some point.
The quote that really has stuck with me was also from Pratchett:
"What can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the reaper man?"
This caught me in two ways:
1. Death is the release. Whatever suffering you're undergoing, it won't follow you into whatever comes next, even if that is absolute oblivion. The relief would be welcome, I assume. So that's at least one positive way to look at it.
But moreso:
2. Everyone's death is individual and special. The process of getting to it is different for everyone, and the journey is just as much a part of the process as the destination. It isn't something to fear, because you cannot stop it, but it is something to consider as you move through your life.
Cancer is the fucking devil. I, myself, have been lucky enough to avoid it for now, but we spent the last year with my father and lymphoma. It's a fucking nightmare of cancer treatment and chasing side effects from the cancer treatments until the end. He chose to die with hospice on the family farm; it wasn't the most dignified death due to the symptoms of his cancer, but it was peaceful and with family/friends. So that's something.
His treatment didn't really bother me, and his process didn't really depress me; it was the people like the older lady in your write-up that really stuck with me. In his first month on the cancer floor, his across the hall neighbor was just like that. Her only lucid moments were either screaming in pain, or nonsense phrases on repeat from what I assume was her childhood.
Terrifying.
I hope that your life goes well all the way to the end. I genuinely do not know what to say other than that.
[+] [-] caseyy|10 months ago|reply
It’s good we are starting to develop dignified death laws. With the world population as it is, more people will die in the next decade than any other in history (even the plagues). Just looking at population graphs, 1B might die between 2050 and 2060. Much suffering can be avoided.
[+] [-] magicalhippo|10 months ago|reply
Yet they got their flu shots and got treated for any infections they might get. This went on for the two years my SO worked there.
My dad had cancer that spread to his lungs, and then he got pneumonia. The day after being hospitalized, he asked the doctor if it was a chance he'd ever get home and they admitted that no, that was not very likely. Later that day he asked them to turn off the oxygen, which they did after confirming his wish. He passed peacefully a few hours later.
I was so glad he was given the opportunity to make his choice, and that the doctors respected it.
Sure, I lost some months with my dad, but he'd be in a hospital bed struggling to breathe. I hope I get to make a similar choice when that time comes.
[+] [-] kiba|10 months ago|reply
We should probably try harder to make people healthier in general. Much of the frailty of the elderly can be avoided with rigorous exercise. Maybe heart disease and dementia doesn't have to be your fate. I don't know how much longer people will be able to live if they optimize the hell out of their biomarkers.
But I do know...I don't want to be in pain and frail when I die. The best way to do that is making health my priority.
[+] [-] sandworm101|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] serial_dev|10 months ago|reply
Similarly, I don’t really fear my death, I fear the death of others.
[+] [-] gsf_emergency|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pc86|10 months ago|reply
Is anything better or worse if 2B people die instead of 1B with the same aggregate amount of suffering? Average suffering reduced by half! What about 100,000 people instead of 1B? Those people presumably die horrific, painful, suffering deaths but now there a lot more people alive. Is that better or worse?
[+] [-] giantg2|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] penguin_booze|10 months ago|reply
Assisted death--one with dignity--is rare recent development about which I'm genuinely and wholeheartedly happy.
What unsettles me--as rational as I think I'm--is the thought of being born again (duh!). I lead a very comfortable life, but far from "perfect". I can say I'm content. What are the odds that I'll be content in my next life? How likely is it that I'll be born in the right country, to good parents, follow the right religion, and have a brain wired in the right way to make a decent living? I'm not hopeful. So, I've "decided" that I want to be a rock in all my next lives. No emotions, no feelings, no struggle, no pain, no indignation. Just a fricking rock.
[+] [-] bowsamic|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] susiecambria|10 months ago|reply
Separately, some years ago spent a good amount of time listening to what Atul Gawande thought about medicine and doctors and dying. He wrote Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End and there's a Frontline documentary (Being Mortal) about his experience and his book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQhI3Jb7vMg. I've not yet read the book.
[+] [-] dTal|10 months ago|reply
Fear of death is not just natural, it is the most fundamental instinct of any creature besides reproduction. Those who don't have it, don't last long. Perhaps society's attitudes towards it could profitably be improved, but don't make out like it's an irrational personality flaw.
[+] [-] serverlessmania|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] fkida|10 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|10 months ago|reply
Idealism can cause so much suffering in this way.
