Falling on death ears

If, like me, you are a person of relative optimism and good health, then chances are you spend most of your time thinking, feeling and acting like you are going to live forever… more or less.

I usually breeze through life with the ease of the immortal, unperturbed by the passage of time, rowing happily downriver, oblivious to the waterfall that inevitably awaits me.

Lost in the mist of living, I seldom glimpse my final destination. Every so often though, the fog lifts, and I catch sight of the precipice that I – and everyone I love – am bobbing inexorably towards.

“Ahhhhhhhhhh,” screams every fibre of my all-too-mortal being.

When this thought takes hold, a heavy aching feeling penetrates the protective antidepressant-like bubble of my everyday experience and a deep feeling of unease settles in my guts, growing into an all-consuming dread. Every preoccupation and distraction seems less and less significant, shrinking smaller and smaller, until, eventually, everything disappears, leaving only that terrible certainty that some day the lights will go out forever.

“Jesus Christ, that’s right, how did I forget again that some day I am definitely going to die?,” I say inwardly, scrambling to climb back up the chain of thought that has lowered me into this abjectly depressing and lonely pit.

But, try as I might, I can’t.

See, unlike my usual mode of being, the one detached from death, the one that can laugh, joke and speak ironically about the prospect of my non-existence, the Hole of Morbidity harbours no footholds and offers no obvious way out.

Incapacitated by the crushing weight of the reality that has fallen upon me, I find it hard to move. When my mind manages to wriggle free long enough to make a run for it, every hopeful avenue I dart down turns out to be a hopeless dead end.

“This really is awful,” I think, searching for something sanguine and consoling… “But not as awful as death itself,” and back down into the pit I plummet.

What becomes apparent when I am being sucked into this godawful gyre of gloom is that my demise looks unbearably terrible from whatever angle it’s viewed.

I realise that not only am I scared of dying – as in the physical process of deterioration, which I always like to imagine will be protracted and painful, that will lead to my eternal unconsciousness – but that I am also terrified of death, which is to say, I am scared by the thought of the eternal unconsciousness itself.

Is it just me or is this one hell of a cathartic column?

Well, chances are, if you don’t think about death very often, this is probably more of an unwelcome reminder than it is a salutary meditation.

However, some day, we are all going to have to think about it, whether it be our own or a loved one’s, and I am going to go out on a limb and say that pretending it will never happen might not be the best preparation for the hardest days of our lives.

So, what do I, a 27-year-old who has never lost an immediate family member, recommend?

One thing we could do is stop ignoring ‘Death Matters Week’, a campaign that has been going for a few years which was set up specifically to open ip conversations that might help us address the fact we live in such a stubbornly death-phobic society.

I mean, if you are in any doubt about just how allergic to the idea of our own deaths we are, take a second to appreciate the irony of burying our heads in the sand every time ‘Death Matters Week’ comes around.

Now, I am not saying we should all buy inflatable coffins, paint our faces black (generally a bad idea anyway) and hold street parades, but perhaps there is some strength to be found in looking that which most terrifies us directly in the eye, at least every once in a while, anyway.