[lit-ideas] Re: Imagining Death
- From: carol kirschenbaum <carolkir@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:37:31 -0700
The worst thing about your own death is realizing that you won't be able to
write about it.
On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 4:08 PM, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Eric wrote
>
> ...I hear furious trumpeting from above. Looking up, I see something that
>> resembles a growing storm cloud. Finis. The worst thing about my imagined
>> death is the sense of things left undone. Pain I can deal with. It's nothing
>> new. But the end of possibility is unnerving.
>>
>
> Any thoughts? How do you guys imagine your death?
>>
>
> When I was a child, and a very long time ago that was, I used to imagine
> being bombed or strafed by a German Stuka dive bomber like those that were
> shown in newsreels gunning down poor folks with their carts and luggage who
> were trying to flee some other terror. This was a real fear, for it didn't
> occur to me that the Stuka could not reach Western Oregon without satanic
> help.
>
> In the last four or five years I've had occasion to be 'put to sleep' with
> general anesthesia. One instant you're there; the next instant you're not.
> There is no 'experience' of becoming not there. You just aren't. I did not
> note the transition because there was none. Of course, I'm able to report
> this because after a time I was 'there' again, surrounded by looming shapes
> uttering sounds, which after a short time became people saying my name.
>
> I know that there are different experiences of being sedated or
> anesthetized, e.g., those in which one undergoes something like the waking
> experience I just mentioned, run backwards. But for me, it was as if a
> switch had been clicked to 'off,' instantly and completely. I did not 'come
> back' from the 'absence,' for I had no experience of being in it.
>
> I believe that this is how it is with death, no matter how one dies. One
> may die in agony, or wrapped in a cocoon of morphine, but in the end it's
> all the same. Death is not part of life; it is the end of life. It is hard
> for nonbelievers like me to think about it beyond that.
>
> My fear of flying has come back.
>
> Robert Paul
> The Reed Institute
>
>
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