[+] [-] philjohn|10 months ago|reply
What angers me is that not everyone gets to experience a dignified death; the hospice where my father stayed relies on charitable donations to do their vital work - a death like this should be table stakes for an advanced economy, but alas, it's not.
[+] [-] whalesalad|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] xvector|10 months ago|reply
Future generations will wonder at our coping mechanisms for something so tragic and horrifying as death, and wonder why we didn't try harder, earlier.
Why isn't the longevity problem our #1 tax expense? Because the culture believes the problem is insurmountable, inevitable, and not worth solving. Our parents try to hide their grief and dread at the inevitability, telling us it's okay, but the tears at a funeral disagree.
As an aside, I would pay vast sums of money (millions of dollars) to live my final days at an old folks' home that was capable of monitoring my health on a frequent basis, catching things early, and integrated SOTA cryonics facilities to maximize my chance of revival in case LEV doesn't become a possibility in my lifetime.
[+] [-] ViscountPenguin|10 months ago|reply
If it were just that, I might still be hopeful, but the latency on aging cure experiments is inevitably going to be quite long, and that won't change without massive advances in biological simulations.
[+] [-] hapticmonkey|10 months ago|reply
And without changes to laws around euthanasia or suicide, it means being forced to stay alive forever, which is even more dystopian.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|10 months ago|reply
We’re on a path to curing aging. We have no clue how to cure death.
[+] [-] VonTum|10 months ago|reply
Sadly, my main fear is that immortality will only be available to the extremely rich and powerful. Generally historical progress is made when the old guard die, be it in science with the leaders clamoring to old theories, dictatorships falling when their leader does, companies setting a new course when their founder/CEO retires.
I shudder at the thought of living in a world where everyone still dies like before, except an entrenched immortal powerful elite.
[+] [-] kiba|10 months ago|reply
Psychological health and well being are going to be key to resolving the problem of peaceful coexistence between humans.
[+] [-] MisterBastahrd|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] fsociety|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] cess11|10 months ago|reply
As for 'non-biological' humans, I'm assuming you believe in some soul that could be transfered from your body to a computer? If so, that's clearly into deeply religious territory. You are an analog being, you view the world as analog projections onto a mammal cortex. That is fundamentally, ontologically very different from digitally virtual environments. The digital lacks identity, which is the source of security issues in the computerised society. There is no difference between 1011011001 and 1011011001 regardless of source, it can be a biometry reader sending an encoding of your thumb print or another computer hooked into a network sending the same bytes.
If we for the sake of argument ignored the problems with the transfer, then you still propose a deeply restricted existence, a machine prison, where there is no way for you to discern whether your experience actually comes from your sensors or some other source feeding digital signals into your machine. At best it is a simulacra of a dream you can't wake from. You'd be absolutely cut off from any possibility of freedom and immediate engagement with the universe.
Now, I do understand that many people enjoy living almost their entire adult lives mediated through digitally transmitted images and sounds, but at least they still have the option to look away and out of their own bodies and into the remnants of the world that birthed our and many other species. Removing that option entirely and replacing it with the most intimate and absolute form of imprisonment we have yet been able to imagine does not seem at all attractive to me.
Regarding "longevity", currently billions are suffering under the rule of a few generations that refuse to let go of power even though they are well beyond what is the common age of retirement in vast parts of the world. If allowed they will for sure continue this refusal and they signal clearly that they are going to kill and maim a lot of people just to try and stay in power now. Locking borders against climate refugees, taking resources from things like education and art and medicine and pushing it into war industry, inventing new insidious forms of surveillance and control to try and make sure dissent becomes impossible.
If you get to watch them follow through on this, how do you expect to keep some semblance of sanity? Are you hoping to be able to ignore it, sitting on a server in a bunker being fed a constant soap opera of fiction and simulated conversations, humming away at some 200 watts or so?
[+] [-] computerthings|10 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] AlexandrB|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Perenti|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jajko|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] AStonesThrow|10 months ago|reply
For me, perhaps I do not fear death so much as infirmity. Dying, for me, would be entrance into glory and bliss (at least that beginning of that process), but to live with illness, to be incapacitated, to suffer helplessly, that's a terrible and frightful thing.
So being admitted to a hospital, the beginning of that infirmity or incapacitation, that is definitely a traumatic experience for me that requires accompaniment and soothing. Unfortunately, modern hospitals are woefully equipped to allay our fears, but instead just run us through a meat grinder of paperwork, finances, poorly-informed decisions, and disappointment.
