I remember dying vividly. Fear will do that.
I suppose it’s a biological mechanism of the utmost irony that those experiences we associate with the danger of death are imprinted so indelibly on our memories, especially the event itself.
My seventy year lifetime was characteristically secular. My parents had never imposed any religious observances and my later life my interests in science drew me further away from the church. Indeed, it became a small matter of pride, in my private thoughts, that I resisted the urge to run to the comforting bosom of such things as forgiveness and the hope of angels and an afterlife in paradise, even when events pushed me close to the brink on a handful of occasions. Giving birth to my second child, for example.
It is a cold hand upon your heart, that fear of extinction. It sends thrills of panic down your spine, even when it promises relief from extraordinary pain, as it did during my final hours. Relief from pain, how amusing that naïve concept appears to me now.
I can share a little with you about the act of dying, for most people their final act upon this earth. It has the most remarkable effect on your sense of time.
Even as your mind accepts that it is approaching it’s final moments, it re-engineers it’s perception of the passing moments to squeeze the last drops of existence from that dwindling resource. Seconds are split until they seem like minutes, minutes are subdivided into facsimiles of hours.
A piece of advice I’ll give you for free: When your time comes, don’t have a clock within hearing distance. Tell them to put you, that it if your are unable to move of your own volition, where you can hear the sounds of /life/. Birds singing, perhaps, or the sound of the wind moving the leaves in the trees. Anything but mechanical measurement policing the duration of your final moments.
I couldn’t hear a clock from my hospital bed, thankfully. I could hear the regular sounds of the machinery that supported those body functions that had already gone on ahead of me to extinction, and I could hear the muffled sounds of the various denizens of the hospital going about their business.
It’s only now, when I think back on it, and weigh up my experience against the possibilities, that I imagine the very worst thing that could have been there with me in my sickroom, and that would have been a clock. Maybe a big old grandfather clock, calling out the passing seconds with an inexorable tick. The mind clinging to those seconds, gripping them tightly, desperately crushing them in denial of death, until each in turn crumbles to sand and slips away.
In such a time a clock is a cruel thing, a jackbooted marshal enforcing the passing of each moment with brutal discipline.
But no trick of the mind can forestall the end forever. Eventually all roads lead to the same destination. When the upper bulb of the hourglass is full, you can make whatever choices you like, play it safe or take chances, embrace opportunities that come your way or see them slip by with a tip of your hat. It doesn’t matter.
Eventually every grain in that glass passes through the narrow opening at the bottom, every grain save for the last one.
When that grain tumbles after all the others, the darkness presses in on all sides of your consciousness, your lids close out the light and all that remains is the tight circle of the nucleus of your being. Everything that defines you as who you are, reducing in diameter, smaller and smaller, until…You are not.
Don’t be afraid of it. It’s not so bad.