So it's laudable that palliative care and hospices are making efforts like this one.
On my own part, I'm gradually overcoming a visceral fear of hospitals and facilities by just waltzing in while I'm perfectly healthy. There are a couple nearby and so I've taken to eating in their cafeterias when it's convenient (very cheap, great selection of healthy food!); and the chapel where the Eucharist is reserved is a focus of peace and prayer; and there is actually a lot of art and history to admire in them, so it's become an interesting and unexpected diversion.
[+] [-] theothertimcook|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] NoMoreNicksLeft|10 months ago|reply
I need to die so that there's room for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
[+] [-] Yeul|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dghughes|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] cancerhacker|10 months ago|reply
A timely piece I can relate to. currently starting my second week in a (US) hospital oncology ward after my 11th cycle of chemo. I was first diagnosed with stage iv colon cancer and after chemo, surgery, resections and stubbornness was NED from 2018 to 2025. The return is inoperable and I was given “six months to a year”.
I asked if I’d be in pain when death came, and he said that I wouldn’t likely be - it would just be feeling more and more tired. That’s basically what’s been happening.
The chemo itself hasn’t given me direct side effects like skin lesions or mouth sores, nor much nausea. The secondary effects on my kidneys (which were already doing poorly before this started) and liver (cirrhosis) plus the metastases in lymph nodes and lung leads to edema. Diuretics helped but flushed out my potassium, so there several months where they trying to balance those electrolytes.
Anyway, a lot of my swelling was reduced (and they took 4L from two rounds of draining my lungs) but for some ungodly reason my scrotal sack decided it wanted to play too, and became the size and consistency of one of those half size basketballs you can win at fairs. it’s so bad that I actually requested a catheter. The swelling makes walking or anything else really painful.
The oncology wing I’m in doesn’t seem soaked in the kind of depressing, institutional green malaise of slightly older hospitals but it isn’t a “nice place” to die (I don’t expect to do that this visit in any case). The older woman (70?) two doors down though - seems to be in constant pain and in and out of lucidity, shouting at everyone. Usually a phrase gets stuck on repeat for a few hours - the most heartbreaking was “mommy get my mommy I’m sorry mommy I’m a bad girl mommy stop it” yelled loudly for hours.
This is a generic hospital though. Memorial Sloan-Kettering in NYC has a patient day lounge and lots of projects for child patients and patients families. Still not even approaching the quality described
Sorry, rambling. Probably my way of compartmentalizing the anxiety.
The other thing I wanted to say is that I really liked Christopher Hitchens “Mortality” and that Terry Pratchett’s very relatable death character shows up in all of his books. My favorite quote is from “Small Gods” as Death comes for the protagonist at the very end:
> “Ah. There really is a desert. Does everyone get this?” said Brutha. WHO KNOWS? “And what is at the end of the desert?” JUDGMENT. Brutha considered this. “Which end?” Death grinned and stepped aside.
Maybe I’m not afraid of death because as a devout atheist - well yea, we all get to do that at some point.
[+] [-] eth0up|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] xen2xen1|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Loughla|10 months ago|reply
"What can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the reaper man?"
This caught me in two ways:
1. Death is the release. Whatever suffering you're undergoing, it won't follow you into whatever comes next, even if that is absolute oblivion. The relief would be welcome, I assume. So that's at least one positive way to look at it.
But moreso:
2. Everyone's death is individual and special. The process of getting to it is different for everyone, and the journey is just as much a part of the process as the destination. It isn't something to fear, because you cannot stop it, but it is something to consider as you move through your life.
Cancer is the fucking devil. I, myself, have been lucky enough to avoid it for now, but we spent the last year with my father and lymphoma. It's a fucking nightmare of cancer treatment and chasing side effects from the cancer treatments until the end. He chose to die with hospice on the family farm; it wasn't the most dignified death due to the symptoms of his cancer, but it was peaceful and with family/friends. So that's something.
His treatment didn't really bother me, and his process didn't really depress me; it was the people like the older lady in your write-up that really stuck with me. In his first month on the cancer floor, his across the hall neighbor was just like that. Her only lucid moments were either screaming in pain, or nonsense phrases on repeat from what I assume was her childhood.
Terrifying.
I hope that your life goes well all the way to the end. I genuinely do not know what to say other than that.
[+] [-] srean|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] I_cape_runts|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] weregiraffe|10 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] spatterl1ght|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] teslaberry|10 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] vpribish|10 months ago|reply
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